Torey Dolan on non-Native people owning land in reservations

In the 19th century, Congress implemented this policy called allotment. The idea was that where tribes own things in common — meaning all members and the tribe itself owns the property — they decided to break up that communal title and parcel out individual parcels of land to different families, and then sell the surplus. The process of selling the surplus land within the reservation is what led to these checkerboarded reservations that we see today, where there are significant populations of non-Indians that own fee land within the exterior reservation boundaries.