This fall alone, 75 cabin owners will have to sell or move off the land.īand leaders say they need to retake those properties as part of their plan to help ease the reservation’s gnawing homelessness problem. Now, as those leases come up for renewal, the properties are reverting back to the tribe. Earlier this year, though, a new tribal administration voted not to renew the contracts. “That’s where you’re left, because you’re not going to change it.”įor decades, the tribe has leased nearly 350 small water-front lots on Leech Lake, Cass Lake and a few others. “I’m to the point where, do I laugh or do I cry?” Gail Hinkemeyer said. The Hinkemeyers received a letter a few months ago from the Leech Lake band telling the couple they had to leave the northern Minnesota lake property at the end of the lease, which will happen sometime in October. They’d been leasing the waterfront lot from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. But while the couple owned the cabin, they did not own the land beneath it. They’d dodge Minnesota’s cold winters with a cheap apartment in Belize, then spend their summers at their small family cabin on Leech Lake.Īfter 30 years at the local Potlatch lumber mill, Jim saw it as the perfect place to rest. Jim and Gail Hinkemeyer just retired and they had their future all worked out.
0 kommentar(er)
