KVIG Informative

The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony’s land base grew acre by acre, decades apart, while the city around it grew in leaps — a pattern of catch-up federal action that continues today, as Washington keeps funding construction on trust land Congress didn’t recognize until 1986.

In the 1880s, landless Washoe, Northern Paiute and Shoshone people who had come to the Reno area for work settled along the Truckee River with no reservation of their own, according to testimony Reno-Sparks Indian Colony Chairman Arlan Melendez gave the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 2014.

The federal government bought 20 acres in 1917 to give that settlement a permanent home, Melendez told the committee. The settlement organized as the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, a federally recognized tribal government, under the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934, according to the same testimony.

By the mid-1980s, the city of Reno had grown up around the Colony’s small urban land base, leaving its community boxed inside a city that had engulfed it on every side, Melendez testified.

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Congress answered in 1986. Public Law 99-389, approved Aug. 23, 1986, declared roughly 1,949 acres held in trust for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, including three 640-acre sections of public land in Hungry Valley, Washoe County, along with the Colony’s existing in-town parcels, according to the statute’s text. The law directed the Interior Department to cancel grazing leases on the Hungry Valley land within 30 days and to compensate leaseholders for their improvements, the statute states.

Hungry Valley now houses roughly half the Colony’s population, Melendez told the Senate committee in 2014.

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The federal government is still building on that 1986 land today. U.S. Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto announced Aug. 30, 2023, that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had awarded the Colony more than $4.4 million through its Indian Housing Block Grant Competitive Program to build more affordable housing for tribal members, according to the senators’ joint announcement. More than a century after the government bought the Colony 20 acres to solve the same problem, Washington is still answering it acre by acre, grant by grant.