1976-11-15 Char-Koosta News

              MEMBERS FORM
SUPREME COURT REFUSES REVIEW
F. R.R.C.
Another petition to stop the Tribal Office Complex is being circulated. Those opposing it have formed a political pressure group calling themselves the Flathead Reservation Resource Council (FRRC.) Tom "Bearhead" Swaney, a former Councilman, claims the group will "ride herd" on the council, although he said they will not necessarily oppose everything the Council does. Swaney claimed the group would support council actions they agreed with. He also claimed his group had 26 people present at a recent meeting and would have the necessary 650 signatures to bring the issue to a vote.by the end of the month.
Swaney asked the council to stop the complex because he felt the construction costs could not be kept within the Federal monies available. The Council took actions to continue the project after Swaney made his presentation at the regular Friday Council meeting. However, the Council Vice Chairman, Vic Stinger, said his feeling was that if there were not enough federal funds to cover the project he would rather kill it than leave something out.
FRRC also plans an executive appleal through the BIA.
It is now law.  By refusing and appeal, the U.S. supreme Court has allowed to stand a U.S. District Court decision that said non-Indians living along Flathead Lake within the reservation have the right to construct docks and wharves even though the Tribes contend they trespass upon the lakebed which is held in trust by the Federal government for the tribes
Tribes as part of the 1855 Hellgate Treaty.   The denial
of a request for a Writ of Certiorari came November 1, without comment.   Still undecided at this time is the question of how far this right extends. The reasonable limit of how far a person can build up his property with fill out onto the lakebed such as James Namen at Jim's Marine in Poison did, is still undetermined. Namen's 16 foot wide causeway extending into the lake to develop a commercial enterprise on the lakebed resulted in a U.S. District Court suit against Namen by the Tribes. Judge Jameson held that Namen's property rights include access to the lake and "the right to wharf out of navigable water." Jameson said, "Congress must have intended that
fee patents (to reservation lands)... include the costomary rights of access and wharfage. The fact that Congress did not expressly delineate these rights does not negate their existence. It was not necessary for Congress to specify every incident of ownership which accompanies a patent to land on an Indian reservation." The Tribes had insisted that
the 1855 treaty gave them exclusive right to the lake below the high water mark. They questioned whether such structures could be built "without consent of the Tribe or the Secretary of Interior and without express Congressional authorization." Namen contended that as sucessor to Antoine Morais, the Indian allottee, he had obtained riparian rights of access and wharfage.