An oil boom on American Indian land has brought jobs, millions of dollars and hope to long-impoverished tribal members who have struggled for more than a century on the million-acre Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.
In little more than a year, oil companies have put dozens of money-producing rigs on remote rolling prairie and sprawling badlands that are home to small cattle ranches and scattered settlements of modular housing. Although other tribes around the nation have oil interests, industry officials said none has likely experienced a recent windfall of this scale.
The reservation is occupied by the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, known as the Three Affiliated
Tribes, who were placed in west-central North Dakota by the federal government in the 1800s - long before anyone knew of the oil.
"If they knew there was billions of barrels of oil here, they would never have put us here," said Spencer Wilkinson Jr., general manager of the Four Bears Casino on the reservation. Click the jump to read the rest.
via: ap
-AL
