Alleen Brown, In These Times: 'Indians cannot sell or lease their trust land without federal approval, and the government is supposed to distribute any revenues earned from the land (through leasing to farmers, railroads, mining companies and other private interests) to the individual landowners. As soon as the first allottees died, the government began dividing property among their descendents. But heirs did not inherit pieces of land with specific boundaries. Instead, they inherited fractions of the title - a title held in trust by the federal government. This system leaves most allotment heirs with tiny, in effect unusable, fractions of ownership.'

http://www.truth-out.org/land-our-land/1309359074