Indian tribes, game wardens dispute hunting rights

A continuing dispute between members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation and wardens from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is testing the limits of tribal sovereignty and the authority of state game wardens to enforce state hunting regulations on tribally owned lands outside reservation boundaries. The controversy is centered upon a remote patchwork of private, public and tribal land on the southwestern edge of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. This same area was at the nexus of a confrontation in September, when tribal police detained a state game warden for more than five hours. On Sept. 13, 2014, Warden Dirk Paulsen was stopped by officers from the Fort Belknap Law Enforcement as he drove down a designated county road in the southeast corner of Blaine County. The tribal police officers told Paulsen that he was trespassing on tribal land, blocked him from driving away and threatened to impound the state vehicle Paulsen was driving and cite him for criminal trespass. The incident was resolved peacefully after officers from the Blaine County Sheriff's Office intervened, however, the question of which law enforcement agency has the authority to regulate hunting activities in the area has never been fully resolved. The jurisdictional disagreement has resurfaced once again, during a recent hunting excursion into the disputed area roughly 12 miles west of the town of Hays. On Jan. 19, several Fort Belknap tribal members assembled on tribally controlled land just west of the reservation's exterior boundary, with the expressly stated intent of shooting a few deer and elk. Montana's big-game hunting season for deer and elk had ended seven weeks earlier, but the group of tribal members based its authority to conduct the off-season hunt based upon subsistence hunting permits issued by the Fort Belknap Fish and Game office...more