In 1704, the colony provided that non-Indians who took timber from Indian lands would be "lyable to Action or Actions of trespass And the persons grieved shall and may recover their Damages accordingly".
The Indians may cut the timber themselves or allow commercial loggers to do it.
Now, the department is again required to account for how much the government owes Indians in oil, gas, timber and grazing royalties dating to 1887.
And the record of an earlier Indian scheme, joint forest management, in which locals were promised a small share of timber revenues in return for deterring illegal logging and planting trees, is discouraging.
In 1994, Congress ordered the Interior Department to clean up the system, established in 1887 to manage royalties from mining, cattle grazing, oil drilling and timber harvesting on Indian land.
Most groups of living snakes including species as diverse as (clockwise from upper left) palm vipers, Indian cobras, green snakes, and timber rattlesnakes are genetically most closely related to the Anomalepididae family of burrowing blind snakes.
The Ayoreo, an indigenous group from the Paraguayan Chaco, obtain their salt from the ash produced by burning the timber of the Indian salt tree (Maytenus vitis-idaea) and other trees.
Though the Indians owned these allotments and often lived on them, the government retained title and generated income for the Indians from oil, coal and timber leases, from easements and ranching, from all the ways that those lands could yield money short of outright sale.
In fact, the width of the growth rings visible on the surface of the cut tree trunk provides a partial history of climatic conditions, the spacing of the growth rings of different size having been correlated with known periods of drought and cold to provide reliable archaeological dating of various structures, as in the timbers used in Indian pueblos in the southwestern United States.
The Justice Department has asked that a different judge be assigned to a long-running lawsuit filed by a group of American Indians seeking billions of dollars from the federal government for oil, gas, timber and other leases on Indian land.
