The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation has sued CenturyLink’s parent company, alleging that the telecommunications business has been trespassing for more than a decade by running fiber-optic cables across tribal land. The complaint alleges CenturyLink has periodically entered the reservation to operate the fiber lines.
The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Portland, alleges that a 25-year easement the tribe granted for telecommunications cables across Warm Springs land expired in 2013. Years of intermittent negotiations failed to produce an agreement, and now the tribe wants the courts to intervene.
“Treaty Rights are not just a matter of reserving land: but of maintaining sovereignty and independence,” Jonathan W. Smith Sr., who chairs the Warm Springs Tribal Council, said in a statement Tuesday.
The tribe was forced to cede 10 million acres of its territory to the federal government in 1855, Smith said, and in exchange received the right to call its 640,000-acre reservation home.
“When corporations, whether intentionally or unintentionally, violate both the law and spirit of treaties, it undermines this very sovereignty and erodes the trust and respect that Indian nations both extend to outsiders and expect in return,” Smith said.
CenturyLink said it does not comment on pending litigation.
The case highlights ongoing issues over how private companies operate on tribal lands.
Last month, a federal judge ordered BNSF Railway to pay $400 million to the Swinomish Tribe in Washington state. The judge ruled that the railway had run 100-car trains carrying crude oil across tribal land, violated terms of a 1991 agreement with the tribe that allowed no more than 25 railc ars per day.
CenturyLink has been operating on Warm Springs land for 10 years without the consent of the tribe or the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, according to Smith.
“This disregards our sovereignty and disrespects the independence and autonomy of the people who call the reservation home and whose livelihoods stand to be impacted by this,” Smith said.
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