By Emergy Cowan | Arizona Daily Sun
Members of the Hopi Tribe are asking the Coconino County Board of Supervisors for help in finalizing a land transfer that has been promised to the tribe for decades.
It’s the latest effort by the tribe to acquire nearly 150,000 acres of state trust land south of Interstate 40 and east of Flagstaff that is interspersed in a checkerboard pattern with about 160,000 acres that the federal government already holds in trust for the Hopi.
The state lands were promised to the tribe in a 1996 agreement approved by Congress to settle a dispute, now more than a century old, that involved overlapping boundaries of Hopi and Navajo reservation lands.
