BILLINGS, Mont. — A Louisiana company will receive $2.6 million to relinquish the last remaining oil and gas lease on U.S. forest land near Montana’s Glacier National Park that’s sacred to Native Americans, government officials and attorneys involved in the deal said Friday.
The deal would resolve a decades-long dispute over the 10-square-mile (25-square-kilometer) oil and gas lease in the mountainous Badger-Two Medicine area of northwestern Montana.
The lease was issued in 1982 but has not been developed. It’s on the site of the creation story for the Blackfoot tribes of southern Canada and Montana’s Blackfeet Nation. Tribal members bitterly opposed drilling.
In exchange for giving up the lease, Solenex LLC will receive $2.6 million, said David McDonald with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represented the company. The government will pay $2 million and the Wyss Foundation, a charitable group founded by Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, will provide the remaining $625,000, according to McDonald and Wyss spokesperson Marnee Banks.
The Solenex lease had been cancelled in 2016 under then-U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at the request of the Blackfoot tribes and conservation groups.
But U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered the lease reinstated last year. Leon said Jewell lacked the authority to withdraw the lease so many years after it was sold and after several prior studies had examined the environmental and other impacts of drilling in the area.
Tribal cultural leaders appealed that decision. The appeal is expected to be dismissed once the agreement for Solenex to relinquish the lease is enacted, which could take several months, according to court documents filed Friday.
Blackfeet Tribal Historic Preservation Officer John Murray characterized the legal battle over the lease as a “protracted clash of cultures” and said he was relieved it was over.
“The Badger Two Medicine is significant to the Blackfeet way of life from the past, now…
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