Approximately 800 acres of federally-owned land, adjoining the Fort Sill Indian School at Lawton, Okla., has been added to the land held in trust for the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Indians of Oklahoma.
The land was administratively transferred to the Secretary of the Interior, as trustee, by Arthur F. Sampson, Administrator of the General Services Administration on March 17, 1975. Notice of the transfer has been published in the Federal Register.
Legislation, enacted January 2, 1975, amending the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, provided the authority for the transfer. This was the first use of the new authority.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morris Thompson observed that he was pleased that, through the efforts of the BIA's Office of Trust Responsibilities and others, the tribes were able to obtain this valuable property.
The legislation establishes that excess and surplus. Federal property may benefit be transferred, under certain conditions, to the Secretary to be held for the benefit of Indian tribal groups. The land either must be within the boundaries of a reservation or, in Oklahoma, it must be former tribal trust lands, within the boundaries of former reservations or contiguous to land now held in trust for a tribe.
The transferred tract, in Comanche County, is located within the boundaries of the former reservation designated for the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Indians in the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty_. The tract eventually went into private ownership vocational-agricultural but was reacquired by the United States in 1939 for a vocational education program at the Fort Sill Indian School. This program has since been discontinued and the school no longer needed the land.
