The Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF) is dedicated to a mission of serving American Indian nations and people in the recovery and control of their rightful homelands. They aim to promote education, increase cultural awareness, create economic opportunities, and reform legal and administrative systems to enable Indian people to own and control reservation lands.
The Legal Reform Grant by ILTF targets overcoming systemic barriers hindering Indian land use and control, such as fractionated ownership, checkerboarding, and abuse of federal trust relationships, rooted in complex, unjust regulations and laws. The grant emphasizes correcting historical injustices from policies like the allotment policy of the 1800s, which have lingering detrimental effects. It supports projects aimed at granting Indian landowners and tribes greater control of their land assets, including estate planning and probate reform, land policy development or reform, creation of landowner associations, and fostering dialogue with government leaders about tribal sovereignty over land. Projects should also focus on improving the legal landscape for owning and managing Indian land.