On February 5, a federal appeals court in Boston heard arguments over a long-standing dispute between the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and local residents over 321 acres of land in the Cape Cod area. The land was allocated to allow the tribe to build a $1 billion integrated resort on the property.

The dispute traces back to 2015 when then-president Barack Obama gave the land to be developed as a casino, hotel, and entertainment resort. However, residents in the area sued, arguing that the government had no standing to take this land into trust to give to the tribe, considering it wasn’t an officially recognized tribal affiliation when the trust law was passed.

The Obama administration had granted the 321 acres as sovereign land; However, according to the law, a tribe must have been officially recognized under the federal Indian Reorganization Act, which passed in 1934. This is when the land in trust process was created.

The Cape Cod tribe has been able to trace their ancestry back to the original harvest meal with the pilgrims in 1621. However, they were not officially recognized until 2007. In 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of the local residents, citing that the tribe did not meet the standards of the 1934 law and sending it back to the Interior Department for reconsideration.