The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs has unanimously approved Chairman Ben Nighthorse Campbell’s bill to reverse a century of splintered ownership of Indian lands.

The Republican senator from Colorado introduced a bill to empower Indian tribes to consolidate lands on their reservations. That would not only lessen financial and administrative burdens on the federal government, but would help tribes attract outside investment and employment-creating opportunities, according to Campbell’s office.

The bill also rolls back the effects of the Dawes Act, a 19th-century law designed to break up Indian reservations and assimilate Indians into the general population.

That law gave parcels of reservation land to some Indians, but does not allow them to pass it on to specified heirs, according to Campbell spokesman Chris Changery. Thus, a tract had to be divided among all an owner’s heirs.

With each generation, the land might come to have more owners; some parcels now have hundreds, and the administration of the land and its leases has become increasingly inefficient.

The situation has contributed to the Interior Department’s mishandling of Indian trust funds, Campbell maintains.

"It was a contributing factor to the whole trust-fund debacle," Changery said. "Keeping up accounts of someone owning one six-hundredth of a 40-acre parcel — you can imagine."

"Today we begin real Indian-trust management reforms by getting at the core problem — land fractionation," Campbell said in a press release. "The current situation is yet another example of the federal government putting burdens on Indian country that do not exist anywhere else.