Solenex LLC in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, will receive $2.6 million to relinquish the last remaining oil and gas lease on U.S. forest land that is sacred to Native Americans near Glacier National Park in Montana, the Associated Press (AP) reports.

The deal, which includes $2 million from the federal government and $625,000 from the Wyss Foundation, will settle a decades-long dispute over the 10-square-mile lease in the mountainous Badger-Two Medicine area of northwestern Montana—the site of the creation story for the Blackfoot tribes of southern Canada and Montana’s Blackfeet Nation.

Solenex founder Sidney Longwell, who died in 2020, bought the lease in 1982, but never drilled on the site, as his company confronted bureaucratic delays, prompting Solenex to sue in 2013. The lease was cancelled in 2016 under then-U.S. interior secretary Sally Jewell at the request of the Blackfoot tribes and conservation groups, and reinstated last year by U.S. district judge Richard Leon, who said Jewell lacked the authority to withdraw the lease, a decision tribal cultural leaders appealed.

The 1982 lease was one of 47 awarded that year in the Badger Two-Medicine by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Congress withdrew the area from further leasing in 2006 and provided tax breaks to lease holders that prompted most to voluntarily give up their drilling rights. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture designated Badger Two-Medicine as a Traditional Cultural District.

“The Badger Two-Medicine is significant to the Blackfeet way of life from the past, now, and in the future,” said Blackfeet tribal historic preservation officer John Murray. “I am happy to see this oil and gas lease go away in the Badger Two-Medicine. We are back to where we were 40 years ago.”

(Photo credit: creative commons public domain image by Murray Foubister accessed from Wikipedia)