Suit Reignites 2 Tribes’ Dispute Over Land : Indians: Seventy Yuroks, unhappy over a 1988 settlement of claims with rival Hoopas, sue the federal government for a share of the state’s largest reservation.

Continuing a dispute that has spanned generations, a group of Yurok Indians sued the federal government Tuesday seeking to invalidate a 1988 act that denied them any rights to the timber-rich Hoopa Valley Reservation in far Northern California.

The suit over California’s largest reservation was brought by 70 Indians, ranging in age from 9 to 94. All but two are also plaintiffs in a class action suit brought by Yuroks that is unresolved 27 years after it was filed.

The new suit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs is aimed at striking down the 1988 Hoopa-Yurok Settlement Act. The act attempted to resolve the feud by giving the Hoopa Indians the original reservation created in 1876, while the Yuroks received a smaller, underdeveloped section along the Klamath River.

The 1988 act gave the 1,400-member Hoopa tribe control over the Hoopa Valley Reservation, a 12-mile-by-12-mile area called “the square” that has some of the most valuable remaining stands of old-growth Douglas fir.

Roughly 3,800 Yurok Indians received a 20-mile-long strip called “the extension,” a rugged valley that runs from the Hoopa square to the Pacific Ocean along the Klamath River. Unlike the square, the extension lacks paved roads and is without telephone and electrical lines.

The Hoopas lobbied for the legislation that created the 1988 act after the Yuroks won a court ruling in an earlier suit that required the Hoopas to share tribal government. Congress overturned that ruling by passing the legislation, sponsored by Rep. Douglas H. Bosco (D-Occidental).

The suit seeks to force the Bureau of Indian Affairs to cease implementing and enforcing the act, and demands that the bureau ensure the Yuroks’ equal rights to the entire reservation.

The suit claims the settlement act violates the 5th Amendment prohibition against taking property--the 144-square-mile Hoopa reservation--without giving the Yuroks due process of the law or adequately compensating them. The square has been valued at more than $300 million.

The “gross disparity” between the worth of the Hoopa square and the Yurok extension also violates the Yuroks’ constitutional right to equal protection, the suit says.

The suit also attacks a provision in the act that forces non-Hoopas to join the Yurok tribe to gain any rights to the extension. The suit claims this violates the 1st Amendment provision ensuring freedom of association.