Indian country.

• Author: Rabb, Will
• Position: Catawba Indian Nation blocs real estate expansion in suit for land titles

Indian country

Charter Properties Inc. of Charlotte was a dotted line away from building a $75 million mall in Rock Hill, S.C., last July. It was virtually a done deal. Belk wanted to put its anchor department store at Charter's site, just off busy Cherry Road, rather than at a rival spot three miles south.

Only a seemingly minor detail remained unfinished - obtaining full title insurance on the land.

All but one U.S. title insurer refused to underwrite it, leaving the lender unprotected from outside claims to the property. The financing fell apart, and Charlotte-based Belk took its business to the other site.

The scalping that Charter and its partner, Faison Associates of Charlotte, took was the result of what South Carolinians half-jokingly call an "Indian uprising." The 1,200-member Catawba Indian Nation, living about 30 miles south of Charlotte, is waging a crafty legal battle that has thrown ownership of more than 144,000 acres of upper South Carolina land into serious question. Title insurers' reluctance to underwrite property, particularly large projects, makes financing next to impossible. That's pushed projects to unaffected land - and often over the state line into North Carolina.

Which is precisely the point. The uprising means North Carolina landowners and real-estate developers could stand to profit at their neighbors' expense. Since they can't get clear title on some South Carolina property, prospective buyers are looking more favorably at Tar Heel country instead of the area once known as "Indians' Land."

The Charter/Faison site was within the Catawbas' claim. The other site wasn't. "It was Custer's Last Stand, and the Indians won again," says Bill Ford, Charter's vice president for retail development. "It means we won't look at anything else in Rock Hill or that area down there."

Instead, Charter is eyeing Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham and other Carolina sites.

The controversy reached the boiling point last January, when a federal appeals court ruled that the Catawbas could sue for title to a huge, diamond-shaped chunk of land that once belonged outright to the tribe. An 1840 treaty with South Carolina relegated the Catawbas to a 600-acre reservation in eastern York County. Under that treaty - signed with an "X" by Indian leaders who couldn't sign their names in English - the Catawbas sold most of the land guaranteed them by a 1760 treaty with the king of England. Now, 150 years after the 1840 pact, the still-impoverished tribe...