Melissa Olson*Native News at MPR News*

Darrin Smedsmo has his airplane back.

The Roseau pilot towed his aircraft off the Red Lake Nation lands on Wednesday, June 3, more than seven months after the tribe seized the single-engine plane following an emergency landing on a reservation highway. The Red Lake Nation’s prosecution office has dropped all charges against him.

“At this stage right now, I think that everybody is on the same page about just moving forward. Just give the plane back,” said Joe Plumer, general legal counsel for the Red Lake Nation.

Joe Plumer, legal director for the Red Lake Nation, is pictured Wednesday, June 3, 2026. (Mathew Holding Eagle III/MPR News)

For Smedsmo, the resolution brought relief after a long wait.

“I was pleased. It’s the right answer. I just wish it wouldn’t have taken so long,” he said.

The plane came down on Oct. 15 as Smedsmo was flying from Roseau toward Bemidji for training when, he says, he heard his engine laboring over Lower Red Lake. He looked up to see the propeller stopped in front of him — what he recognized at once as catastrophic engine failure. With the lake on one side and a swamp on the other, he put the plane down on the highway. He was uninjured, and the plane was unharmed. A friend helped him tow it clear of the road, then called the tribal police.

In a June 1 letter to Smedsmo’s attorney, the tribe’s chief prosecutor Ogema Neadeau wrote that the prosecution team had decided not to bring trespass or related charges over Smedsmo’s conduct on Oct. 15, 2025, and that it would be “fair and equitable to return Mr. Smedsmo’s airplane to him at this time.”

In the letter, the prosecutor wrote that Red Lake Nation “takes its responsibility to exercise its sovereignty very seriously,” and that returning the plane was “the result of the Red Lake Nation’s responsible exercise of its inherent sovereignty.”

Red Lake is the only fully closed reservation in the United States — a status rooted in the treaties it signed with the federal government. Unlike other reservations in Minnesota, it holds all of its land collectively, limits who may visit or live there, and maintains its own police force and court system. Its members are not subject to state criminal or civil jurisdiction on tribal land.

Red Lake Nation tribal police impounded the plane and cited him for violating a 1978 resolution that bars aircraft from flying below 20,000 feet over Red Lake Nation lands. Smedsmo said there was never a court hearing on the citation. In January, Smedsmo received a settlement offer. Red Lake asked the pilot to make a $5,000 donation to the Red Lake Nation Boys and Girls Club plus a towing fee — which he rejected.

“If I would have accepted that offer, I would have been basically saying that I was guilty, and since I wasn’t guilty, I wasn’t willing to do that,” Smedsmo said.

For months, Smedsmo said all he wanted was his day in court. This week he put it differently.

Roseau pilot Darrin Smedsmo stands next to his airplane Wednesday, June 3, 2026. (Mathew Holding Eagle III/MPR News)

“I don’t know that anybody likes to go to court,” he said. “I was just willing to go to court to confirm that I wasn’t in the wrong.”

The case drew the attention of pilots statewide because of a bigger question underneath it: whether a tribal nation can control airspace over its land.

In the letter, the tribe said the incident had “opened doors” to the Federal Aviation Administration, which it described as “very helpful” in explaining how Red Lake Nation’s airspace concerns could be addressed. At the same time, the tribe acknowledged that the federal government controls nearly all airspace matters.

Red Lake Nation also said it had updated its own rules — granting written approvals to the air ambulance services that serve the reservation and issuing flight protocols to agencies that fight fires on or near its land.

Smedsmo says he believes federal law is clear as to whether Red Lake Nation has the ability to exercise jurisdiction over airspace.

“They can make as many resolutions as they want, but they don’t hold water, because the FAA holds the keys to the airspace,” he said.

But Smedsmo acknowledges the history behind the resolution. Red Lake Nation passed its airspace resolution almost five decades ago as it opposed a proposed military training route that would have sent low-flying aircraft over the reservation — and that worry had even deeper roots.

From the 1940s into the late 1950s, the U.S. military used the nearby Big Bog area as a weapons range, dropping bombs and testing non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons in the cold weather over Upper Red Lake.

As MPR News reported in 2016, a Red Lake elder recalled the blasts shaking her family’s house and breaking windows, and the bombing disrupting the hunting and fishing the tribe relies on.

“I think we all know that the resolution from ‘78 was about military planes,” Smedsmo said.

He says his 80-year-old plane — parked outside through a northern Minnesota winter after the failed October flight— likely needs a full engine rebuild before he can fly it again.

Immediately after leaving the Red Lake Nation Reservation Darrin Smedsmo stopped in Fourtown on Wednesday, June 3, 2026. (Mathew Holding Eagle III/MPR News)

At Red Lake, Plumer says people in the area are happy “the whole thing’s over,” speaking to the media attention and criticism the tribe received.

“The way things have been reported, you know, without the tribe’s input, it shows how fragile the relationship with the neighbors up here really is,” Plumer said. “And people know that. We know that.”

Correction (June 3, 2026): A previous version of this story misspelled Darrin Smedsmo’s name in a photo caption. It has been corrected.

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