Kansas City, Mo. ? The Interior Department has ruled that an Oklahoma tribe has no claim to farmland in northeast Kansas where it planned to build a casino.

The ruling, released late Thursday, reverses the agency’s decision from four years ago.

It also brings to an end a decadelong effort by Olathe-based Butler National Corp. and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma to jointly develop a tribal gambling facility on land in Miami County, Kan., that the tribe abandoned more than 120 years ago.

“If this is true, we’re done,” said Natalie Haag, chief of staff to Kansas Gov. Bill Graves, who has resisted the tribe’s efforts in court since the mid-1990s.

“If they don’t have reservation land in Kansas, I can’t see any other way they could pursue the issue,” Haag said.

After years of litigation, Butler and the tribe in 1998 and 1999 won Interior Department rulings declaring the site, near La Cygne Lake, eligible for casino gambling.

Interior Department officials said at the time that the land qualified for gambling after the tribe in 1996 “adopted” about 20 non-Indian owners as tribal members, leased the land back from them and exercised tribal government control there.

And the Interior Department’s National Indian Gaming Commission approved Butler as manager of the proposed Kansas casino almost three years ago.

Graves challenged the tribe, claiming it relinquished its historical rights to the land in 1873 when the land was sold and tribal members were moved to their present federal reservation in Oklahoma.

Graves won an injunction in federal court in Kansas City, Kan., halting the project last year, as federal agencies were poised to license the casino project over the state’s objections. An appeals court later upheld that injunction.