Elkhart ? A 79-year-old American Indian woman who lives in the Cimarron National Grassland is embroiled in a battle with the federal government over the land’s boundaries.

Bea Riley, who has lived the last 26 years encircled by the grassland in Morton County, said she wants to swap land with the federal government, which says the boundaries of her land are 70 feet off from where they should be.

Joe Hartman, who manages the grassland for the U.S. Forest Service, said tepees Riley put on a campground she built would simply have to be moved so they are no longer on the disputed property.

“We told her that we’d work with her in getting that corrected,” Hartman said, adding that another problem is that Riley’s daughter’s home juts into the grassland.

Hartman said that structure was an “intentional trespass” because it was built after the correct boundaries of Riley’s plot had been determined. But Riley said work on her daughter’s house started before the correct land lines were determined.

Riley, a retired nurse who is one-quarter Cherokee, was given the 53-acre plot in 1980 as a gift after caring for several members of an area family. She later moved an old Methodist church from nearby Wilburton to the fenced-in land and turned it into her home.

She cleared out the native vegetation and turned the plot into a neat, grassy oasis. She also converted the old church into a museum of curiosities such as arrowheads, a table made of horseshoes, John Wayne memorabilia and more.

“People call it junk, but it really isn’t junk,” Riley said. “Antiques, I guess.”

In the mid-1980s, she started putting the tepees – wooden cones covered with whitewashed stucco – on the plot’s western edge. Scouting groups began using it for occasional outings.

The fight over the land began when she decided it was becoming too difficult to care for her plot.

Surveyors determined in the 1990s that the boundaries of the land were off by 70 feet, but it seemed to make little difference at the time. When Riley began talking of selling, the pressure to fix the boundary discrepancy increased.

Riley said she’ll give the government the scrubby land outside her fence line that is technically hers and hold onto the manicured portion inside the fence that is technically theirs.

“I’m 70 over on them, and they’re 70 over on me. Why can’t we swap out?” she asked.

But Hartman insists that a swap isn’t reasonable.

“I think it would be, in her case, a lot cheaper to move her teepees than look at a land trade,” he said.

Riley has hired an Elkhart lawyer to help her and has ended talk of selling the land.

“If it’s worth fighting over,” she said. “It’s worth keeping.”