Good for McLean County State's Attorney Ladd Erickson for speaking out on the possible transfer of 36,000 acres bordering Lake Sakakawea from the U.S. Army to the Three Affiliated Tribes.

The acres contain significant public and private improvements - a campground, boat ramps, private cabins. Even more important, they amount to a noose around the most important part of Lake Sakakawea and its $90 million recreation industry.

Say only that the potential for general unhappiness, if not mischief, is great.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers claims it has the authority to make the transfer without public hearings. If that is so, it is by the technicality that the official transfer would be to the Bureau of Indian Affairs - agency to agency - in the name of the tribe.

Erickson surely has the right of it when he says the public must be involved by dint of public and private investments in the land and because not all of the acreage represents land lost by the tribe to Garrison Dam.

Some of it, says Erickson, belonged to "nonenrolled farmers and ranchers who may have strong opinions about their former lands being donated to the tribe after being taken from them."

In any case, the corps now says it had already decided to hold hearings. Whatever. We'll thank Erickson anyway for sticking his head up.

Granted that the Three Affiliated Tribes was dealt a terrible injustice when its best 152,000 acres - and one-quarter of its land base - were condemned for Garrison in the 1940s. At the time, this was the most prosperous tribe in the state, largely because it was living in the lush river valley that was its traditional home.

That deal would never go down today. But this was 60 years ago, and non-Indians, too, had little bargaining power with the dam-builders. (See Lake Sakakawea, in a wet cycle, stretching west from the Fort Berthold Reservation all the way to Williston.) At least, the Three Affiliated Tribes has gotten paid three times for "the Taking."

In the mid-1940s, it got $5.1 million to start - a sum so low that Congress was embarrassed into adding another $7.5 million before the decade was out. Forty years later, U.S. Sen. Kent Conrad rounded up another $149 million for a permanent trust fund for the tribe - again, as compensation for loss of its prime real estate.

It is worth at least a public discussion whether the tribe is owed more - and, if so, whether a stranglehold on the economy of Lake Sakakawea is the proper recompense.

If we were conspiracists, we would suspect payback by the corps for all the grief North Dakota has given it over low water on the lake. ("You don't like us? See how you like Tex Hall.") But the idea actually seems to have originated, at least, with the tribe.

Fair enough - people can propose anything. But it's a big enough subject to involve the public and, if it comes to that, the public's lawyers. Let the hearings begin.