After 12 years, thousands of docket entries, and several roundtrips through the courts, a federal judge has awarded a group of Americans Indians $455 million in restitution for the government’s mismanagement of an Indian land trust fund created more than a century ago.
The trust fund was created for the collection and dispersal of royalties from oil, gas, timber, and other companies that leased Indian lands. The plaintiffs had tried to make the case that the government bilked them out of as much as $47 billion over the years.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson’s ruling today does not explain “how and to whom” the award will be dispersed. The plaintiffs, led by Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet tribe in northwest Montana, number around 500,000. If the award were spread evenly among them, each plaintiff would take away less than $1,000, before attorneys’ fees.
"I am disappointed, to say the least," Cobell said in a statement. "We believe we presented a strong, compelling case that individual Indian trust beneficiaries are entitled to much more than the government's admitted mismanagement of our trust monies over the past 120 years."
Cobell filed suit in 1996, demanding that Interior account for the royalties held in trust by the government. Roberton's opinion comes about a month after a bench trial in which the parties argued over how much of the Indians' royalty money the federal government withheld over the years, where it was held, and whether holding the money benefited the government.
In most cases, Robertson was inclined to agree with the government's model for determining what was owed. The plaintiffs, he said, "did not make use of the best available evidence and did not make fair or reasonable comparisons of the data."
In June, we reported that the firm handling the case, Kilpatrick Stockton, had sunk more than $20 million into it. Last year, the plaintiffs rejected an offer of $7 billion to a settle to settle all Indian land trust cases — there are several besides Cobell — and shut the door on future claims. Cobell’s lawyers at Kilpatrick offered to settle the case for $27.5 billion but were rebuffed.
Cobell said she asked her lawyers "to carefully review this opinion as we consider whether to appeal the ruling."
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