by John Files
New York Times
Like many other American Indians, Elouise Cobell, a banker and Blackfoot from Montana, inherited some land from her parents. The federal government had long agreed to pay her family for farming, grazing and timber-cutting on the property.
But the government checks arrived in what seemed like a haphazard way, Ms. Cobell says. Some years the checks arrived, but many years they did not.
“It all started for me way back when I was a child listening to elders — parents and grandparents — who talked about how they couldn’t get their money,” Ms. Cobell said in an interview. “And, you know, it stuck with me.”
On behalf of nearly a half-million Indians, Ms. Cobell filed a class-action lawsuit in 1996 challenging the government to rectify what she described as a collective wrong dating back more than a century.
Ms. Cobell, 58, an energetic woman who grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park in northern Montana, and thousands of other Indians estimate that they are owed about $137 billion from oil, timber, grazing and other leases on their lands.
This month, the Indians and the government agreed to the selection of two mediators in the case after members of Congress urged the parties to resolve the matter.
The conflict goes back to the Dawes Act of 1887, which initiated a practice of giving land allotments to individual Indians as their reservations were being broken up for sale. While the Indians owned the allotments and sometimes lived on them, the government retained title and generated income for the Indians from use of the land.
The proceeds were put into a trust to be paid out to Indian holders of individual trust accounts, whose number grew as the allotments were passed down through generations. The Interior Department was to manage the fund.
“The issue we’re dealing with,” Ms. Cobell said, “is the fact that we don’t know how much land we own, we don’t know what the resources are on that land because the government has gotten away with not reporting to the trust beneficiaries.”
The litigation, which has moved along in fits and starts, has revealed that the department lost track of beneficiaries and that many of the account records were in a state of disrepair — decayed or lost.
Beyond the records, Ms. Cobell and other Indians say the government has stolen, lost or misallocated tens of billions of dollars. (The government pays out more than $500 million a year from the fund, which exceeds $3 billion.)
J. Steven Griles, the deputy interior secretary, said in 2003: “Nobody has shown me that there has been a loss. They haven’t provided one shred of evidence.”
In a letter sent to Congress on April 6, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton wrote that trust reform was one of the department’s highest priorities. “We are making real and substantial progress on both reforming our trust management practices and on moving forward with an appropriate accounting,” Ms. Norton wrote. She said the department had more than $109 million in its 2005 budget for such activities.
But a court-appointed investigator who sought for about three years to determine the finances of the trust fund resigned recently because of what he said was the government’s persistent effort to impede his work.
The judge handling the case, Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court here, has sided with the Indians, calling the Interior Department’s handling of the fund “the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century.” Judge Lamberth has held Ms. Norton and her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, in contempt for ignoring his orders to account for the fund, although an appeals court panel last year overturned the contempt order for Ms. Norton.
Ms. Cobell says she has dedicated her life to the suit, traveling about 40 weeks a year talking about it. “I live this every day,” she said.
This month alone, she has spoken at events with the Navajo tribe in New Mexico and Cheyenne and Crow tribes in Montana. On Wednesday, she spoke at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She frequently pays her own expenses, she said.
Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, said in an interview that he had “great respect” for Ms. Cobell.
“She has raised public understanding of an incredible injustice to Indians,” Mr. Daschle, the Senate minority leader, said. He has called on President Bush to direct the Interior Department to cease its effort of “derailing the Cobell case and get on with the job of crafting a consensus solution to the problem.”
Ms. Cobell said she has been overwhelmed by her reception among Indians, particularly in the West.
“They stand up and cheer,” she said, “because finally someone stood up for justice.”
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