Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet tribal member who led a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 500,000 Indians against the Interior Department that yielded one of history’s largest government settlements — a payout worth $3.4 billion — died late Sunday at a hospital in Great Falls, Mont. She was 65 and had cancer.
The death was confirmed by Bill McAllister, a family spokesman.
Mrs. Cobell spent nearly 15 years advancing the suit, which was settled in 2010. It claimed that the Interior Department had stolen or squandered billions of dollars in royalties owed to individual tribal members, mostly in the West, in exchange for oil, gas and other leases.
Mrs. Cobell, an accountant who grew up on a reservation in Montana without electricity, a telephone or running water, was all too familiar with stories of the government’s mistreatment of tribes. She said the federal mismanagement of the land trusts dated from the 19th century and had contributed to a pattern that had left her tribe with high poverty and unemployment rates.
“The issue we’re dealing with,” she told the New York Times in 2004, “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 landmark settlement was ratified by Congress and signed into law last year by President Obama, who called it an “important step towards a sincere reconciliation.”
Eric Eberhard, an Indian law expert at the Seattle University law school, said there was “no doubt that Elouise Cobell changed the legal landscape when it comes to Indian law and the federal government’s trust responsibilities.”
He said Mrs. Cobell was “able to demonstrate in court that the mismanagement was profound — that, in some instances, monies which should have been credited to accounts never showed up.”
Mrs. Cobell served as treasurer of her Montana tribe and helped found the first Indian-owned national bank, where she spoke with Blackfeet distressed by the paltry income their acreage seemed to bring in from Washington.
By the time she filed the far-reaching lawsuit in 1996, she had grown convinced that the federal government was not moving swiftly enough to address problems with the land trusts.
Almost nothing had happened, she said, even though Congress passed a trust reform act in 1994, after a scathing report two years earlier by the House Committee on Government Operations called “Misplaced Trust: The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Mismanagement of the Indian Trust Fund.”
She thought that no action by the government would likely occur without legal pressure from Indian country.
Mrs. Cobell was aided over the years by foundation money. That included a “genius grant” of $310,000 in 1997 from the John D. MacArthur Foundation, which called Mrs. Cobell “an advocate for Native American self-determination and financial independence whose work has inspired many Native American women to seek influence and leadership within their own communities.”
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