Indians Continue Wait for Accounts' Resolution

Nine-Year-Old Lawsuit Against Interior Department on Trust Funds Appears Far From Settlement

BROWNING, Mont. -- Nine years have ticked away since Elouise Cobell sued the government on behalf of as many as 500,000 Native Americans whose land the United States was supposed to manage. But the end of what has become the longest, largest class action lawsuit against the federal government remains nowhere in sight.

Sometimes, when Cobell returns home here to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwest Montana from Washington, where the case is being heard in U.S. District Court, she feels buoyed by a development she thinks might help settle the case once and for all. But the feeling is fleeting.

Last week, a major court victory was still fresh; Judge Royce C. Lamberth had issued his most scathing critique of the Interior Department's handling of the Indians and the case. Lamberth cited Interior's "mismanagement, falsification, spite and obstinate litigiousness," among other failings, and his disgust was palpable.

"Perhaps Interior's past and present leaders have been evil people, deriving their pleasure from inflicting harm on society's most vulnerable," he wrote in the extraordinary, 34-page July 12 ruling, which agreed with the plaintiffs' claim that the department's information was unreliable.

But Cobell was preoccupied by a bill to settle the case that was introduced July 20 by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.), chairman and ranking Democrat, respectively, of the Indian Affairs Committee. The bill, which the senators called "a starting point," was far from the remedy Indian leaders had hoped for, Cobell said. And she testified to that point.

"This bill proposes a formula for accounting that looks at the trust records from 1980 to 2005," Cobell said when she returned here from testifying. "The judge has already ruled that Interior has to make an accounting going back to the beginning."

Cobell v. Norton (for Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton) dates to 1996, but the complicated debacle some members of Congress have likened to a "Federal Enron" traces its origins back more than a hundred years.

Under a forced arrangement, in 1887 the government divided much tribal land across the country, which it had not already taken, into separate, private allotments for Indians. It then leased individuals' land, which ranged from 40 to 160 acres, usually to oil, gas, timber, grazing or coal interests. The Treasury Department placed the fees into a trust and was -- and remains -- responsible for doling out checks to the individual Indian trust beneficiaries.

But from the beginning, the plaintiffs say -- and the government has conceded until recently -- the basic recordkeeping for these lands was botched.

In 1994, six years after Congress began oversight hearings into the mismanagement of Indian trusts going back for decades, it passed a law ordering a special trustee to monitor the accounting of the trusts and creating a plan for reforming the system. The 1996 lawsuit followed after the first special trustee resigned in protest of what he said were attempts to obstruct his efforts to reconcile accounts.

Norton and her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, have said it is impossible to provide a full historical accounting of the trusts -- there are said to be about 300,000 accounts, incorporating perhaps 500,000 individual beneficiaries, with combined balances in the trust of $500 million to $800 million.

But Interior officials say that as they perform a historical accounting of the trusts ordered by Lamberth -- an effort costing $100 million so far -- their research, performed by using statistical sampling, has shown that the trust holders are owed little for their land. "If you use the facts that we have found so far in the accounting process, the number would be very, very low," James E. Cason, the associate deputy secretary for the Interior, told the Indian Affairs Committee last month.