HELENA, Mont. – Native Americans who sued the federal government over lost royalties have been waiting nearly 15 years for the $3.4 billion settlement Congress passed last month. Now they’ll have to wait some more.
The plaintiffs expect it will be at least next August before Indian trust landowners see a dime, and six months after that before the last claims are settled with trust account holders.
That’s because when the political wrangling ends, the red tape begins.
The lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, Elouise Cobell of Browning, Mont., said the biggest obstacle by far to the settlement was obtaining congressional approval – indeed, it took nearly a year and a couple of false starts before the Senate authorized the deal.
“I want to run out and thank the whole world for getting it through the Senate,” Cobell told The Associated Press. “We still have work to do. One thing about this case, it hasn’t been easy. You don’t take anything for granted. You make sure it all gets approved.”
Once President Barack Obama signs the legislation, the settlement must still go through a gantlet of court hearings, a media campaign to notify beneficiaries, waiting periods for comments and appeals. Even after the first checks are cut, it will still take months more to sort through the process of deciding who should or should not be included as a plaintiff – a number that will likely end up somewhere between 300,000 and 550,000, plaintiffs’ representatives said.
“Making sure it is a fair process takes time,” said Geoffrey Rempel, an accountant consulting for Cobell’s Washington, D.C., legal team.
The dispute began over property owned by the Indians and held in trust by the government. The Department of Interior leases that land to others for farming or resource development, and is supposed to pay the Indians the money generated by the land into Individual Indian Money trust accounts, or IIMs.
Those IIMs were created in 1887 by lawmakers who believed at the time that Indians could not handle their own financial affairs.
But Cobell found there was no real accounting of how much money was in the trust pool of IIM accounts. She estimated the amount of money mishandled, stolen or squandered from those accounts over the last century may actually total more than $100 billion.