Reznet

Government's Mishandling of Indian Trust Put at More Than $58 Billion

By Bill McAllister

WASHINGTON—Lawyers in a 12-year-old class action lawsuit say the 500,000 beneficiaries of the government's century-old Indian Trust are entitled to $58 billion in restitution because of the government's breach of trust to the Indians.

The government was unjustly enriched by unlawfully holding of the Indians' money, the lawyers said.

The statement comes in a filing made late Wednesday in the Cobell v. Kempthorne lawsuit. It has challenged the government's acknowledged mismanagement of trust accounts that were established in 1887 to handle the proceeds from the leases of Indian lands, mostly in the West.

On Jan. 30, U.S. District Judge James Robertson held that the government was unable to perform the accounting that it had long promised to the Indian trust beneficiaries.

He then called for proceedings to determine an alternative remedy that would remedy the Interior Department's "unrepaired and irreparable breach of its fiduciary duty over the last century."

The new filing was in response to the judge's Jan. 30 ruling. It represented the plaintiffs' effort to find a remedy that will vindicate the Indian trust beneficiaries for the government's actions.

In the filing, lawyers for the Indian plaintiffs say the federal government's breach of the Indian Trust carries a $58 billion price tag. That represents the "accumulated savings" that the government has secured through its mishandling of funds that should have been promptly deposited in individual Indian Trust accounts, the lawyers said.

Using "very conservative" figures derived from the government's own reports, the plaintiffs' lawyers provided an estimate of how much the government should have to pay to an estimated 500,000 Native Americans for the mismanagement of their lands and money.

The lawyers had promised the judge they would use the government's figures to give him a more defensible estimate of how much money failed to reached the Indians.

"We believe that our numbers are very conservative and represent the minimum harm that Indians have suffered under our broken trust system," said Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation from Montana. She is the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit, filed in 1996.

Robertson has set June 9 as the date of a trial on the issue of how to resolve the government breach of trust to the Indians. The judge says he wants to end the lawsuit this summer. Earlier, he rejected the government's plan for a historical accounting, saying that those plans would not work.

The entire text of the new filing is available at Cobell's Indian Trust Web site.

Bill McAllister, a former Washington Post reporter, is Elouise Cobell's spokesman.

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