12 Yr Old Cobell v. Kempthorne – Closure Near

I’m not sure if anyone has heard about this case but it has been a major focal point for many Native American nations for many years.

It may finally be drawing to a conclusion.

The case started out as Cobell v. Babbitt, then went to Cobell v. Norton, and finally Cobell v. Kempthorne, after each new Secretary of the Interior was installed.

The class-action lawsuit was filed on June 10, 1996, by Elouise Cobell in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. to force the federal government to account for billions of dollars belonging to approximately 500,000 American Indians and their heirs, and held in trust since the late 19th century. It’s a very long messy tale but basically it revolves around the poor management or even intentional misuse of the Individual Indian Money Accounts (IIMs)

Under the Dawes Act American Indian reservations were divided into individual allotments. The allotments, however, were held in trust by the federal government based on the presumption that natives lacked the competency to control their resources. Also held in trust was any income from leases on the property. These included lucrative leases for timber, mining, or grazing rights. This income was held in IIMs and paid out as annuities or, in the early days of Indian agencies, drawn on to buy goods.

Seems to be a common thread in our history with the Native American. “We will take care of you because we know what’s best for you. You guys just stay here on your “little piece of heaven” called a reservation and try to learn how to be like us and in the meantime we will take your resources and manage them for you because we know you cant do it as well as us and we will send you a check every now and then and …. well, just don’t worry about a thing.. It will be all right.”

The plaintiffs maintain that the Interior Department did not keep an accurate accounting of what went into and out of these accounts and that hundreds of thousands of American Indians and their heirs did not receive their due.

The dual purpose of Cobell v. Kempthorne was to force the government to conduct an accurate accounting of IIMs and to reform the recordkeeping system going forward. Total estimates for the discrepancies have gone as high as a $100 billion, but $27 billion is what plaintiffs now say they would settle for in order to bring the decade-long case to a close and expedite payments to deserving plaintiffs.

“We know that the government collected our money, but it hasn’t been paid to us as individual Indian beneficiaries,” says Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet Nation member who initiated the suit in 1996 on behalf of several hundred thousand account holders
On Jan. 30 of this year U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the trust’s finances are beyond salvaging.

The Judge stated,” My conclusion that Interior is unable to perform an adequate accounting of the IIM [Individual Indian Money] Trust does not mean that a just resolution of this dispute is hopeless. It does mean that a remedy must be found for the Department's unrepaired, and irreparable, breach of its fiduciary duty over the last century. And it does mean that the time has come to bring this suit to a close."

The Dept of Interior has spent years since the case was filed retooling its accounting systems, but various court reviews found the trust in chronic disarray. Not only are financial records inaccurate or missing, critics say, but many landowners have little information on their lands and lease activities, or even the value of their assets, aside from sporadic checks issued by the government.

The system disbursed about $300 million to individuals and $500 million to tribes last fiscal year, and holds hundreds of millions in individual-account funds.

Whatever the exact amount that has been unpaid, Cobell says, evidence of a swindle is strewn across Blackfeet territory. Though the earth is replete with oil, timber and other resources, she says, “there is poverty all over the place.”

Defending its ongoing accounting work, the Interior argued that a “statistical sampling” of records for several thousand transactions had uncovered only a small percentage of errors, and that “additional work would neither produce a better result nor be cost effective.”

But official probes haven’t been so reassuring. In 2002, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held then-Secretary Gale Norton in contempt for failing to initiate the historical accounting process years after Congress had mandated it. The Interior Department, he wrote, had “indisputably proven… it is either unwilling or unable to administer [the trust] competently.”

Court-appointed Special Master Alan Balaran reported similarly dismal findings. Inspecting a Dallas branch of the Minerals Management Office in 2003, he noted the “chaotic” disorganization of financial documents, along with the “unexplained presence of an industrial shredder”—before office staff forced him to leave.

Outside the courtroom, advocates have pressed Congress for legislation to completely overhaul the trust’s management and accounting systems.

Sources:
http://nativeamericanfirstnationshistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/cobell_v_kempthorne
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3531/challenging_indian_land_trusts