Judge to hear $3.4B Indian settlement case

BILLINGS — A hearing is planned Monday on the fairness of a $3.4 billion settlement reached in a lawsuit that claimed the government mismanaged the accounts of hundreds of thousands of American Indian landowners.

The hearing in Washington, D.C., comes six months after lawmakers approved the settlement and a federal judge granted preliminary approval of the deal in December. The lead plaintiff in the 15-year-old class-action lawsuit is Elouise Cobell of Browning, Mont., a member of Montana's Blackfeet Tribe.

The lawsuit argues the Interior Department mishandled billions of dollars in royalties belonging to Indian account holders.

Potential beneficiaries were notified of the settlement and had until April 20 to opt out of the class-action lawsuit and start their own, or submit objections to the settlement.

The Billings Gazette reported that 92 objections were filed and 19 people have asked to speak at the hearing on Monday before U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan.

Some objections to the settlement concern the $223 million, plus $1.3 million in expenses, requested by attorneys. The attorneys in February said that Instead of being paid up to $99.9 million, as initially agreed, they deserved at least $224 million for their work on the case since 1996.

The initial 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.

Under the settlement, $1.5 billion would go to individual Indian account holders. Another $1.9 billion would be used by the government to buy up fractionated Indian lands from individual owners willing to sell, and then turn those lands over to tribes. Another $60 million would be used for a scholarship fund for Indian students.

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