US Settles Massive Lawsuit With Native Americans [$3.4 bil]

Washington (dpa) -- The United States on Tuesday agreed to pay 3.4 billion dollars to settle a long-running lawsuit brought by some 300,000 Native Americans who claimed they had been cheated out of land revenue for more than a century.

The class-action lawsuit was first brought 13 years ago and has been the subject of 22 judicial decisions. Many past attempts to settle the claims have failed.

"We are here to right a past wrong," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at a press conference in Washington. The settlement still has to be approved by Congress and in court.

The dispute stems from an 1887 agreement that divided up much of the Indian tribal lands into small parcels that were individually owned and held in "trust" by the US government.

Native Americans claim the mismanagement of those trust accounts robbed them of billions of dollars in revenue that the government collected from leasing the parcels of land.

Under the settlement, the government agreed to pay 1.4 billion dollars directly to the 300,000 Native Americans tribal members. Another 2 billion dollars was set aside for the government to buy some of the land from its owners.

Note: I wrote most of the following back in 2003, when we had quite a discussion on this topic here on FR. I did a cut-and-paste on my old posts, to create this novel.

I've lived in or near Indian country my whole life, and the business of "tribal sovereignty" has always bothered me. It's a double standard joke. And I absolutely do not believe we should be paying reparations now, for events from centuries past.

All that being said, I think the tribes have a legitimate gripe about this trust fund fiasco. That was pretty much a straight business deal. Oil, gas, and coal companies would sign contracts to run their operations on Indian owned land and to pay royalties in return. The BIA agreed to administer the contracts and manage distributing the money. No federal money went to the tribes in this deal, although the BIA did agree to eat the cost of managing the system.

The BIA was so inept that not only did they not distribute the money properly, they didn't collect it properly either. Instead of managing the contracts and making sure they were paid the correct amounts of royalty money, the BIA evidently just took whatever the mining and drilling companies sent and assumed it was correct. If I'm the owner of an oil company and I owe say 20 million a year in royalties, and then I find out that if I just send in 2 million a year nobody ever says a word about it, you can imagine what happens. I believe that the vast bulk of the missing money was due to this problem of the BIA not auditing payments made against payments due.

This Indian royalty money was tracked for years at the BIA national data processing center in Albuquerque, NM. I think maybe it got yanked back to Washington DC at some point in the 90's, but in was in Albuquerque for a long time. In the early to mid 80's I worked at that data center as part of a contract technical services team. We assisted the BIA technical staff with just about everything they worked with, except one thing: we were never allowed to touch or even see the royalty tracking system.

We never understood why we couldn't see that system, because from what we learned talking to our BIA co-workers, that was the one system we should be looking at. Even back then then it was a disaster, and everyone seemed to know it. I don't remember most of the details, but I remember a couple of the problems. The main job of this system was to account for mineral-extraction royalties paid on Indian owned land, and to distribute that money to the owners. Sometimes the tribe would own all the land, but other times the tribe would own some and individuals would own some.

One thing they had trouble tracking was who owned the land. Ownership would change as the years rolled by and land was passed from one generation to the next, often being chopped up into different size parcels in the process. Different parcels received royalty money based on different contracts, and this got all mixed up.

The one problem that seemed most unique to me had to do with the way they prorated the money based on what percentage Indian blood each person had, and of what tribe. If you were blood-related to more than one tribe, then this system attempted to track your percentage ancestry in each tribe and prorate the royalty money accordingly. And it didn't keep this percentage as a single number for each tribe, that totaled up to 100%. Instead they stored the numerator and denominator for each person for each tribe in separate arrays, and tried to keep up with each new birth by using the numerators and denominators of the parents to generate the data for the child. No one seemed to know where this Rube Goldberg approach originated, but everyone seemed to agree that it was broken beyond repair.

The head of the Dept of Interior and the head of the BIA are both political appointees of course, and I think everyone knew about the problem but nobody wanted it taken care of on their watch - much too ugly. To me, this is not an Indian versus evil white man issue, nor is it a Republican versus Democrat issue. This is an example of government bureaucracy at its very worst, and both parties are at fault.

If anyone has followed this story from the beginning over the years, there is more than enough evidence that (a)billion$ in mineral-rights leases were granted by the BIA on parcels of land for which there is no question that they were held “in trust” by the BIA for various tribal people, and (b)the record keeping of the BIA for those leases was so abysmal that if only sheer incompetence could be prosecuted as a crime, someone would have gone to jail long ago, and (c)the admitted payments of the parties who paid the leases, by itself (if only they could be tracked within the BIAs record keeping - they can’t) is sufficient knowledge, against the paltry sums actually allocated to appropriate tribal interests for the leases, (d) to suggest that the $3.4 billion that is being agreed to now IS PROBABLY LESS than what would have been paid - over the entire period of years covered by the suit, plus the interest that should be due on payments never received.

I remember one of the earlier court rulings in the case admitted all that I noted above but claimed, with the least bit of logic, that the court had no power to demand full payment of what is probably owed, simply because what is probably owed is so much.

I suspect that the tribal parties concerned are accepting the $3.4 billion, to just finally put the case behind them. We are lucky that they are willing to do so.

Isn’t it funny how the idea of ‘honoring contracts’ is still met with complete incredulousness and hatred by so many people. The Government did so wrong by the Indians that no amount of money could make it right and we all know $3.4 Billion doesn’t begin to cover actual monetary amounts owed.

And just a word to those that like to talk about how the Indians live on welfare on the reservations and get free healthcare and blah blah blah. 150 years ago Indians still lived completely off the land. They didn’t want anything but to be able to stay where they were, hunt and fend for themselves. Europeans came over, totally decimated them and then forced the small population left onto reservations and yet people somehow blame the Indian for staying on the reservation and trying to maintain something of his or her own culture?? The insanity of man never ceases to amaze me.

Try to take the 10 commandments out of a court house and watch the Christians explode with fiery indignation yet the Indians are expected to somehow navigate the near total decimation of their culture, their religion - their very existence - and do it in a way that PLEASES the very people who decimated them?? Will the insanity never cease?

Complete immorality, fear, greed and heartlessness caused this situation yet none of the above are in short supply even today.

This settlement will do very little to improve the lives of Indians. The amount of money received by each individual is laughable.

As to reparations. If this WERE reparations (which it is not) what would be wrong with that unless you are completely immoral. Reparations is a word that exists for a reason.

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