WASHINGTON — A half-million American Indian plaintiffs are appealing a federal judge’s recent decision to award them much less than they wanted in a long-running trust case.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled Aug. 7 that the plaintiffs are entitled to $455 million, a small fraction of the $47 billion they had sought. Robertson’s number was closer to government estimates in the 12-year lawsuit, which claims the Indians were swindled out of billions of dollars in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.
“If this opinion was fair, I’d like to be out of court, but we certainly can’t let a decision like this stand,” said Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff in the case.
At issue is how much of the royalty money was withheld from the Indian plaintiffs and whether it was held in the U.S. Treasury at a benefit to the government. Robertson said in his opinion that plaintiffs did not successfully argue that it was.
Because many of the records have been lost or destroyed, it has been up to the court to decide how to best estimate how much the individual Indians should be paid.
In their appeal, which was to be filed Monday, the plaintiffs say Robertson is too narrowly defining the obligations of the government in managing the Indian trust. The government trust should be treated the same as a private trust, which would have been held to stricter standards, the plaintiffs say.
The class-action suit deals with individual Indians’ lands and covers about 500,000 Indians and their heirs. Several tribes have sued separately.
