Time is running out for the Senate to step up and do right by the American Indians whose money and land were mismanaged by the federal government for more than a century.
At issue is a proposed $3.4 billion settlement of a 14-year-old legal battle in which Indians alleged the government illegally withheld some $150 billion in royalties from them.
The House has approved the settlement, but it remains stalled in the Senate, even as a court-imposed deadline of Oct. 15 looms.
The problems stem from the 1880s, when the federal government took Indian land to lease some of it to companies looking for sources of timber, oil, grazing lands and minerals. To this day, the Interior Department manages some 56 million acres of trust lands for Indians.
Some of the land taken in the 1880s went into an allotment system. The government employed a land division method that cut large swaths of Indian land into parcels ranging in size from 40 to 160 acres, and assigned those parcels to individual Indians. The government collected royalties on behalf of those Indians, and distributed the money to them.
However, as original owners died, part ownership in those plots passed through successive generations resulting in highly fractionalized ownership.
Some parcels of land had hundreds, even thousands of owners, making royalty accounting a nightmare.
It was, admittedly, a messy system and the federal government did a poor job of managing it.
The class action lawsuit, which had a contentious history, was settled in December when the government and the plaintiffs came to terms on a $3.4 billion settlement.
The agreement calls for the government to pay $1.4 billion to 300,000 Indian plaintiffs, including hundreds in Colorado. And it creates a $2 billion fund to buy back — on behalf of tribes — some of the scattered small parcels of allotment lands around the west. The settlement also sets up a $60 million Indian scholarship fund.
It is a fair settlement. Though the plaintiffs had argued for more money, the task of figuring out exactly which Indians are owed exactly how much is made virtually impossible by poor record-keeping and the length of time that has passed.
Some senators have objected to the settlement because of the legal fees involved, and the numbers give us pause as well. Lawyers will get between $50 and $100 million in fees, a daunting amount since the average payout to individual Indians is expected to be in the range of $2,000.
It’s important to keep in mind that lawyers worked on this case for decades, and the fee would amount to less than 3 percent of the settlement, which is far lower than typical fees in this type of lawsuit.
And even if the legal fees were whittled down, it wouldn’t boost individual payments by much.
It is time to put this dispute to rest, and we hope the Senate does just that by approving the settlement.
