Elouise Cobell, the treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe who tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating American Indians out of more than a century’s worth of royalties, resulting in a record $3.4 billion settlement, has died. She was 65.
Cobell died Sunday at a hospital in Great Falls, Mont., of complications from cancer, her spokesman Bill McAllister announced.
Growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwest Montana, Cobell often heard her parents and neighbors wonder why they weren’t being paid for allowing others to use their land, she later recounted.
When she took over as treasurer of the tribe in 1976, she found herself in charge of an accounting system “in total chaos,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2002.
As Cobell attempted to unravel the books, she could make neither “hide nor hair of the trust accounts,” she later said, referring to trusts that had been set up as part of the 1887 Dawes Act.
The act tried to erode the tribal system by granting parcels of land to individual American Indians, but not allowing them to control their new property. Instead, the land was placed in trust with the promise that owners would be paid royalties for oil and gas, grazing or recreational leases.
Yet the Indians received little or no payment, the Times reported in 2009.
Cobell approached the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund about filing a class-action lawsuit against the Interior and Treasury departments, and she was named as lead plaintiff when the suit was filed in 1996. The suit contended that the Dawes Act arrangement allowed U.S. officials to systematically steal and squander royalties intended for American Indians.
Just this June, a federal judge approved the $3.4 billion settlement, the largest payment American Indians have ever received from the U.S. government.
It provides a $1,000 cash payment to every individual who has a trust account and $2 billion for the federal government to buy back the land parcels, the Times reported when the settlement was reached in 2009. Cobell was to receive $2 million.
