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Julia Whitty: What America Owes the Indians ... $176 Billion

When Montana banker Elouise Cobell added up the Indian trust money lost, looted, and mismanaged by the U.S. government, the tab came to $176 billion. Now she's here to collect....

Cobell filed her lawsuit in 1996 after years of kinder entreaties failed, demanding payment of all unpaid revenues from Indian leases for the past century, a tally of past revenues, and a new accounting system to deal with future revenues. According to Cobell's forensic accountants, the government owes $176 billion to individual Indian landowners, averaging $352,000 per plaintiff, making this monetarily the largest class-action lawsuit ever launched.

If successful, Cobell's lawsuit may force a historical shift of America's capital away from the cowboys -- the oil, gas, timber, mining, grazing, and agriculture industries, along with their political cohorts -- toward the Indians. Furthermore, there's a nearly identical case waiting in the wings regarding Tribal Trust lands, also managed by Interior. Not surprisingly, the Clinton and Bush administrations have flexed unprecedented bureaucratic muscle to delay the resolution of Cobell v. Norton, spending hundreds of millions of dollars defending Interior.

In court, Interior is backed by the formidable resources of the Department of Justice, along with 35 of the country's most expensive private law firms. Cobell, meanwhile, rents a modest four-room office in Browning and has funded her legal challenge with $11 million in grant money. Small, soft-voiced, and an energetic 59 years old -- she refers to herself as "kind of hyper" even six weeks after undergoing surgery to donate a kidney to her husband -- Cobell seems an unlikely crusader. But she is the great-granddaughter of Mountain Chief, part of a pantheon of legendary Blackfeet warriors who battled the U.S. government as far back as its original real estate emissaries, Lewis and Clark.

To those concerned that the United States can't afford a Cobell v. Norton settlement, she says, "It's not your money and never was."

the historical heart of Cobell v. Norton beats in the Dawes Act -- a 19th-century legislative attempt to solve what President Chester A. Arthur called "the Indian problem." Simply put, Western pioneers wanted Indian lands, while liberal Easterners (mostly out of sight of any Indians) wanted the Indians to be happy. The act's author, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, felt the solution for the Indian lay in a Puritan work ethic: "Put him on his own land, furnish him with a little habitation, with a plow, and a rake, and show him how to go to work to use them.... The only way is to lead him out into the sunshine, and tell him what the sunshine is for, and what the rain comes for, and when to put his seed in the ground."

The Dawes Act was signed into law in 1887, three years after the Blackfeet were buried atop Ghost Ridge. Also known as the General Allotment Act, Dawes mandated that most reservation lands be broken into individual parcels in the hope that dissolving communal ownership would dissolve the power of the tribes -- considered counterproductive to Indian assimilation. Thus, BIA agents surveyed the reservations, typically allotting families 160 acres, and single adults 80 acres. The "surplus" lands -- two-thirds of the area in question -- were put up for sale.

From the Indians' point of view, Senator Dawes' experiment in social engineering was a mockery. Not only did the government fail to furnish the Indian with a plow when it gave him his allotment, it typically splintered those allotments into unmanageable islands (30 acres of timberland here, 50 acres of farmland 100 miles away), more or less guaranteeing that no Indian could work the disjointed parcels. Consequently, the government took legal title of the allotments and began to lease the land to settlers and, later, corporations. It pledged to collect the revenues and disburse them to the Indian landowners.

But from the beginning, Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado foretold that "the real aim of [the Dawes Act] is to get at the Indian's land and open it up for settlement." And in fact as soon as allotment began, Indian-owned acreage began to vanish. Twelve percent disappeared the first year. By 1920, the 136 million acres held by Indians when the Dawes Act was signed into law had shrunk to 72 million acres -- 17 million of which were leased to white settlers. Today some 46 million acres remain in the Tribal Trust, and 10 million in the Individ-ual Indian Trust. The rest disappeared at a rate of 1.5 million acres a year....
Read entire article at Mother Jones