Native
Americans getting final Cobell payments
Signs
that things are slowly changing . . . The US government has settled land-use royalties
and land claims with a group of Native Indians. -LW
HELENA –
Hundreds of thousands of Native Americans have started receiving the final cash
payments this week from one of the largest government settlements in U.S.
history, about three years after the deal was approved.
Checks ranging
from $869 to $10 million were sent beginning Monday to more than 493,000 people
by the administrators of the $3.4 billion settlement from a class-action lawsuit
filed by Elouise Cobell of Browning.
Some $941
million is being distributed in this second round of payments, plaintiffs’
attorney David Smith said Thursday.
Cobell sued
after finding the government squandered billions of dollars in royalties for land
it held in trust for individual Indians that was leased for development,
exploration or agriculture. The mismanagement stretched back to the 1880s, the
lawsuit found.
She died of
cancer in 2011, after more than 15 years of doggedly pursuing the lawsuit,
rallying Native Americans around the cause and lobbying members of Congress for
its approval.
Cobell’s
successor at the nonprofit she created, the Native American Community
Development Corp., said she regrets that Cobell is not around to see the checks
arrive.
“That’s the sad
part. You work all those years and to not to see it to fruition is
bittersweet,” NACDC executive director Angie Main said Thursday.
Cobell was
present when a federal judge approved the settlement just months before her
death. But it took years to work through the appeals and then sort through
incomplete and erroneous information provided by the government to identify all
the beneficiaries.
Some 22,000
people listed in the data provided had died, while 1,000 more listed as dead
were still alive, Smith said.
The government
data also listed the wrong or no address for three out of four people, he said.
The payments are
the second of two distributions in the settlement. The first distributions of
$1,000 apiece went to more than 339,000 people. This second, final round of
distributions is based on a formula looking at 10 years of the highest earnings
on those individual landowners’ accounts.
The settlement
also includes a $1.9 billion land buy-back program now underway in which
willing landowners sell the government their land allotments to be consolidated
and turned over to the tribes.
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