U.S. Is Ordered to Tell Indians Before Selling Trust Propert

i posted this article because it is sooooo rare an occasion when the US government takes native american's interests (or anyone else's for that matter) into account when dealing with the subject of oil and gas exploration.

i applaud Royce C. Lamberth, the judge in the case, for his wisdom and obvious bravery in the face of what had to be very intense pressure from the various energy companies that this ruling will affect.


U.S. Is Ordered to Tell Indians Before Selling Trust Property


By JOHN FILES

Published: October 4, 2004


WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - A federal judge has ruled that the government must notify American Indian landowners before it seeks to sell property from a trust it manages that collects revenue from oil, timber and grazing leases and other activities on Indian land.

It is the first time such a practice has been required, the Indians say, in the nearly 120 years that the Department of the Interior has administered the fund, called the Indian Trust.

The ruling on Wednesday is part of a complex class-action lawsuit filed in 1996 by Elouise Cobell, a banker and Blackfoot from Montana, on behalf of nearly a half-million Indians who contend that during more than a century the government has cheated them of about $137 billion in royalties from the leases. The government pays beneficiaries a total of more than $500 million each year from the fund, which exceeds $3 billion dollars.

The judge handling the case, Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court here, said that the Indian landowners, who may be "fully unaware that their land is up for sale in the first place," had a right to a "full and accurate accounting, appraisal and other relevant information" about their plots, which in some cases are small interests in land that has been passed down from generation to generation.

The Interior Department said that it had routinely notified landowners of sales for decades. Indeed, the department said that many of the transactions related to the property are prompted by the Indian landowners themselves.

A spokesman for the department, Dan DuBray, said Friday that officials had reviewed the ruling and would respond in 10 days.

Lawyers for the Indians said the ruling was an important step toward compelling the government to provide transparency in its work with the trust, particularly in assessing a fair market value to land that they say has dwindled to less than 11 million acres from more than 40 million acres around the turn of the 20th century.

"For more than a century, the U.S. government has sold our land out from under us - without consent, without appraisal, and without informing us of our rights," said Ms. Cobell, the lead plaintiff in the case.

The conflict goes back to the Dawes Act of 1887, which initiated the allotment of land to individual Indians as their reservations were being broken up for sale. While the Indians owned the allotments and sometimes lived on them, the government retained title and generated income for the Indians from use of the land.

The proceeds were put into a trust to be paid out to Indian holders of individual trust accounts, whose number grew as the allotments were passed down to family members. The Interior Department was charged with managing the fund.

In 1994, Congress passed the American Indian Trust Reform Management Act, which required the department to account for all the money in the fund.

The litigation has revealed that the department lost track of beneficiaries and that many of the account records were in a state of disrepair or lost. Judge Lamberth has consistently sided with the Indians, calling the Interior Department's handling of the fund "the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century.''

In a letter sent to Congress in April, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton wrote that trust reform was one of the department's highest priorities. "We are making real and substantial progress on both reforming our trust management practices and on moving forward with an appropriate accounting,'' Ms. Norton wrote. She said the department had more than $109 million in its 2005 budget for such activities.

Some members of Congress have said that the cost of an accounting of the trust could be as much as $3 billion.

 

the article is quoted in its entirety. sooo there is a way that he is saying that it will cost 3 billion for accounting of the trust.

sounds to me as if someone is upset over this ruling and has already started the political spinning early.