Is U.S. ready to settle with Native Americans?

WASHINGTON - For Elouise Cobell, a Native American landowner who launched a class-action lawsuit in 1996 against the U.S. government, there may be reason to be optimistic.

The battle over the Indian Trust Fund has been going on unofficially for more than a century, encompassing Indian lands dating back to 1887. Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee said a settlement is within reach.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had two high level visitors to his Capitol Hill office Tuesday morning. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne came to talk with McCain about trying to settle the long-term dispute.

The Interior Department manages Cobell's property and that of about 500,000 other Native Americans, leasing the oil, timber, mining and grazing rights, and collecting the money in trusts and distributing it to the owners. Cobell contends the government owes Indians more than $50 billion.

Gonzales and Kempthorne spoke with McCain and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the ranking Democrat on the committee, a day before both were to offer a bill that would have suggested a settlement of close to $8 billion to compensate Indian land owners.

The bill never made it. McCain says he was willing to listen to what the government had to offer and hold off with legislation until the Senate comes back from its month-long summer recess in September. "I won't agree to anything unless Cobell feels it's OK," McCain told NBC News.

‘A historic opportunity’
In a letter to McCain, Interior Secretary Kempthorne writes: "There is both an atmosphere and positive attitude in the Administration to find a settlement solution. I believe we have a historic opportunity to embrace constructive solutions to long-standing trust management concerns held by generations of Indians."

Cobell feels this is a positive move, her spokesman Bill McAllister said, though she is disappointed the administration "does not seem ready to resolve this quickly." Last week, when McCain was drafting his bill, she said, "It would be foolish to ignore political realities while our people continue to go without the basic staples of life. That is why I and the other representative plaintiffs are considering this settlement offer." But Cobell reiterated, "I have been quoted as saying that an $8 billion dollar settlement amount for the historical accounting claims of 500,000 individual Indian trust beneficiaries is 'equitable.' That is not what I said. That is not what I believe."

For the past 10 years the court battle has been a messy, protracted affair. Cobell has won a series of victories. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held Interior Secretaries Bruce Babbitt and Gale Norton in contempt and ordered the Interior Department to disconnect its computers from the Internet to secure Indian trust data.

Indian trust documents were once scattered throughout all 50 states, some in federal facilities, others jammed into barns, attics and even storage sheds. Nobody was even sure what was out there. Lamberth ordered the Interior Department to collect boxes full of Indian records from across the country and have them trucked to Lenexa, Kansas. National Archives workers then file the documents in boxes. So far, there are more than 145,000 boxes there, 300 million documents with new shipments arriving weekly.

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