FHBC sends letters to Idaho Congressional Delegation for support of Cobell trust settlement

By Laverne Beech
Tribal Public Affairs
FORT HALL — The Fort Hall Business Council voted March 9 unanimously to send letters to Idaho’s Congressional Delegation encouraging support of the $3.4 billion Cobell trust fund agreement to settle the 13-year-old lawsuit claiming the government mismanaged or lost billions of dollars of Indian landowner money.
The request for council support was made by the Fort Hall Landowners Alliance, which noted that the settlement agreement reached by the federal government and lead plaintiffs on behalf of the estimated 500,000 individual Indian trust fund account holders must be approved by April 16 by Congress or it will go back to the courts. There are approximately 2,500 landowners with trust fund accounts at Fort Hall.
“The council needs to weigh in on this issue so our landowners can receive payment. A lot of our elderly people and those in poverty need this money; it may be their only chance to get something,” said Ernestine Werelus, director of the alliance.
Under the terms of the settlement, most eligible Indian landowners would receive at least $1,500 each, according to the federal government’s informational website: www.cobellsettlement.com .
The Cobell trust fund settlement was slated to be heard before the House Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday.
The federal government is still seeking input from tribes on how to best address fractionated lands with the $2 billion set aside under the agreement for land consolidation, according to Tom Perrelli, associate attorney general, who addressed tribal leaders at the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) conference in Washington, D.C., last week.
Werelus noted that the settlement agreement has an opt out provision for Indian landowners who want to continue pursuing their own litigation for land mismanagement. Landowners filing their own lawsuits would still be eligible for a payment under the settlement, she said. While the settlement does not address the potential mismanagement of lands owned by the tribes, the resolution passed by the council today noted that that the lawsuit has clouded the relationship between tribes and the federal government. About 50 percent of the trust land on the Fort Hall Reservation is tribally owned.
“We believe that the last 13 years of litigation have negatively impacted tribal-federal relations and we look forward to putting this longstanding trust fund mismanagement issue behind us,” states the resolution.
Native American Rights Fund Executive Director John EchoHawk says the amount of tribal trust accounts hold five times as much money as the individual Indian trust accounts involved in the Cobell case.
The Native American Rights Fund was co-counsel for the Cobell plaintiffs when the case was originally filed in 1996 and participated in the case until 2006 when it undertook the filing of a similar case for Indian tribes over federal mismanagement of tribal trust fund accounts, Nez Perce Tribe, et al. v. Salazar.
EchoHawk said that he is hopeful that the Obama Administration can soon focus its efforts on settlements for the tribal claims. The Native American Rights Fund currently represents 42 tribes in the Nez Perce case. There are also about 100 other tribal cases asserting claims stemming from federal mismanagement of tribal trust fund accounts, according to NARF. The only current land claim by the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes is to resolve the change in the reservation’s northern boundary when the Blackfoot River was rechanneled by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control back in the 1960s, said Jeanette Wolfley, tribal legal counsel on water resources issues. Proposed federal legislation to resolve the northern boundary issues has been introduced both the House and Senate and is slated for hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs in the coming months.

More Local - Page 1

More Local - Page 2

More Local - Page 3