Indians deserve money; settle it

Inter Lake editorial

Finally, a federal judge has come up with a dollar figure in a long-running class action trust case involving 500,000 Native American plaintiffs.

While the dispute is not over, the ruling from U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson should serve as an important step to bring it to an end.

The judge ruled that the plaintiffs are entitled to $455 million, but that's just a fraction of the $47 billion most recently sought by the plaintiffs for being swindled out of oil, gas, grazing and timber royalties by the U.S. Department of Interior for decades.

Elouise Cobell, the Blackfeet tribal member who filed the lawsuit 12 years ago, was not surprisingly disappointed in the ruling. But now a benchmark has been set to hopefully advance negotiations that previously seemed irreconcilable.

Frankly, there needs to be a settlement, because the plaintiffs are plainly entitled to some compensation for what has been called one of the biggest fraud scandals in the country's history.

The problem is that it is a particularly complicated scandal because it occurred over nearly half the country's history. It requires a settlement based on some sense of pragmatic realities.

Judge Robertson wrote earlier this year that "a remedy must be found for the Department's unrepaired, and irreparable, breach of its fiduciary duties over the last century."

But he also lamented that it would be nearly impossible to figure out the difference between what the government collected from the leases and what it paid out to Native Americans over the decades. So he was left to sort through the best information available, putting an end to what appeared at times to be an arbitrary calculation of the amount the plaintiffs are entitled to.

Consider that the lawsuit originally sought up to $137 billion. But at one point in 2005, negotiation offers were at $27.6 billion. A year later lawyers were talking about $8 billion, and in 2007, the government offered $7 billion, but that was rejected.

This year, the figure was back up as high as $58 billion and most recently, $47 billion.

Robertson used firm language in explaining his ruling this week: The model used by the plaintiffs to estimate the amount of money withheld from them could not "be used as a representation or even an estimate of the amount of trust funds that the government has failed to disburse … Their model did not make use of the best available evidence and did not make fair or reasonable comparisons of data."

But the judge himself suggested that his $445 million may not be adequate. What it could do, however, is help spur both sides to accept negotiations that could lead to a settlement.

"Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the announcement in this memorandum of a hard number will give rise to some off-line conservation between the parties," he wrote.

We can only hope. A case that has involved more than 3,500 docket entries needs to come to an end. A wrong was undoubtedly done, but it's time to move ahead and put this case behind us.