Five years ago the NARF initiated a class action lawsuit over the mismanagement of trust accounts set up in 1887 to compensate Native Americans for use of their lands. Each year, around $500 million in royalties are collected from the sale of oil, timber, and other natural resources and put into individual trust accounts. The plaintiff estimates the U.S. government diverted roughly $10 billion from the accounts and is fighting to get the monies reinstated.
In December 1999, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled the trust beneficiaries were entitled to a full accounting of the money over the decades. He ordered the Interior and Treasury Departments to overhaul the trust fund and find out how much they were owed.
In reference to the mismanagement, Lamberth called it "fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form." At one point the judge held both Bruce Babbitt and Robert Rubin, interior and treasury secretaries during the Clinton administration, in contempt of court for failing to produce records ordered by the court.
Babbitt, in one of his final acts before leaving office, ordered a statistical sampling of the trust to determine how much account holders are owed. Attorneys for the Native Americans proposed instead that data for oil well production and grazing records among other variables be used to put together a model of the accounting system.
The decision by the appeals court to uphold Lamberth's ruling also gives him jurisdiction over the case for five years in order to follow the execution of the order and overhauling of the system. In writing for the appeals court, Judge David Sentelle stated that "what little progress the government has made appears more due to the litigation than diligence in discharging its fiduciary obligations." He asserted, "Since the founding of this nation, the United States' relationship with the Indian tribes has been contentious and tragic."
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