Fourteen years ago, as mineral and gas corporations were discovering new reserves of oil and gas in huge shale deposits on Indian reservations across the West, a feisty middle-aged Blackfeet woman, named Eloise Cobell, decided that the time had come to begin a long-overdue accounting of mineral royalties on Indian lands.  As a community organizer in Browning, Cobell understood the machinery of government, both in her tribal world and in Washington D.C..  What started in 1996 as a mere suspicion – a hunch that the federal government and mineral corporations had been stealing from the poor and giving to the rich – soon germinated in actualities and took root in the law to become a formal complaint.  Once her suit was filed in federal court, Cobell as it came to be known, quickly grew into the larges and most complicated class-action lawsuit ever brought against the United States.  The paperwork involved a staggering four hundred thousand plaintiffs.

Ms. Cobell’s suit alleged that the U.S. Department of the Interior, in collusion with energy companies, had neglected its solemn fiduciary responsibilities to the Indians by absconding with mineral royalties since the late 1800s.  Accountants for the firm of Price-Waterhouse conducted the initial review of the government’s books – that is, the books they could find.  Their report minced no words: it appeared that as much as $50 billion had gone missing over that time, and maybe more.  In 2003, a conservative Texas judge by the name of Royce Lamberth, who, from the beginning, had presided over the case in federal district court in Washington D.C., ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.  Along the way, he three times cited sitting secretaries of the Interior for contempt of court for their chronic foot-dragging, malfeasance, and bureaucratic double-talk.  Now that the basic question of culpability was settled, the protracted and contentious accounting nightmare could begin in earnest.   Or could it?

“Alas,” declared Judge Lamberth in words seldom heard from a federal bench, “our modern Interior Department has time and again demonstrated that it is a dinosaur – the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago…For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few.”

In 2005, at the insistent urging of the Bush White House and the Interior Department’s lawyers, who accused Judge Lamberth of being “too harsh on the government” in their motion seeking his dismissal, Judge Lamberth was removed from the case.

Last week, this sordid scandal finally inched its way toward some kind of closure when Ms. Cobell and her lawyers, along with the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior, announced that they had arrived at a $3.4 billion settlement.  In real dollars and cents, this will amount to a $1,000 payment to every named plaintiff in the lawsuit, and President Obama, who characterized this suit as “a stain” on the nation, hailed the settlement as “an important step towards sincere reconciliation” between the government and the Indians.  As a presidential candidate, Obama had pledged himself “to resolving this issue, and I am proud that my administration has taken this step today.”

After he had spent his fair share of time in the West dealing with both whites and Indians, General William T. Sherman gave the best definition of an Indian reservation that I’ve ever heard:  “A parcel of land set aside for the exclusive use of Indians that is surrounded by thieves.”  This entire sordid episode grew out of the thievery of both the federal and state governments in the 19th century.  Between them, they managed to steal an estimated 125 million acres of treaty protected homelands from native tribes.  Ms. Cobell’s lawsuit may have settled – for the moment – the question of stolen mineral royalties, but only a fool, as Judge Lamberth suggested with such articulate fervor, would think this is the last we’ll hear of it.

Paul VanDevelder is the author of Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation, and Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory.

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