A group of over 300,000 American Indians filed a class-action suit against the federal government this week, detailing what they say is a long history of government mismanagement, neglect and deception in handling Indian trust funds. The detailed court filing tracks private historical records back 115 years, and claims $137.2 billion in funds have been lost or stolen from the Indians by the federal government. In many ways, this latest suit is the culmination of decade after decade of the government’s ignoring repeated appeals for information on the money by American Indians, many of whom have little or none of the enormous profits of the oil, timber, mineral, and grazing leases from the lands supposedly managed in trust by the Department of the Interior. So far, the only formal response of the Department of the Interior has been the filing of a brief, outlining how they plan to rework the Indian trust fund in the future. Meanwhile, two weeks ago U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth order an ethics panel to investigate six Justice Department attorneys for sending mass mailings to the Indian plaintiffs in the case. The mailings threatened to extinguish the very rights to claim damages at issue in the case.
