June 30, heirs’ deadline to file for allotment land royalties

June 30 is also the deadline for 17,000 allotment heirs to file claims regarding $38 million in unclaimed settlement money remaining from the case after it was settled in 2010 with President Barack Obama’s signature on Congressional authorization.

If millions of dollars go unclaimed, it’s not yet been determined what will happen to the money. But family members can go to the www.Cobellsettlement.com website to search for family members who never filed a claim but are still owed money. The site has search flaws so the deadline should be extended.

Cobell, also known as Yellow Bird Woman, was lead plaintiff with four other Native Americans who filed the Cobell v. Salazar lawsuit, one of the largest class actions ever against the government. The overall $3.4 billion settlement would directly benefit 500,000 individuals.

She spent more than the last decade of her life promoting and lobbying for the restitution. She learned of its approval about the same time she learned she had cancer. At 65, she passed away in 2011, without seeing the distribution.

How would Cobell want to be remembered? Perhaps it would be for her 14 years as Blackfeet Nation treasurer. During that time, she discovered she could make neither “hide nor hair of the trust accounts,” as she famously said later.

Maybe she would like to be remembered for being executive director of the Native American Community Development Corporation and chair of the Blackfeet National Bank. She knew what she was doing when it came to finances.

A Blackfeet Nation reservation rancher, Conell was the first non-veteran honored as a warrior by her Niitsítapi Blackfoot Confederacy. Among accolades earned for her public service, she received a “Genius Grant” from John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Cobell saw her rural neighbors discouraged by the Interior Department’s failure to distribute the income it collected for them from farming and grazing leases, timber sales, oil and gas production. They are among at least 300,000 Individual Indian Money Management account holders nationwide to whom the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration was in arrears when she initiated the class action suit, Cobell v. Salazar, in 1996.

Chopping tribal trust land into individual tracts was a result of the 1887 Dawes Act and other official quasi-legal bids to erode tribal government by transforming reservation land bases into private parcels. But it was even worse that, by these instruments of assimilation policy, the federal authorities broke the promise to pay out the property royalties placed in this trust.

The ensuing Cobell v. Salazar Settlement agreement established compensation to landowners.

It also provided a $1.9 billion Trust Land Consolidation Fund to pay willing allotment sellers for restoring private parcels to tribal trust status. The process, called the Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, concluded in 2022. The settlement included $60 million for post-secondary education grants to tribal citizens.

Former North Dakota U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan, who chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs at the time, declared: “For over a century, the federal government mismanaged, lost, and even stole billions of dollars it held in trust for individual American Indians. Final congressional approval of the Cobell v. Salazar settlement is long overdue and historic. But it is much more than that. It is a victory for justice.”

The settlement ranks as yet another transcendental achievement in the life of Elouise Cobell.