Peninsula Daily News
and The Associated Press
NEAH BAY — The Makah tribe will receive $25 million from the federal government under the terms of a $1 billion settlement of a series of lawsuits brought by Native American tribes over mismanagement of tribal money and trust lands.
It was the only tribe on the North Olympic Peninsula listed on the settlement.
“The settlement money is not a gift or windfall to the tribe,” said Michael J. Lawrence, vice chairman of the Makah Tribal Council, in a letter sent to members of the Makah tribe last week.
Instead, Lawrence said, it “is an estimate of how much money was lost to the tribe through the United State’s mismanagement of the Makah tribe’s trust funds and breach of its trust responsibility.
The agreement announced earlier this month by the Justice Department and the Interior Department resolves claims brought by 41 tribes from across the country to reclaim money lost in mismanaged accounts and from royalties for oil, gas, grazing and timber rights on tribal lands.
Negotiations continue on dozens of other cases.
In addition to the Makah, tribes in Washington state included in the settlement are the Tulalip, Swinomish, Colville, Nooksack and Spokane.
“The settlement money is money that would have and should have been available to the tribe over time for tribal operations and tribal initiatives since 1946, plus interest,” Lawrence said.
The Makah Tribal Council authorized the chairman to sign the settlement Feb. 28, the letter said, and it was signed April 9.
Money is expected to be received as a one-time payment within two to six weeks of the chairman’s execution of the agreement, Lawrence said.
The Makah will have complete authority over how it is spent, Lawrence said.
The money will not be held in trust by the United States, he emphasized.
“The Tribal Council has established uses for the settlement monies to include timber land acquisition, debt reduction and economic development and jobs creation,” Lawrence said.
The Makah filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 26, 2006.
The lawsuit said the federal government had not provided an accounting of trust funds and non-monetary assets and had mismanaged both.
Damages to the Makah include “unauthorized disbursements, lags in disbursements and receipts, resources damages — including failure to collect and under-collection of rents and proceeds — and underinvestment damages for the period 1946 to 2010,” Lawrence said in the letter.
The settlement also sets up a requirement for quarterly or monthly reports on tribal accounts, beginning at the end of January, with the tribe having six years from the date of a report to contest its accuracy.
The agreement deals only with trust funds and assets before the date of execution.
It does not affect a long list of rights, including hunting and fishing rights, water rights, the ability to seek remedies to protect the environment and any other claims not specifically waived in the agreement.
The Interior Department manages more than 100,000 leases on tribal trust lands and about 2,500 tribal trust accounts for more than 250 federally recognized tribes.
The government did not release the dollar amounts each tribe will receive, though some were entered into U.S. District Court record in Washington, D.C.
Among those, recipients of large sums include Montana’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes at $150 million, Idaho’s Nez Perce tribe at nearly $34 million and New Mexico’s Mescalero Apache Nation at nearly $33 million.
The Ute Mountain Ute tribe — whose reservation covers southwest Colorado, southeast Utah and northern New Mexico — will receive nearly $42.6 million.
Washington state’s Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, also part of the settlement, had announced their $193 million settlement in February, as did Montana’s Assiniboine and Sioux tribes from the Fort Peck Reservation, which settled for $75 million.
Last year, the government announced a $380 million settlement with the Osage Nation in Oklahoma.
A total of 114 tribal governments filed suit after Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe from Browning, Mont., brought a similar claim on behalf of thousands of individual Natives over the government’s mismanagement of their trust lands.
The government ultimately settled the Cobell case for $3.4 billion, but it remains under appeal for various reasons by four people.
Congress delayed approval of that settlement for months.
But unlike the Cobell case, money for the tribes’ settlements already has been appropriated under a congressionally approved judgment fund, Interior spokesman Adam Fetcher said.
