Recently, the district court in Cobell v. Kempthorne awarded the Indian plaintiffs about $455.6 million. This is down from the $7 billion on the table a while back.
And now, the Supreme Court has decided to defer a question on the mere interest of an award to the Exxon Valdez plaintiffs, including Alaskan Native villages, of about $488 million. And that is just on the compensatory damages award of over $500 million, far less than the billions of punitive damages awarded in the original verdict.
My guess is that the Court will keep driving these numbers down if they get a chance to the future.
Turtle Talk 
The $7 Billion Offer That Never Was
A number of news accounts – particularly The Associated Press – are incorrectly saying that the plaintiffs have rejected a $7 billion offer from the government to settle the Indian Trust lawsuit. That simply isn’t true.
Here are the facts:
The government has never offered to settle the Cobell vs. Kempthorne lawsuit at any price. Every proposal made by plaintiffs and by mediators to settle the case has been rejected by the government.
The Bush administration in March 2007 suggested it was willing to spend $7 billion over 10 years to resolve a wide range of major Indian issues, including land fractional land claims, the Cobell suit, all individual land mismanagement claims, the 100 plus trust lawsuits filed by tribes and pay for all of trust reform as well.
Oh yes, and it also included provisions to deny Indians any right to bring any future lawsuits for future mismanagement no matter how egregious. That final provision was essentially a license to steal. This proposal was universally condemned by everyone not associated with the government, including a wide range of Native leaders.
It never went beyond conceptual testimony to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. And it contained no specific amount to settle the Cobell litigation.
In testimony before the committee Ms. Cobell said the figure was insufficient to settle her case alone. “This is not an offer — instead, it is a slap in the face for every individual [with] trust fund litigation,” she said. She did note that a mediator had suggested recoveries could run between $7 billion to $9 billion in the case. She said she “would want to talk about that more.” Hardly a rejection.
But the Bush administration never followed up on her overture. In fact, federal officials have never made any offer to the Cobell legal team to settle the class action lawsuit for any specific amount.
In 2006, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee did introduce legislation to settle the lawsuit without a specific dollar amount. The Committee later amended that bill to include an $8 billion figure but the bill never moved out of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee because of objections raised by the government.
Lawyers for the Justice Department and the Interior Department have made clear throughout the Cobell litigation that the government’s firm position is that the Individual Indian Money (IIM) Trust is not a real trust and that Indians are owed nothing no matter how much money and other assets are missing or have been looted from the Trust.
The position of the Cobell plaintiffs has long been that we will consider reasonable offers from the United States to resolve this case. Unfortunately, none has been put forth.