WASHINGTON (AP) -- An attorney for hundreds of thousands of American Indians argued Tuesday that the federal government will never be able to account for untold amounts of money owed to his clients.
"We say it is the integrity of the United States on trial here," said Dennis Gingold, who is representing 350,000 American Indians in a class-action lawsuit alleging the government squandered billions of dollars owed to them.
Gingold asked U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to order the Interior Department to reimburse the Indians through a plan the plaintiffs devised that accounts for funds collected from oil, gas, timber and grazing royalties and other uses of Indian land.
The arguments came at the close of a 44-day trial. It could take Lamberth several months to issue a ruling in the case.
For more than a century, Gingold said, the government has squandered and mismanaged the money owed to the Indian landowners, many of whom live in poverty and rely on proceeds from their land to buy food and medicine or heat their homes. Thousands have died without seeing the money they were entitled to, he said.
"We're not just talking about money. We're not just talking about Indian lands," Gingold said. "We're talking about the effect on human beings."
The Interior Department manages 11 million acres of land held in trust for the individual Indian landowners. The lands generate $300 million annually. Millions of additional acres are held in trust for Indian tribes.
Lamberth ruled in 1999 that the government had breached its trust responsibility to manage the funds and ordered the Interior Department to perform a full accounting of the Indian trust funds and to fix its management of the funds.
That is what the plan submitted by the department would do, argued John T. Stemplewicz, the Justice Department attorney representing the government.
He said the Interior Department plan would give Indian landowners an accounting of revenues generated from their land and the payments that have been made. He called the plaintiffs' proposal "a quick fix to a complex problem."
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On the Net:
Interior Department: http://www.doi.gov/