PLEASANT POINT, Maine — While the federal government will be paying an array of Native American tribes $3.4 billion as a result of a class-action suit alleging trust fund mismanagement, none of that money is due to the Passamaquoddy or Penobscot nations in Maine.
“This largely involved lands that were taken away decades ago, and it took many years of legal proceedings to come to a settlement,” Passamaquoddy Tribal Governor and Chief Clayton Cleaves said Wednesday. “But the settlement does not affect the 28 tribes east of the Mississippi River.”
The $3.4 billion settlement became final on Nov. 24, following action by the U.S. Supreme Court and expiration of an appeal period. The settlement includes a $1.5 billion fund to be distributed to tribes that made claims of accounting and trust fund and asset mismanagement by the federal government.
The settlement includes a $1.9 billion fund for a land consolidation program that allows for the voluntary sale of individual land interests that were split among owners over successive generations. The lands were divided multiple times, sometimes hundreds or more, diminishing their value and making it difficult to use for tribal agriculture, business development or housing. Up to $60 million of the $1.9 billion fund may be set aside to provide scholarships for American Indians and Alaska Natives to attend college or vocational schools.
“With the settlement now final, we can put years of discord behind us and start a new chapter in our nation-to-nation relationship,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said of the settlement. “[The settlement] marks another historic step forward in President Obama’s agenda of reconciliation and empowerment for Indian Country.”
The story doesn’t tell us how huge the Indian was who made the claims!
Thats not true… of the 41 tribes the Passamaquotty are # 22 on the list. Check your facts….http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/April/12-ag-460.html Department of Justice.
Obama paying out more.
You mean all of us TAXPAYERS paying out more.
Does this mean it’s the END of the payouts and settlements? I’m asking because I truly want to know, not as a slam…. but when do these payouts and settlements end? When do we have a generation of AMERICANS who all are living under the same set of laws?
If, over the last 400 years, the ancestors of all who live in the current USA flew, floated (a good many against their will) rode or walked to get here, that would be a good point. As for their living under the same laws as equal citizens, that would be a long time.
But the ancestors of some Americans – those here on the continent they’d inhabited for thousands of years were set apart from the very beginning and whenever they were seen as obstacles, they were, by one means or another, killed off, driven off or given a ” deal they couldn’t refuse” to move off their lands.
To dress up that tawdry chapter of empire building, treaties (the means by which one nation signs a bargain with another, which meant recognizing them as separate entities) were drawn up to make it all neat and legal. But not all treaties were equal: many were forced upon vanquished people (think the Oklahoma Territory, some were broken nearly as soon as signed (think about the Black Hills, SD), some were not legal treaties in the first place (think Massachusetts and the Maine tribes). From the git-go, the whole business was so fraught with chicanery, double dealing and outright lying, with a dose of genocide thrown in for good measure, there is much left to do before the damages are paid in full, and mismanagement of tribal funds by federal agencies doesn’t make that part of it any easier. Patience, fellow citizens, patience.
And the attorney fees are how much ??
With in a million or two will be close enough.