Judge Rules Indians Owed $455 Million A federal judge ruled yesterday that Native Americans suing the U.S. government over mismanaged royalties collected from gas and oil companies that drilled on their lands are entitled to $455 million -- far less than the $47 billion they were seeking. The ruling is the latest -- and probably not the last -- chapter in a 12-year legal dispute that U.S. District Judge James Robertson compared to Charles Dickens's legal tome, "Bleak House," in a January opinion. Robertson's ruling yesterday focused on how much royalty money was withheld from trust accounts managed by the Department of Interior on behalf of half a million Native Americans and their heirs over the past 121 years. The Native Americans' attorneys said that the government had badly mismanaged the trusts and that there was a shortfall of nearly $4 billion. At a June bench trial, the lawyers said the Native Americans were owed $47 billion, a figure that represented the "benefit" the government received from improperly using the missing money. That figure was lower than the $58 billion estimate given before the trial started. However, Robertson found their arguments unconvincing. The Native Americans' calculations suffer "from numerous methodological flaws that were illuminated by the government's presentation and, in many instances, are obvious to anyone having basic familiarity with the case," the judge wrote....