Native Americans win $3.7b settlement

The Obama Administration has announced it will pay American Indians $US3.4 billion ($3.7 billion) to settle a class action that argued that US federal governments cheated tribes for more than a century out of royalties for oil, mineral and other leases. The settlement ends a 13-year legal battle that led to 3600 filings, millions of pages of discovery documents and 11 appellate decisions. It is the largest settlement American Indians have ever received from a US government, eclipsing the sum of all previous settlements, according to the plaintiff's lawyers. The dispute stemmed from a 19th century decision to grant parcels of land to individual American Indians and place the properties in trust accounts. For more than a century, the plaintiffs contended, the account holders were cheated out of their share of revenues the federal government collects for leasing that land...read more