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Keith Harper recounts Cobell trust litigation, calling it 'a trust is a trust'
Summary
Attorney Keith Harper told a Missoula gathering that the Cobell litigation, filed in June 1996, forced the federal government to provide trust accounting and produced a roughly $3.4 billion settlement and a $60 million scholarship fund; he described strategy, court fights and continuing limitations for beneficiaries.
Keith Harper, who served as lead counsel in the Cobell litigation and later as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, told attendees at an Eloise Cobell Day event in Missoula that the lawsuit’s central strategy was simple: treat Indian trust accounts like any other fiduciary trust. "A trust is a trust," Harper said, summarizing the legal narrative that steered the case.
Harper traced the problem to policies beginning with the 1887 General Allotment Act and a long history of mismanagement, collusion and documented federal failures. He said early congressional reports — including a 1915 report cited in his remarks — described fraud and institutional incompetence that persisted for decades and left millions of acres and thousands of individual Indian Money (IIM) accounts without reliable accounting.
The litigation, Harper said, began…
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