AARON PACKARD
THE FORGOTTEN
AMERICANS
0.0000001 percent.” That fraction
would afford an interest holder,
Swimmer said, about four onethousandths of a penny.
In the end, the lack of records
made it virtually impossible for
government officials to sort out
what it owed and to whom. Even
if it were possible to forensically
create records for every potential
beneficiary, Swimmer said, doing
so would have cost vastly more
than what most account holders
were actually owed.
More than a dozen years of litigation yielded a $3.4 billion settlement that was ultimately upheld
in May of this year. It will provide
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
payments of between $800 and
$1,000 to individual claimants. A
large chunk of the settlement will
also be used to allow the government to buy up some of the hopelessly fractionated land and turn
the consolidated allotments back
over to the tribes.
The federal judge who presided
over the case for 10 years before
being removed by an appeal panel
in 2006, called the Interior Department and its handling of tribal interests “the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down
of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government.”
Despite all of this, the Cheyenne
River Sioux have been remarkably entrepreneurial, establishing a
number of tribally owned ventures
Ronnie
Bowker, a
50-year-old
tribal member
who last
found work
two years
ago installing
fencing
around
cemeteries,
scattered
about the
South Dakota
reservation,
where the
Army Corps
of Engineers
relocated the
tribe’s graves.
He has not
worked since.