That’s the news this morning from the Washington Post, which looks at a 120 year-old problem  involving Native American lands. Del Quentin Wilbur lays out the ongoing lawsuit by hundreds of thousands of Native Americans seeking $58 billion from the Dept. of Interior.

The dispute concerns what royalties are owed to Native Americans for leases issued by the Dept. of Interior to oil and gas companies for native-owned land. The Dept. of Interior says they owe much less than $58 billion, but their auditing of the leases is almost nonexistent.

The case has been winding its way through federal courts for 12 years. An appeals court kicked the first federal judge off the case for saying that the Interior Dept. is the “morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperial government.”

– Matt Blake

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