Attorney: Melody
McCoy, Don
Wharton, David
Gover, Dawn
Baum, Mark
Tilden, John
Echohawk, Walter Echo-Hawk
Case Update
NARF represents twelve named plaintiffs - - the Nez Perce Tribe; the Mescalero Apache Tribe; the Tule River Indian Tribe; the Hualapai Tribe; the Yakama Nation; the Klamath Tribes; the Yurok Tribe; the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribe; the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma; the Sac and Fox Nation; and, the Santee Sioux Tribe of Nebraska; and the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska in a new action filed December 28, 2006 in the federal district court for the District of Columbia. The action seeks full and complete accountings of tribal trust funds, which never have been provided by the federal government which is the trustee for the funds.
The action also seeks a court order declaring that the Arthur Andersen reports prepared under a reconciliation project contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and provided to tribes in the 1990s are not full and complete trust fund accountings. The action was filed as a class action to protect the rights of all tribes that do not file their own such actions and that choose to remain in the class. About seventy (70) tribes filed their own actions, but as many as two hundred and twenty (220) may be in the class if certification is granted. The action had to be filed by December 31, 2006 under an act of Congress that gave tribes that date as a deadline by which to challenge the accounting adequacy of the Arthur Andersen reports.
On July 2, 2007, the Court stayed this action and the thirty-six (36) other tribal trust cases before it pending resolution of an argument by the government that these cases are not properly before the Court because they should be remanded to the U.S. Department of the Interior under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to allow the agency an opportunity to complete the required accountings. Briefing on the government's APA remand motion will continue through November, 2007.
Case web site
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