LAS VEGAS (AP) — An Indian tribe is suing the federal government to block distribution of money that Congress set aside for descendants of those who lived in a vast area including California's Death Valley and most of what is now Nevada.
A lawyer for the Timbisha Shoshone of the Western Shoshone Nation said Friday the tribe never agreed to give up their lands and aren't touching the fund, which has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars.
"The Timbisha want to recover land, and they also want to hold onto that judgment fund," said attorney Robert T. Coulter, executive director of the Indian Law Resource Center in Helena, Mont.
"The question is whether distributing the money could be a pretext for not settling up with them about returning some of the land," he said.
A Department of Justice spokesman, Charles S. Miller, declined comment Friday on the lawsuit, filed June 10 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. He said department lawyers will respond in court.
In a statement, Joe Kennedy, chairman of the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe in Death Valley and a plaintiff in the case, said he hoped the lawsuit would strengthen tribes and "create a framework to help other Indian nations in the future."
The lawsuit names the secretaries of the interior and treasury, and alleges due process and equal protection violations. It seeks an injunction to block disbursement of money set aside by a federal Indian claims commission in 1977 and the Western Shoshone Claims Distribution Act of 2004.
When then-President Bush signed the act in 2004, the fund totaled more than $145 million, including $26 million from the Indian claims commission award and interest.
The Elko Daily Free Press reported that Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs officials told an audience June 19 in Elko that the untapped fund now tops $186 million, and that Western Shoshone people needed to apply by Aug. 2 for a share of the award.
The commission ruling and congressional act aim to compensate the Shoshone for lands acquired during more than 100 years of what the government termed "gradual encroachment" in an area covering 93,750 square miles, or roughly the size of Maine.
Shoshone tribes say the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley gave the tribes, not the federal government, final say over water, mineral and property rights from the east side of the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California across the Great Basin to the Snake River Valley in Idaho.
Federal officials have argued it would be unrealistic to give back lands now dotted with cities, crisscrossed by interstate highways and railroads, and used for mining, ranching and recreation.
Coulter estimated Timbisha Shoshone membership at a few hundred people, and said the tribe is one of nine named in the commission award. He said all would benefit from a court finding that tribe members, not federal lawmakers, should decide how the funds are disbursed.
"Most don't wish to actually have the money distributed to them, because they want to recover some of the lands they were run off of," he said.
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