The Navajo Nation is praising President Obama for giving the United States' highest civilian award to a leader who fought on behalf of half a million American Indians for greater royalties from the federal government.
Elouise Cobell of Montana’s Blackfeet Tribe, who died in 2011 at the age of 65, is one of 21 people scheduled to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday. While serving as her tribe’s treasurer, Cobell became convinced Indians were not receiving full payment from the Interior Department, which collected fees for energy, mineral, and timber extraction on Indian trust lands. She filed a class-action lawsuit in 1996 that was finally settled by the Obama administration for $3.4 billion. In a release, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said Cobell’s work “was exemplary in pushing the federal government toward acknowledging and reconciling their profound mismanagement of money that should have gone to tribes or trust beneficiaries.”
