GOP Aides Only Latest To Bilk Millions From Native Americans

Indians estimate that they are owed about $137 billion from oil, timber, grazing and other leases on their lands.

This month, the Indians and the government agreed to the selection of two mediators in the case after members of Congress urged the parties to resolve the matter.

The conflict goes back to the Dawes Act of 1887, which initiated a practice of giving land allotments to individual Indians as their reservations were being broken up for sale. While the Indians owned the allotments and sometimes lived on them, the government retained title and generated income for the Indians from use of the land.

The proceeds were put into a trust to be paid out to Indian holders of individual trust accounts, whose number grew as the allotments were passed down through generations. The Interior Department was to manage the fund.

"The issue we're dealing with," Ms. Cobell said, "is the fact that we don't know how much land we own, we don't know what the resources are on that land because the government has gotten away with not reporting to the trust beneficiaries."

The litigation, which has moved along in fits and starts, has revealed that the department lost track of beneficiaries and that many of the account records were in a state of disrepair — decayed or lost.

Beyond the records, Ms. Cobell and other Indians say the government has stolen, lost or misallocated tens of billions of dollars. (The government pays out more than $500 million a year from the fund, which exceeds $3 billion.)

A court-appointed investigator who sought for about three years to determine the finances of the trust fund resigned recently because of what he said was the government's persistent effort to impede his work.

The judge handling the case, Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court here, has sided with the Indians, calling the Interior Department's handling of the fund "the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century." Judge Lamberth has held Ms. Norton and her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, in contempt for ignoring his orders to account for the fund, although an appeals court panel last year overturned the contempt order for Ms. Norton.