Elouise Cobell is the lead plaintiff in Cobell v Norton which is the lawsuit filed against the treasury department and the federal governmentregarding the gross mishandling of the trust accounts, which they were in charge of. The suit was filed in June of 1996, in the U.S. District Court, in a bold attempt to make the government and treasury department to account for the all money that belong to the Native Indians and their descendants, that had been sitting in a trust account since the last century. Details of the litigation tell is that the policy in the United States in 1870 was to find Indians living on reservations, since the government was desperate for land this was the main cause for most of the land having been broken up into parcels, at this point the government offered ownership of the acre parcels of land to individual Indians. The federal government assumed a role of trustee, and had legal ownership of the acre parcels, and the control over the Individual Indian Trust that had been established. It was the government’s responsibility since they had total control over the parceled land to manage the trust’s lands. The suits contents that the federal government has grossly mishandled these funds; since the government has no accurate records to what amounts are owed to the families.

There was legislation passed in 1994 by Congress that admitted what the monetary duties that the Secretaries of the Departments of the Treasury had, and what was owed to the descendants of the Individual Indian Money (“IIM”) accounts. I believe that these are linked because once the legislation was passed it allowed for anyone who wanted to; had the right to ask to see the money trail, and question anything that they thought was in