The early Indian trust system evolved from a series of adjustments to a policy that was gradually abandoned, then finally repealed.

The expectation was that Native Americans would gradually assume fee simple ownership of lands over a period of 25 years, about one generation.

Within a decade of passage of the Dawes Act, the policy began to be adjusted because of government concerns about Indian competency to manage land.

[citation needed]The Meriam Report of that year, which assessed the effects of federal policy toward Native Americans, advocated making Indian landowners undergo a probationary period to "prove" competence.

Probate proceedings commonly dictated that land interests be divided equally among every eligible heir unless otherwise stated in a will.

The allotment policy was formally repealed in 1934, with passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA) during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

In the late 20th century, she became increasingly concerned about evidence that the federal government had mismanaged trust accounts and failed to pay money owed to Native Americans.

[5] The named plaintiffs are Elouise Cobell, Earl Old Person, Mildred Cleghorn, Thomas Maulson, and James Louis Larose.

The plaintiffs alleged that "the government illegally withheld more than $150 billion from Indians whose lands were taken in the 1880s to lease to oil, timber, minerals and other companies for a fee.

The Department of the Interior was represented by presidential appointees, first by Bruce Babbitt, then Gale Norton, Dirk Kempthorne, and finally Ken Salazar.

The case was assigned to Judge Royce Lamberth, who eventually became a harsh critic of the Department of Interior, making a series of sharply worded opinions.

Due to a court order (at the request of the plaintiffs) in the litigation, portions of Interior's website, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), were shut down beginning in December 2001.

The NIGC strongly resisted the imposition of the shut down order and, in doing so, helped establish its status as an independent federal agency.

Cobell is at bottom an equity case, with plaintiffs contending that the Government is in breach of its trust duties to Indian beneficiaries.

While Cobell is technically not a money damages case – claims for money damages against the Government in excess of $10,000 must be brought in the United States Court of Federal Claims – plaintiffs contend that a complete accounting will show the IIM accounts to be misstated on the order of billions of dollars.

His opinions condemned the government and found Interior secretaries Gale Norton and Bruce Babbitt in contempt of court for their handling of the case.

After a particularly harsh opinion in 2005, in which Lamberth lambasted the Interior Department as racist, the government petitioned the Court of Appeals to remove him, saying he was too biased to continue with the case.

The Court wrote that Lamberth believed that racism at Interior continued and is "a dinosaur – the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.

On May 14, 2008, Judge James Robertson issued an order[11] allowing five offices and bureaus of the Department of Interior to be reconnected to the internet.

)[13] Among the provisions of the settlement are for the government to buy land from Indian owners, which has been highly fractionated by being divided among heirs over the generations, and return it to communal tribal ownership.

President Barack Obama signed legislation authorizing government funding of a final version of the $3.4 billion settlement in December 2010, raising the possibility of resolution after fourteen years of litigation.