[7] After her mother's death, Elouise moved to Seattle, where she met and married Alvin Cobell, another Blackfeet living in Washington at the time.
After returning to the reservation to help her father with the family ranch, Elouise Cobell became treasurer for the Blackfeet Nation.
[7] She donated part of that money to support her class-action suit against the federal government because of its mismanagement of trust funds and leasing fees, which she had filed in 1996.
[6] Her professional, civic experience and expertise included serving as Co-Chair of Native American Bank, NA.
[1][8] Cobell was the former president of Montana's Elvis Presley fan club, but left these activities to focus on her landmark lawsuit.
A photo of Cobell and her family at Graceland flashed occasionally in the rotating display on a big screen overhead.
The buffet featured a giant cake, decorated with the words, "In Loving Memory of Elouise Cobell", and a picture of Elvis.
Along with the Intertribal Monitoring Association (on which she served as President), Cobell attempted to seek reform in Washington, DC, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s without success.
At that point she asked Dennis Gingold (renowned banking lawyer, based in Washington, DC), Thaddeus Holt, and the Native American Rights Fund (including John Echohawk and Keith Harper) to bring a class-action suit against the Department of Interior in order to force reform and an accounting of the trust funds belonging to individual Indians.
They set up the Blackfeet Reservation Development Fund, "a nonprofit created to bring claims against the United States for mismanaging lands held in trust for Native Americans.
In 2013, in a suit filed in Washington, the Lannan Foundation said it was still seeking payment from Gingold, the lead counsel in the case, and had received only $1.8 million.
But we are compelled to settle now by the sobering realization that our class grows smaller each year, each month and every day, as our elders die and are forever prevented from receiving their just compensation.Producer and director Melinda Janko made 100 Years: One Woman's Fight for Justice (2016), a 75-minute documentary on the life and achievements of Cobell.