Cobell helped establish a bank in Browning.

Fueled by a sense of injustice

Cobell said she has drawn strength from many sources during her battle.

"Sometimes when you come back from places (like Washington) you feel like a failure," Cobell said. "But you look toward the mountains and get all energized again and think, 'I'm gonna give 'em hell again. They're not gonna get the best of me.' It kind of pumps you up."

Cobell also gleans power from her conviction that the government must be held accountable for its actions.

As a girl growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Cobell learned the government was supposed to pay out money to the owners of the private lands held in trust for American Indians since 1887 and managed by the Department of the Interior. But she noticed government checks for farming, grazing and timber-cutting on her family's land sometimes arrived, but often didn't.

She recognized many of the problems with the government accounting of the Indian trust accounts when she served as treasurer of the Blackfeet Nation for 13 years.

"Just looking at them with an accountant's view made me know there was something seriously wrong," she said.

Originally, Cobell thought if she could get the attention of the right person in Washington, the errors with the trust accounts would simply be fixed.

"I thought, 'All I have to do is get to the president. All I have to do is just let (the government) know what horrible things have happened.then this will all be over with.'"

But Cobell said it was impossible to get an audience. After her numerous requests for meetings with government officials were rejected, Cobell started to think the government was hiding something.

Convinced the government was acting dishonestly, Cobell said she had no choice but to file the suit.

"I realized that there was something fraudulent that was happening," she said.

"What drives me is justice," Cobell added. "It's like we've gotten so comfortable in our lives, we don't really try to force justice."

Pat Williams, the former U.S. Representative from Montana who witnessed much of Cobell's fight from a front-row seat in Congress, describes Cobell's motivation differently.

"Elouise's determination in this is fueled by her anger toward inequity," Williams said. "That kind of burning frustration can almost turn into a rage for some people. She's been able to funnel that into something productive.

"It's very difficult to find another one-person pursuit of this magnitude that has gotten this close to success," said Williams, who helped secure several Congressional hearings about the case. "There are not many instances in American history where one person has fought city hall as successfully as she has."

The work certainly hasn't been easy; Cobell says she has faced plenty of tough times with the case. What has been especially disheartening to Cobell is to listen to politicians make promises, she said, only to be disappointed, time and again, when they break them.

"Who really cares?" she said. "Who cares about this? I don't know if we ever get to somebody that's real and caring about the lives of Indian people."

But Williams and others involved say it's not that the government is trying to keep money from Indians. Rather, records of marriages, divorces and land sales haven't been recorded well enough on the reservations for the Interior Department to know how much money to pay out to whom.

In fact, individual Indians didn't keep very good records, Williams said. "As I examined the issue, I found more than one culprit."

Cobell contests that assessment.

"I moved away from trusting government," she said. "Congress has been ineffective on this issue. They're like, 'If you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back.' I think the fact that Indian people are not the richest people in the world, and they don't carry a lot of votes, nobody gives a damn."

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