US settles massive lawsuit with Native Americans

Washington - The United States on Tuesday agreed to pay 3.4 billion dollars to settle a long-running lawsuit brought by some 300,000 Native Americans who claimed they had been cheated out of land revenue for more than a century. The class-action lawsuit was first brought 13 years ago and has been the subject of 22 judicial decisions. Many past attempts to settle the claims have failed.

"We are here to right a past wrong," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at a press conference in Washington. The settlement still has to be approved by Congress and in court.

The dispute stems from an 1887 agreement that divided up much of the Indian tribal lands into small parcels that were individually owned and held in "trust" by the US government.

Native Americans claim the mismanagement of those trust accounts robbed them of billions of dollars in revenue that the government collected from leasing the parcels of land.

Under the settlement, the government agreed to pay 1.4 billion dollars directly to the 300,000 Native Americans tribal members. Another 2 billion dollars was set aside for the government to buy some of the land from its owners.