Elouise P. Cobell

Buy-back of lands has continued, restoring acreage to the tribes. As of November 2016, $40 million had been contributed to the scholarship fund by the government, from its purchase of lands. It has paid $900 million to buy back the equivalent of 1.7 million acres in fractionated land interests, restoring the land base of reservations to tribal control.

In November 2016, Cobell's work on behalf of Native Americans was honored by the award of a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama; her son Turk Cobell accepted the award on her behalf.

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. It was screened at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival in October 2016.

Cobell died at the age of 65 on October 16, 2011, in Great Falls, Montana, after a brief battle with cancer.

As of July 2011, notices were being sent to the hundreds of thousands of individual Native Americans affected. Most received settlements of about $1800, but some may receive more. As of November 2016, the government had spent about $900 million to buy back the equivalent of 1.7 million acres in fractionated land interests, restoring the land base of reservations to tribal control. In addition, $40 million has been added so far to the Cobell Scholarship Fund.

In 2010, the government approved a $3.4 billion settlement for the trust case. Major portions of the settlement were to partially compensate individual account holders, and to buy back fractionated land interests, and restore land to reservations. It also provided for a $60 million scholarship fund for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, named the Cobell Education Scholarship Fund in her honor. The settlement is the largest ever in a class action against the federal government.

In 2009, when settlement was reached with the government, Cobell said:

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." The Lannan Foundation, which "provides financial assistance to tribes and nonprofits that serve Native American communities", has said that it gave more than $7 million in grants to the Blackfeet fund from 1998 to 2009 to support the litigation, in the expectation that the grants would be repaid in full after settlement. 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.

She founded the Blackfeet National Bank, the first national bank located on an Indian reservation and owned by a Native American tribe. In 1997, Cobell won a MacArthur genius award for her work on the bank and Native financial literacy. 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. (See below: Challenging federal management of trust funds)

The class-action suit was filed in October 1996 and is known as Cobell v. Salazar (Salazar was Secretary of Interior when the case was settled.) A negotiated settlement was reached in 2009 by the administration of President Barack Obama. In 2010 Congress passed a bill to appropriate $3.4 billion for settlement of the longstanding class action suit. It had three parts: payment of individual plaintiffs included in the class action; a fund of $1.9 billion to buy back fractionated land interest in voluntary sales, and restore land to reservations, strengthening their land base. It also provided for a $60 million scholarship fund to be funded from the sales, named the Cobell Education Scholarship Fund in her honor.

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.

Elouise Pepion Cobell, also known as Yellow Bird Woman (November 5, 1945 – October 16, 2011) (Niitsítapi Blackfoot Confederacy), was a tribal elder and activist, banker, rancher, and lead plaintiff in the groundbreaking class-action suit Cobell v. Salazar (2009). This challenged the United States' mismanagement of trust funds belonging to more than 500,000 individual Native Americans. She pursued the suit from 1996, challenging the government to account for fees from resource leases.

Elouise Pépion was born in 1945 on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, the middle of nine children of Polite and Catherine Pépion. She was a great-granddaughter of Mountain Chief, one of the legendary leaders of the Blackfeet Nation. She grew up on her parents' cattle ranch on the reservation. Like many reservation families, they did not have electricity or running water. Pépion attended a one-room schoolhouse until high school. She graduated from Great Falls Business College and attended Montana State University. She had to leave before graduation to care for her mother, who was dying of cancer.