In 1996, Blackfeet banker Elouise Cobell, determined to find out why the system was so inefficient, filed the class-action lawsuit against the Interior Department. The plaintiffs claim they are owed as much as $137 billion.

But unless a historical accounting is done, there is no way of knowing if every Indian — or any Indian — received what was due.

In the 1950s, oil was discovered here in remote Montezuma Creek and nearby Aneth, two communities that are part of the Navajo Nation — one of the most mineral-rich tribes in the country. The reservation covers 18 million acres through Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

With more than 180,000 members, it is the country's largest Indian tribe but also one of the poorest. More than 40 percent of its people live in poverty. The median household income is just $20,000, less than half the national median.

'Hopeless feeling'

A few dusty roads off the main highway, the one-room, stone house where she grew up still stands about a mile and a half away from her home today. Oil pipelines run across land she owns with five siblings.

Johnson gestures to her mother's grave in the distance. She remembers the day a company drilling for oil hit her mother's casket.

The oil and gas lease for her property was signed in 1953, and Johnson and her family trusted the Bureau of Indian Affairs to pay them for the production on their land. Like many Indians, Johnson has no other income.

Sometimes, the checks would be for just pennies. Her November check was for $5.30. Once, she was so fed up with her sporadic checks that she marched out to an oil well and turned it off.

Over the years, Johnson and her five siblings have received about $50,000 each. But they believe they are due much more, perhaps as much as $1 million apiece.

"It's difficult for people like Mary to look out their window and see this kind of production, and they go to the post office and see nothing in payments coming to them," said Kevin Gambrell, former director of the Federal Indian Minerals Office in Farmington, N.M. "It gives them a real hopeless feeling."

But whether Johnson is really due more money is virtually impossible to know because a century of records are incomplete.

'Putting it off'