Battle over oil

"All that vegetation is burned now," Johnson said. "Once I went to the spring and there was a film on the top of it. That's how they destroyed our drinking water. All the springs are gone now."

The worth of the land and the impact of pulling oil from the ground here in Indian Country is something the Johnson family knows is difficult to understand. "My ancestors settled here because of the water. There was a flow in the creek and it was just beautiful. Now it is totally destroyed."

There is no fresh water, the natural springs are decimated and the companies have left the trashy remnants of their projects behind. Indeed, down a rutted dirt road, a tangle of rusted pipes lines the roadway.

"These oil companies came and destroyed the most important thing in life, the water and the land," Johnson said. "They just took the oil out of the ground, and they don't come back to help clean up."

Johnson's homesite is thousands of miles and a world away from Washington, D.C., where a battle continues over billions of dollars owed to American Indian landowners like Johnson because of gross government mismanagement of their trust accounts.

One Montana Indian woman has spent a decade trying to rectify the issue in a class action lawsuit named in her honor.

Lawyers for Eloise Cobell, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, say Indian landowners are owed at least $100 billion in royalties tied to farming, grazing, mining, logging and other activities on tribal lands. Johnson is one of about 500,000 plaintiffs.

Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Indian Tribe of Montana, operates a working cattle ranch with her husband and is active in local agriculture and environmental issues.

Ten years ago, she led the lawsuit in an effort to correct a century of problems, and the legal action has dragged on with one delay after another.

"We have to continue fighting for justice and accounting," Cobell said last week from her Montana office. "If we can't win this one, there is something really, really wrong with this country."

Bill McAllister covered Indian issues for the Washington Post for 10 years and now works for Cobell's organization. There are few advocates for American Indians in their concerns over mismanagement by government and oil companies, he said.

"Eloise was one of the first ones to successfully make the government accountable."

During the litigation, lawyers have found corruption, fraud, horrible mismanagement and gaping holes in the accounting system by which Indians were paid for oil on their land, Cobell said.

"What's wrong with this picture when we have someone who is living in a shack and they have four oil wells pumping on their land?" she asked. "They should be living in a mansion."