Hoopa Tribe suit targets Yurok funds

John Driscoll

The Times-Standard

February 2, 2008

The legal battle over millions of dollars being disbursed to the Yurok Tribe has been reborn in a federal claims suit filed against the government Friday in Washington D.C. by the Hoopa Valley Tribe.

The $80 million suit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims comes as trust money is being given to the Yurok Tribe, a long-contested fund that has its origins in the split of the Hoopa Tribe's reservation into two reservations in 1988.

The U.S. Interior Department decided in spring 2007 to give $90 million from timber sales on the Hoopa Reservation to the Yuroks. The Yuroks argued its narrow stretch of largely private land along the Klamath River doesn't have the rich forests of the larger reservation.

After years of litigation by the Yurok Tribe following the Hoopa-Yurok Settlement Act, which split the timber funds, the tribes entered mediation, but couldn't agree on new legislation. In 2007, the Interior Department's stance that the Yurok Tribe forfeited its right to the money because of its suit changed. The Hoopa Tribe isn't entitled to any more than the $34 million it had already received, the Interior decided, and the Yuroks should get the remainder of the funds.

”The Settlement Act gave the Yurok Tribe until November 1993 to drop its litigation and obtain certain benefits; it refused to do so,” said Hoopa Tribal Chairman Clifford Lyle Marshall. “Now that they lost in the courts they have used lobbying tactics at the Department of Interior to reverse the last decade of legal and administrative decisions saying they could not access this money.”

Yurok Tribe Executive Director Ralph Simon said he'd just received a copy of the new lawsuit and could not comment on it.

John Driscoll can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll@times-standard.com.
 

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Source:  http://www.times-standard.com/local/ci_8148734