The Long and Short of it
Final payments could be made soon in 50-year-old lawsuit By Heidi Walters
heidiwalters@northcoastjournal.com
T
his month, a federal claims court judge approved a settlement agreement that may finally lay to rest the interminably long Jessie Short case, in which thousands of mainly Yurok Tribe members are owed money stemming from a 50-year-old lawsuit. Now, almost all that’s left is the checkcutting — but that will come after attorneys finish sifting through hundreds of bankers’ boxes to verify who has or hasn’t been paid yet, says Yurok Tribal Attorney
John Corbett. Among those still owed are Humboldt County Supervisor Ryan Sundberg and other heirs of folks who died waiting for their checks. The settlement OK’d by the judge on April 3 was between Citibank and the plaintiffs in “Jessie Short, et al, v. The United States,” over a dispute that arose sometime in the last decade (we’ll get to that in a bit). But the case itself was filed in 1963 by Jessie Short, a Yurok Indian, and several thousand other primarily Yurok people who said they
6 North Coast Journal • Thursday, April 11, 2013 • northcoastjournal.com
had been denied their share of revenues from timber sales from the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. At the time, the Yurok people had shared the reservation with the Hupa people — in fact, the reservation was 70 percent Yurok and 30 percent Hupa, according to legal documents in the case. The Hupa lived on what was called the Hoopa Square, the Hupa’s original, 12-square-mile reservation established in 1864, where all the timber was cut. The Yurok primarily lived on a strip of land, a mile wide on each side of the Klamath River, which extended from the square to the ocean and had been added to the Hoopa Valley Reservation in 1891. That strip of land was called “the addition.” Since 1955, the federal government had been making annual timber payments to each person officially enrolled as a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe — an organization that had formed in 1950 and excluded people who lived on the addition. Those addition dwellers were Jessie Short and his fellow plaintiffs. In 1988, under the Hoopa-Yurok Settlement Agreement, the square and the addition were separated legally from each other into two reservations, and the Yurok Tribe formed its own government. It wasn’t until 1993 that the Short lawsuit was finally — sort of finally — settled, says
Corbett, with about 2,000 plaintiffs being awarded damages and interest. A judgment trust was created, and since then checks trickled out to the plaintiffs or their heirs. There have been 42 disbursements of payments so far. Now three more payment distributions are left. About $1.5 million — the 43rd and 44th — will be divvied up among people who have only received one of their two promised checks so far. And $1.9 million— the 45th — will be divided among people who were supposed to receive checks back in 1996 and 1997 but said they never got them. That’s the Citibank dispute — the bank says it distributed the checks. But it couldn’t produce proof of canceled checks, says Corbett. The bank agreed to settle. Because there’s not enough money left in the trust — the 1996 and 1997 funds are gone — the beneficiaries will share about half of what had been owed them, comprised of what’s left in the fund plus $1 million thrown into the pot by Citibank “to cover any alleged wrongdoing in recordkeeping in its actions as trustee,” says Corbett. It’s one of the longest running cases in federal claims court. The plaintiffs have had several different attorneys. Corbett’s only been on the case three years. In the recent legal notice to yet-to-be paid beneficiaries,