Federal Class Action Lawsuit Claims Native American Allotment Owners from the Five Tribes Were Denied Oil and Gas Payments 

More than 10,000 Native American restricted-fee landowners in Oklahoma may have been denied oil and gas income or interest payments because the federal government failed to protect their rights, according to a new federal class action lawsuit filed by mctlaw in the United States Court of Federal Claims.

The lawsuit alleges the United States breached its trust duty to tribal citizens of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, and Cherokee Nations who own restricted-fee Indian land allotments governed by the 1947 Stigler Act, as amended in 2018.

“We’ve seen oil and gas companies take what’s ours while the government stands by and does nothing.”

– Stephen Hampton, Enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation

According to the Complaint in Tyson v. United States (Case No. 26-606L), more than 3,000 Indian allotment owners received no payments at all from oil and gas production on their land. These “non-leasing owners” may never have received lease offers or were otherwise left out of the process. The lawsuit argues the federal government had a trust duty to protect all of the owners’ mineral interests but instead allowed the oil companies to take the mineral resources while the non-leasing owners received nothing.

The class action also claims that more than 7,000 Native American landowners from the Five Tribes who receive oil and gas payments under the Stigler Act have been denied basic federal protections required by law. Unlike other Native American mineral owners, they do not have a federal record keeping system to keep track of oil & gas company payments or a mandatory deposit system to earn interest payments. As a result, members of the Five Tribes have no clear way to check the accuracy of their payments or hold oil and gas companies accountable for missing money.

“For years, my family has fought the federal government over the mismanagement of our ancestral land allotments,” said Stephen Hampton, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. “We’ve seen oil and gas companies take what’s ours while the government stands by and does nothing. This isn’t just a Choctaw story.  Whether you are Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), or Seminole, if your family holds restricted land or mineral rights in Oklahoma, you may have been cheated by the same broken system under the Stigler Act.”

“The federal government cannot use the Stigler Act as an excuse for decades of mismanagement against the Five Tribes,” said Jeffrey Nelson, attorney at mctlaw and manager of the firm’s Indian Law Group. “This case is about holding the government accountable and making sure more than 10,000 tribal landowners in eastern Oklahoma receive the protections and payments they are owed under federal law.”