“As those people died, it became more and more fractionalized. They were married and had a wife and kids that inherited land, and their wives and kids inherited land,” Madison explained, “to the point where you would have hundreds or in some cases thousands of people who would have an interest in an undivided piece of land.”

Madison, whose responsibilities for the BIA included using the formula for divvying up royalties and placing them in Individual Indian Money (IIM) accounts, said in one case the computer program wasn’t able to process a share of an oil lease that required 43 decimals, and it had to be calculated manually.

“It’s an amazing title issue of who the heck owns the land,” Madison said. “For example, in the Rocky Mountain Region, there were about 950,000 owner interests. About 25,000 individual landowners who acquired their interests in about 950,000 ways.”

The IIM accounts were a central part of Cobell’s lawsuit. In it, she alleged that the federal government failed to provide a historical accounting of those and other trust assets, and neglected its trust responsibilities for both land and funds owned by tribal members during more than a century of mismanagement.