In 1996, Keith Harper began to work on a lawsuit against the US government. It was a class action suit filed by Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Confederacy in Montana. She claimed something that many people had long known to be true, but that had never been directly addressed in the US legal system: the US government owed many, many Native Americans a lot of money.

Keith Harper - who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation - became a lead prosecutor for the plaintiff class, which grew to include hundreds of thousands of Native Americans. The case, known as Cobell v. Salazar, became one of the largest class action suits in US history. It awarded a total of $3.4 billion dollars to Native Americans across the country. 

But as Keith explained to Sarah on this week’s episode of Trending Globally: 

“It was an important milestone. But we should recognize, it was a mere measure of justice, and not full justice.”

Keith would go on to serve as the US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council under President Obama starting in 2014. He was the first Native American ever to be appointed to an ambassadorship. 

This year he’s serving as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute, and on this episode we explore both the groundbreaking case Cobell v. Salazar and what Keith sees as the relationship between Native American rights, international law, and human rights more broadly. 

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