The 11-year legal battle pitting a half-million Indian landowners against the U.S. government has closed another chapter, but it isn't over yet.

A 10-day trial wrapped up Thursday in the Cobell vs. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

Lawyers on both sides have 36 days to present written closing arguments to the newly appointed federal judge overseeing the case.

Elouise Cobell, a community development expert in Browning, Mont., filed the suit in 1996. She attended the proceedings this past week where federal attorneys defended the government's handling of billions of dollars that never made it into the accounts of individual landowners who earned money from natural resources on 11 million acres of tribal land.

Witnesses and whistleblowers stepped forward to testify that Indian landowners are still losers in a land management game where the U.S. Interior Department has been trying to explain, and fix, an accounting system operated with few checks and balances.

"The historical accounting can be and is being accomplished, and it is being accomplished in a structured and orderly manner," attorney Robert Kirschman Jr. told U.S. District Judge James Robertson.

After Cobell filed suit in 1996, a federal judge - who was removed from the case for scathing remarks against the Interior Department - ordered an historical accounting dating back to 1887.

Meanwhile, estimates of mismanaged money range from $7 billion to upward of $100 billion.

"We're not talking peanuts," said Cobell attorney Dennis Gingold. One of the largest timber deal contracts in U.S. history was executed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, which involved Indian timber lands.

As lawyers argued for and against the accounting system that has bilked Indians out of billions of dollars, testimony also revealed that the Interior Department has been charging landowners for its accounting services.

Interior Department Deputy Secretary James Cason testified in court that the department has been examining its accounting methods. The department's work is on track for its historical accounting, a date Interior officials pin at 1994, instead of the court-ordered 1887.

"We have not found any instances of systemic accounting error or systemic fraud," said Cason. "We have covered a fair amount of territory so far, and we think that the job, as we've defined it, is a doable job," Cason said.

He said the department could finish its accounting sooner if Congress provided adequate funding. But that's not the case, he said.

But Cobell attorneys argue a proper accounting is long overdue.

"The systems that house our clients' trust assets and money have been without control," said Gingold. "There's no management. There was not even an audit of the trust for the first 100 years of the trust."

Sharon Red Thunder, a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee for nearly four decades, testified that graft within the present-day system goes unchecked. She retired from the BIA in 2003.

(Reporter Jodi Rave can be reached at 800-366-7186 or at jodi.rave@lee.net.)