Fighting a flawed royalties system
The largest-ever court challenge on behalf of American Indians reaches a critical point
USNews.com
By: Samantha Levine
January 30, 2002
Elouise Cobell clings to the spirit of her great-great-grandfather, the legendary Mountain Chief of the Blackfeet tribe, who stood his ground against the advancing U.S. Army in the late 1800s. “He fought for the values of his people, his culture, and his land,” Cobell says. “I must have gotten my strength from someone. I probably got it from Mountain Chief.”
Lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana (Ray Ozman–AP) Today, her fight is set not against the vast prairies and craggy mountains of the American West but within the confines of a wood-paneled federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., where she is the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit charging the federal government with mismanaging billions of dollars in royalty payments owed to more than 300,000 American Indians. No one disputes that the royalties system is a mess–and doubtless has cheated generations of Indians–but coming up with a fix seemingly has been beyond the capabilities of the U.S. government.
After five years, Cobell’s lawsuit–the largest-ever court challenge on behalf of American Indians–has reached a critical point: U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth is expected to hold Interior Secretary Gale Norton, like her predecessor Bruce Babbitt and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, in contempt of court for misleading him on reform efforts. But Cobell and her attorneys hope Lamberth will go further and take the unprecedented step of appointing an outside receiver to clean up the mess.
At issue is the Interior Department’s mismanagement of the roughly $500 million that annually passes through the trust fund program, which was established in 1887 to pay the Indians royalties generated from mining, timber, oil, and farming on lands their ancestors were forced to cede to the U.S. government. Over the decades, the record is one of gross negligence by the Interior Department–many account files have been destroyed, and nearly 60 percent of all leases for trust lands were never recorded. The whole system is in such bad shape that the government doesn’t have a full count of Indian beneficiaries or how much money they are owed, although Cobell believes the sum is $10 billion or more. “There has never been any internal control,” says Cobell’s lead attorney, Dennis Gingold, “and no way to determine where the money is held and how it’s distributed. That raises serious fraud issues.”
The royalty checks to individual Indians range from a few hundred dollars up to $50,000 a year, though the amounts often inexplicably vary from month to month. Suspected faults in the Interior Department’s online accounting system were confirmed when a court-appointed hacker broke in–twice–and set up a false account to illegally receive money. “I don’t think anybody, including myself, can say with complete conviction that we’re on the right track,” said Thomas Slonaker, the special trustee for American Indians, testifying before Lamberth in early January. “I don’t have a great deal of confidence in … trust reform generally.”
For his part, Lamberth has been, at times, openly derisive of government officials. The judge was incredulous as one Interior executive tried to claim that a trust account management system–an outgrowth of reforms Lamberth ordered in 1999–was operational. “That’s just a flat untruth, isn’t it?” the judge remarked, adding a few minutes later: “We will take our morning recess before I have a heart attack.”
One step the Interior Department did take–two weeks before Norton’s contempt hearing was scheduled to begin in late November–was to strip responsibility for the trust funds from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and consolidate all trust management duties into a new office. Norton touts the plan as “a new course for positive, productive trust reform.” The House Resources Committee will hold a hearing February 6 to air concerns about the strategy. Cobell will be there, along with other critics who regard this latest idea as a bureaucratic maneuver that will weaken the BIA, the federal government’s major link to Indian tribes.
Partial restoration of past-due trust fund monies would help Indians on impoverished reservations pay for college educations or go into business for themselves, says Cobell. That phase of the trial, in which Lamberth determines how much money the government should pony up, is expected to begin later this year. “People could start building better lifestyles,” she says. “We want to build our foundation and strength in our children. We want to move on from this horrible mismanagement.”
When Cobell feels helpless in the face of the government’s neglect, she calls on the strength of Mountain Chief, the last hereditary Blackfeet chief and one of the last American Indian leaders to sign treaties with the U.S. government. “He was one of the people the government made all these promises to,” Cobell says. And if he saw how those pledges have been trampled, she says, he “would be fighting just as hard as I am.” ##
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