Trust fund has created a century of problems for Indians
The Associated Press
By: Robert Gehrke
Associated Press Writer
February 24, 2002
WASHINGTON (AP) – Elouise Cobell fields about five calls a day from fellow American Indians who are frustrated, angry and afraid.
They last were paid three months ago for oil and gas drilling on their land. Many rely on that money and blame Cobell for the hang-up – the computer shutdown that stopped the payments is a byproduct of her lawsuit against the federal government.
Cobell explains to them that she went to court to correct a century’s worth of mismanagement of a system that collects and distributes royalties to Indians. Cobell and others who have joined the lawsuit estimate 300,000 Indians lost more than $10 billion over the years.
The government acknowledges mismanaging the trust system but disputes the amount of money lost. Settlement talks have stalled and it could fall to a judge or Congress to decide what the Indians are owed.
“It’s been broken. It has been totally broken for all that time,” said Cobell, a banker in Browning, Mont., and member of the Blackfeet Nation.
“Their mentality was they’re working with savages. We were considered to not be a people having any rights. That mentality carried forward all the way through to today.”
Cobell sued the Interior Department in 1996 and won a judgment in 1999.
“It would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program,” U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth wrote. “It is fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.”
Lamberth ordered the department in 1999 to fix the system and piece together what the Indians are owed.
Despite spending $614 million since 1996 to comply with instructions from both Congress and the court, problems continue: a $40 million accounting system does not work; records remain scattered and incomplete; computer security has put Indian money at risk; and the agency has yet to develope a plan to comply with a court-ordered accounting of the trust funds.
During hearings on Cobell’s lawsuit, Lamberth routinely has criticized government lawyers for the agency’s failure to correct problems. In 1999 he held then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt, fining them $600,000 for concealing the destruction of documents.
He now is considering holding Babbitt’s successor in contempt. Closing arguments in Gale Norton’s contempt trial were held last week, and Lamberth said he had been “duped” by department officials into believing reform was working.
If Norton is found in contempt, it could pave the way for Lamberth to grant Cobell’s request that the department be stripped of its trust responsibilities and an independent professional be appointed to manage it.
The history of the trust fund begins in 1887, when Congress took 90 million acres from Indians and gave them to white homesteaders. The Indians were left with allotments ranging from 40 acres to 320 acres, with the Interior Department assigned to manage grazing, timber and oil and gas activities on the land.
For more than a century, an untold amount of money meant for some of the nation’s poorest residents was lost, stolen or never collected. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, first took notice of the problems in 1928. It took an additional 66 years for Congress to act.
In 1994, the Indian Trust Reform Act was passed. It called for an accounting of all Indian monies and reform of the collection and distribution system.
Cobell, who had heard complaints about the system since childhood and seen no progress despite congressional action, sued two years later.
Norton conceded in court on Feb. 13 that a complete accounting of all the money Indians should have collected would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and may be impossible because documents have been lost or destroyed.
The documents are piled in trailers or warehouses. Some have been shredded, burned, or crumbled from exposure to the elements. Some even are contaminated with deadly hantavirus from rodents scurrying among them.
Other problems have arisen. Last fall, a monitor appointed by Lamberth found that the Interior Department’s lax computer security may have put $500 million that flows through the system annually at risk from hackers.
Lamberth shut down connections to the system, but the Dec. 5 order had the unintended consquence of disconnecting other agency computer systems, including its e-mail and public access to Web sites for national parks, endangered species and other entities.
The computer shutdown also has left the agency unable to collect and distribute royalty checks, creating a profound hardship for Indians who rely on the money.
“Unfortunately many individuals, their credit is ruined basically. I mean, after 60 days, the debt collectors start coming; after 90 days, the lawyers start coming,” said Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians.
Department officials began mailing checks several weeks ago, but many Indians have yet to get them. Hall said last week neither he nor any of the 6,000 accountholders on his reservation had received payments.
Despite all this, Norton told Lamberth she believes progress has been made since she took office last year.
Still, her reform efforts have brought problems. She wants to shift oversight to a new agency called the Bureau of Indian Trust Assets Management, but Indian leaders were upset because they were not consulted beforehand. Some in Congress are skeptical that creating another agency is the right way to go.
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