Sometimes reform just not enough
The Spokesman-Review
By: Jim Camden
Staff Writer
March 27, 2002
Elouise Cobell isn’t looking for mere reform. She’s looking for full-blown change. She wants to change an Indian Trust fund that she and others say has been mismanaged for more than a century. And she wants law schools to change the way they teach ethics, so their graduates will be strong enough to fight the government abuses like those that plagued the trust fund. “You have to start somewhere with this initiative to change the government,” said Cobell, the keynote speaker at a symposium Tuesday at Gonzaga Law School.
Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, started six years ago as the lead plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit that pits nearly 500,000 Native Americans against the federal government. Since she was a child, Cobell said, she heard stories of relatives and neighbors who struggled to get money from the trust fund.
The Individual Indian Trust Fund was set up in the 1880s as reservations were opened up to allow non-Indians access to timber, minerals, oil, grazing or things on the land. The federal government held the land in trust and was supposed to collect fees, royalties and other income for the Indians who own the land.
But Indians have to apply to the government to get money from the trust funds. Cobell recalled an aunt once needed money to take her uncle to the doctor, and rode a horse and buggy some 30 miles through the snow to get to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office. The aunt was told the office wasn’t giving out money that day or the next day, but to go home and wait for the check — which arrived six months later.
“Those stories keep you going,” Cobell said. “I don’t ever want that to happen again.” In 1996, with the help of some charitable organizations, Cobell and other Native Americans raised enough money to file suit against the Department of Interior, which oversees the trust. They demanded the government account for billions of dollars and change the system.
Dennis Gingold, the lead attorney for Indians in the case, told students and tribal members attending the symposium that records for the trust are in total disarray. Some paper records were kept in boxes and stored in barns, then discarded when the barn got full, he said.
Some property that’s held in trust hasn’t been surveyed for decades, and some leases weren’t even recorded, he said. “It’s been used as a piggy bank for the U.S. government,” Gingold said of the trust fund. The federal government has lost one contempt hearing for failing to comply with court orders to produce records and lying about it. It may soon lose a second, Gingold said. It has spent hundreds of millions trying to reform the trust, and still doesn’t have a system that is secure from computer hackers.
The Indians are asking that a federal judge take the unprecedented move of putting the trust in receivership — take it away from the Interior Department and put it under control of the court. If that happens, Cobell believes the federal government may offer a settlement. After that, it might take five or six years to straighten everything out, “but at least we’re fixing it,” she said.
The landmark case has brought offers for Cobell, a resident of Browning, Mont., to speak around the country, including at law schools. But Gonzaga was the first to schedule a full symposium with panel discussions on different aspects of the case. “I want to do as many law school invitations as I get,” she said. Cobell knows that many law students will go to work for the government after graduation. She wants them to have the ethical background to fight improper activity from the beginning of their careers.
“They need to know when is the time for attorneys to just say, `No,”‘ she said. She also hopes to interest Gonzaga and other law schools in internships that will send their students to Indian country, to help reservation residents understand their rights. Georgetown University, which is pulling back on international internships in the wake of Sept. 11, is lining up students for work on reservations, she said. Many Native Americans have been too passive in dealing with the federal government, Cobell said. “They have rights and have to get more actively involved in their assets, to know what they own and what they can expect.”
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