Cobell v. Babbitt: Denver Profile
The Denver Post
By: Kit Miniclier
Denver Post Staff Writer
September 4, 2000
BROWNING, Mont. – Elouise Cobell’s father was beaten by missionary teachers for speaking in his native Blackfeet tongue instead of English in class.
Her siblings were shipped off to a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school for months at a time, to the despair of the rest of the family. Her selection as high school homecoming queen at a public school was vetoed by irate white parents. She was one of three American Indians among 97 white students.
As a college student working at the BIA superintendent’s office in the 1960s, Cobell was angered by the ugly waiting room, bars on the windows, indifference of the staff and lack of drinking water or toilet facilities.
She once found the ‘Indian Agent,’ as he was known, fast asleep at his desk in the middle of the workday although the waiting room was full.
‘Mom told me not to make waves because I at least had a job,’ Cobell recalled.
Elouise Cobell has been making waves ever since – to the growing consternation of U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the BIA and the U.S. Department of Justice.
The latter faces her in court Tuesday.
Cobell, 54, first gained national attention, and notoriety, by becoming the lead plaintiff and fund-raiser for a massive federal court suit filed in 1996 that seeks to reform the entire BIA system, which holds Indian funds in trust.
The two-part suit also seeks an accounting of billions of dollars held in trust by the U.S. government for more than 300,000 individual Indians.
Cobell was honored this summer as a warrior by the Blackfeet Tribe and earned the respect and admiration of both its traditional chief and tribal chairman, Earl Old Person, and David Lester, executive director of the Denver-based Council of Energy Resource Tribes.
Old Person, who has worked with Cobell for decades, says she was honored as a warrior ‘because she doesn’t want to let go,’ once she started questioning the federal government’s handling of Indian Trust Funds. ‘She is very persistent in wanting to get things done.’
Lester agrees.
Cobell’s ability to deal with other tribes, Congress, lawyers and the federal government ‘takes an enormous amount of intelligence and perseverance. If the federal government is good at anything, it is grinding down individuals,’ Lester said.
‘She has a fire, she has the capacity for righteous indignation. There are a lot of heroes the larger world doesn’t see, and she is one of them.’
Although federal officials were reluctant to comment about Cobell because of the court case, Keven Gover, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, recently criticized her efforts on ‘The Diane Rehm Show’ on National Public Radio.
Commenting on Cobell’s suggestion that federal officials be held personally responsible for the failure to account for billions of dollars in missing trust fund money, Gover responded: ‘You make it all the more difficult for us to recruit the kind of people who are going to make it possible to fix the system.
‘And frankly, I think that is why you do it. I think that you turn it personal in order to make the job more difficult because you and your lawyers have staked your reputations on the proposition that Interior cannot fix it.’
In the late ’70s, when Cobell was treasurer of the Blackfeet Tribe, she discovered that the BIA wasn’t taking oil and gas payments from those extracting resources from tribal land although it is required to under federal law.
When she repeatedly insisted on finding out how much money the BIA was holding in trust for the tribe, she was told there was a ‘deficit interest of a couple million dollars,’ but no one could explain what that meant or how it came to be.
‘I was constantly stonewalled. The BIA said I wasn’t smart enough to understand,’ she recalled.
Rather than give up, Cobell began learning about bookkeeping and accounting. She left Montana State University without obtaining a degree, returning to the family ranch to help care for her ailing mother.
While she was tribal treasurer, the only bank on the reservation was ‘closed due to mismanagement,’ so Cobell contacted the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and helped form what became the first tribally owned National Bank, opening the door for a dozen others across Indian country. ‘We had to jump through a lot of hoops and were warned that we would disgrace the tribe if we failed.’ The bank opened in 1987 with assets of $ 1,050,000 and has assets of $ 18 million today.
‘We shattered the old stereotypes that ‘Indians don’t pay their bills and you can’t collect debts on the reservation,” said Cobell, who is chairwoman of the board of directors of the Blackfeet National Bank.
She also is a prime mover in the planned Native American National Bank, which is to have its headquarters in Denver with the support of 11 tribes.
Cobell also has established mini-banks in elementary and middle schools on the reservation to teach concepts of saving and accountability.
One of the rules the student directors of the early mini-banks adopted was ‘parents may not withdraw’ funds from their children’s accounts. ‘We were teaching parents through their kids,’ she said.
Her goal is to sever the economic dependence that she says the federal government has encouraged since the 1880s, when Indians were placed on reservations.
‘They created a refugee camp atmosphere where people would do anything to get a share of the limited offerings of food and shelter.’
Commenting on the huge federal court suit, she said, ‘They didn’t think anyone would get smart enough to stay on them. They’ve always been in denial. They are so dishonest, they’ve been lying for 100 years.’
In December, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth angrily accused the BIA and Interior Department of mismanaging the Indian Trust Fund and vowed to begin supervising the government’s efforts to resolve how much the accounts are worth.
Lamberth also ordered the government to file quarterly reports detailing their efforts to reform the trust fund system and retained court jurisdiction for at least five years. However, in January, the Justice Department appealed Lamberth’s ruling, contending the judge overstepped his power and went too far in retaining jurisdiction.
‘It is unbelievable that the U.S. government is able to get away with this,’ Cobell said during an interview in the tribal bank and during an impromptu roundup of cattle on her ranch.
Cobell is flying to the nation’s capital today and plans to be in court Tuesday during oral arguments before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in the case of Cobell vs. Babbitt.
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