Another Broken Trust
After the government’s bungling of a land allotment program for hundreds of thousands of Indians, all eyes are now on a federal judge trying to sort out the mess.
ABA Journal
By: John Gibeaut
Reporter for the ABA Journal
September 1, 1999
The case was big, really big, and Kevin Gover knew it. After all, 300,000-plus American Indians just don’t come waltzing into court every day alleging that the federal government has lost as much as $ 10 billion held in trust for them.
But it wasn’t until after Gover became the assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior in late 1997 that he realized just how badly government lawyers had botched the most significant Indian case ever brought, which also is one of the largest law-suits ever filed against the United States.
Gover really started to feel queasy after he learned that government lawyers had agreed to give the plaintiffs thousands of records relating to Indian trust accounts dating as far back as 1887. After the lawyers had stalled on producing the records for more than two years, a federal judge was about to hold defendants Gover, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and then-Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin in contempt last winter.
As a lawyer and an Indian, Gover knew it would be impossible for the government to produce the records, even though they only involved the five named plaintiffs in the massive class action.
Some of the documents had been lost or destroyed by fire or flooding over the years. Some of the remaining documents had been stored in wooden sheds, exposed to the weather, and they were strewn loosely among discarded tires and other rubbish. Many documents never had been cataloged.
The government had fallen asleep at the wheel, and the case was spinning out of control.
“As I got reports about what was going on out there, I got more and more uncomfortable,” Gover recalls. “I looked at the [production] order, and I just said, ‘Holy cow.'”
The mammoth case has been hanging around for three years since it was filed in 1996.
Despite nearly unfathomable complexity, Interior Department officials admit the case either could have been settled or dismissed long ago had it not been for the government’s initial failure to take it seriously. The Justice Department only assigned two lawyers to it at first.
Compounding the problem, Justice Department law-yers and their superiors got in over their heads when they started monkeying around with unfamiliar Indian law. In the meantime, Justice initially ignored routine but key legal strategies that could have pressured the tenacious plaintiffs into resolving the case sooner. Worsening the government’s predicament even further was lax oversight of the litigation by the client agencies.
“They misunderstood the breadth of the issues and the political environment that surrounds them,” says Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe of Oklahoma. “It requires so much specialized knowledge that the attorneys on the case didn’t have. But they also needed a client to fill them in, and that wasn’t done.”
The History
Roots Run Deep
In 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce finally laid down his arms. Just one year after the Sioux and Cheyenne victory over Custer at Little Bighorn, he eloquently surrendered in what has become one of the most widely quoted Indian speeches of all time:
“Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad: From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
A few years later, Chief Joseph said he never would have surrendered had he known how the whites would treat his people. Today some Indians say he would rise from the dead if he saw the way the government handled a land allotment program that was supposed to make individual Indians break away from their ancient tribal culture.
Elouise C. Cobell is one of those Indians. The 53-year-old banker from the Blackfeet reservation in northwest Montana is the lead plaintiff in the trust case.
She can’t forget her parents’ constant complaining about the government owing them money from income produced by land held in trust for them and hundreds of thousands of other Indians.
“Somebody had to stand up and make them do the right thing,” says Cobell, a founder of the nation’s first Indian-owned bank. “Somebody has to fix this. I don’t want my grandchildren to have to deal with this.”
Tearing Up the Tribal System
The problems of Cobell and other Indians date to the 1887 General Allotment Act. The act was supposed to break up the tribal system and make Indians financially independent by doling out parcels of land, usually in 80- to 160-acre chunks, and allowing them to reap the rewards from leases for oil and gas wells, logging and other activities. Today the allotments total about 11 million acres, nearly all scattered on or near reservations west of the Mississippi River.
But few Indians spoke English in 1887 or were educated enough to manage their land. So the government stepped in as trustee and was supposed to pay them income the land produced.
The system quickly became a nightmare that continues today.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs and other agencies in the Interior Department administer the trusts, and accounts maintained by the Treasury hold up to $ 500 million at a time from the lease payments. But a Byzantine record-keeping system makes it impossible for the government to keep track of what it owes each Indian, meaning billions may have disappeared over the last century.
To make matters worse, many Indians just don’t understand the situation.
Consider 78-year-old Jim Little Bull and his wife, Mabel, 74, who’ve lived all their lives on the Blackfeet reservation. Little Bull tries to keep track of an allotment owned by his 98-year-old mother, Mary, who lives in a nursing home.
Instead of government royalty checks, he keeps getting water bills for irrigation that’s supposedly going on at the property. One bill from May claims his mother owes $ 1,583.
Little Bull says he doesn’t know where the land is. But he learned one thing when he went to the local Indian agency office and asked about the charges.
“The land wasn’t leased. It’s not farming land, and there’s no water on it,” Little Bull says.
Besides the slipshod record-keeping, thousands of government checks are returned to the Treasury because the intended recipients either have died or can’t be found. A glacial probate system takes so long to wrap up deceased Indians’ financial affairs that the ownership of allotments splinters into minute portions, sometimes leaving hundreds of heirs with an interest in a single parcel. Cobell says it took 14 years for her father’s estate to go through probate.
“These are stories you hear over and over again on every Indian reservation,” Cobell says.
Gover says 60 percent of accounts in question are worth less than $ 25 a year. But determining how much, if any, money is missing has proved elusive, if not impossible.
The Indians say the case is worth $ 10 billion or more. The judge presiding over the litigation has valued it at $ 4 billion. In 1989 the accounting/consulting firm Arthur Andersen could only partially reconcile tribal trust accounts not at issue in the current litigation, and determined that it would cost up to $ 280 million to figure out how much the individual accounts were supposed to hold. Congress abandoned the reconciliation attempt after that.
“There’s not a person among us who has a fact-based idea about what the government’s liability really is,” Gover acknowledges.
Even the size of the plaintiff class remains in dispute. The government estimates it at 300,000 members, while the Indians say the number is closer to 500,000.
The Indian Affairs Bureau, today part of the Interior Department, and its predecessor agencies have not escaped the attention of Congress and other authorities since the early 19th century, when the government’s guardian-ward relationship with the Indians began.
In 1828, treaty negotiator Henry Rows Schoolcraft reported that the government’s care of Indian money was so slovenly that “one would think that the appropriations had been handled with a pitchfork.” A 1992 House report titled Misplaced Trust complained that officials at the Indian Affairs Bureau “have utterly failed to grasp the human impact of its management of the Indian trust fund.”
The Lawsuit
‘The Case From Hell’
After decades of frustrated attempts at trying to find out what they were owed, the Indians filed the lawsuit on June 10, 1996.
Plaintiffs lawyers say the government’s mismanagement of the trusts suggests it really hasn’t changed all that much since the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, S.D., placed a bloody coda on the nomadic Indian way of life and ushered in an era of government stewardship of Indian lands.
Equally sloppy lawyering in the trust case over the last three years hasn’t done much to help the government redeem itself in the Indians’ eyes. Interior Solicitor John D. Leshy, who has been on the case since the beginning, concedes that his office shares part of the blame with the Justice and Treasury departments.
“It has been an ugly case all the way around,” Leshy says. “It’s the case from hell. What can I say?”
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., has had plenty to say. A former government lawyer himself, Lamberth has become known during his 12 years on the bench as one of the toughest judges around when it comes to public officials. He was more than a little annoyed in February when he held Gover, Babbitt and Rubin in contempt for the bungled document production.
“The federal government here did not just stub its toe,” Lamberth wrote. “It abused the rights of these plaintiffs to obtain these trust documents, and it engaged in a shocking pattern of deception of the court. I have never seen more egregious conduct by the federal government.” Cobell v. Babbitt, 37 F. Supp. 2d 6 (D.D.C.).
The case also saw the government mount a schizophrenic defense, first trying to bargain with the Indians, then appearing to defy gravity with arguments that it somehow shouldn’t have to pay for the 100-year-old trust mess.
Indecision from their superiors left the lone pair of Justice Department lawyers initially assigned to the matter feeling hogtied in the courtroom. “They didn’t know whether to litigate or capitulate,” says one source familiar with the case.
That was just the warmup.
The case grew curiouser and curiouser by the time it went to trial on the merits in Lamberth’s courtroom on June 10 — the third anniversary of its filing.
Before opening statements, the government defendants admitted in court what everyone had known all along: The trust system was in shambles and the government was unable to account for what it owed the Indian beneficiaries.
“They threw the case,” lead plaintiffs lawyer Dennis M. Gingold of Washington said later.
Gingold wasn’t far off. Although it probably sent shudders down the spines of some Justice Department lawyers defending the government, the “guilty plea” was their only choice at that point.
“That was initiated from Interior,” Gover says. “There was no case to be made that the system is working properly. We were not going to get up on the stand and lie to the judge.”
Babbitt eventually admitted that the government had breached its fiduciary duty to the Indians, and that he shouldered a large part of the blame. And, acknowledging that he was “skating on thin ice in the view of many in my department and many in the Justice Department,” Babbitt told Lamberth he would welcome limited court oversight of the trust program.
The object, Gover says, was to force reform of a system that has been the target of one scathing investigation and one steamed politician after another but nevertheless has rolled along for decades in bureaucratic inertia. If that meant an adverse court ruling, so be it.
“We just don’t care about winning or losing the case,” Gover says. “The definition of victory is not to get them thrown out of court or win on appeal. It’s to fix the system.”
Setting Things Right
The first phase of the trial on the merits ended in late July, with the Indians alleging that the government breached its duty to them as trustee and demanding an overhaul of the system through a court-appointed special master separate from the oft-criticized Indian Affairs Bureau.
Besides representing the defendant cabinet secretaries, Justice is working with another special master, trying to straighten out the document production that resulted in the contempt citations.
In the second phase, expected to begin this fall or winter, the Indians are asking for a reconciliation of their accounts, which could cost more than the Interior Department’s entire yearly budget of $ 8 billion.
The case was fraught with potential political perils from the beginning.
Interior, with no money and no legal defense, needed a court order to fix the system and to force the issue with a skeptical Congress beyond the end of President Clinton’s term in January 2001.
“The current environment for reform in the Congress could change and the administration could change, but there’s one player who won’t change, and that’s Judge Lamberth,” Gover says. “It helps us in dealing with Congress to say we’re under a court order.”
Moreover, the Indian Affairs Bureau occupies a unique place vis-a-vis the plaintiffs. While Justice must defend the interests of the United States, the trust beneficiaries are the bureau’s clients, and it must defend their interests. “These people are not our enemies,” Gover says.
Justice Wakes Up in a Jam
Justice, on the other hand, faced two daunting prospects. At one extreme lay the possibility of opening the courthouse doors to other potentially massive plaintiff classes with gripes about being shortchanged. At the other lurked the risk of playing legal hardball in public with hundreds of thousands of Indians — sympathetic plaintiffs with a 500-year history of being stepped on, first by European conquerors and later by the U.S. government.
Lois J. Schiffer, the assistant attorney general responsible for the case, would only say that it eventually became clear that two lawyers weren’t enough to do the job. Treasury Department officials did not respond to repeated requests for interviews on their role.
Privately, senior officials at Justice bristle at suggestions that they underestimated the magnitude of the litigation and did not pursue it vigorously.
Nevertheless, after the contempt trial ended, the two original lawyers were removed and Justice substantially beefed up its team to include as many as two dozen law-yers by some counts.
“After the contempt proceeding, it was very clear that we had to pay full attention to the interests of the United States,” one official says.
Justice officials also acknowledge that they never took a possibly crucial deposition from lead plaintiff Cobell before the class was certified. Thus, they never fully exploited potential conflicts of interest involving Cobell, lead plaintiffs lawyer Gingold and the government’s trustee for the accounts. Those issues could have affected Lamberth’s decision to certify the class.
And Justice only belatedly challenged Lamberth’s jurisdiction and tried to have the case sent to the Court of Federal Claims, which can award money damages but lacks power to grant the broad equitable relief the plaintiffs seek.
Lamberth is expected to rule on phase one by Labor Day, but the government still stands a good chance of coming out ahead in spite of itself.
The judge has expressed concern that injecting the court into an executive agency’s business would raise serious separation-of-powers issues. And though the government admitted fault, it presented more than a month of testimony on a new $ 60 million computer system it claims will clean up the mess.
Despite the misgivings about the system’s ability by the General Accounting Office and some members of Congress, the judge appeared to be impressed with those efforts. Some observers doubted Lamberth would force the government to tear down the new system and start over from scratch.
But intentionally or otherwise, it appeared that the government had done its best to lose the case from Day One.
Lawyers for the government and the Indians agree that both sides entered the litigation in a spirit of cooperation. The two sides agree on little else.
“Everybody recognized that this was a big mess and was interested in solving it,” recalls plaintiffs lawyer Keith M. Harper of the Boulder, Colo.-based Native American Rights Fund.
Realizing that many of the records for the accounts were either missing or in poor condition, the sides tried to negotiate a way to draw a statistical sample to calculate how far out of balance the books were. Those talks began to falter by late 1996.
“This cooperative effort was seeming more like a scam to delay,” says Harper, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
So the case started getting nasty, with the Indians pressing for class certification and production of trust documents relating to the five named plaintiffs. Government lawyers helped draft a stipulated document production order in November 1996 — a move that would return to haunt them.
In the meantime, however, the government’s response to the plaintiffs appeared less than spirited.
Justice Department lawyers didn’t oppose class certification for the first phase of the case, in which the Indians sought a declaratory judgment that the government violated their rights as trust beneficiaries and an injunction forcing the government to fix the system. Justice merely asked the court to delay certification for the second part, which seeks the accounting that potentially could cost billions.
The department, however, all but ignored Cobell. She had chaired an advisory board to Paul M. Homan, another banker appointed by the president under 1994 reform legislation as a quasi-independent trustee over the Indian accounts.
Experts generally suggest taking limited depositions from named plaintiffs to assure that they and their lawyers are conflict-free and can adequately represent the class.
But Justice lawyers failed to depose Cobell to further explore her relationship with Homan and only mentioned it in a footnote to their brief on certification.
Cobell’s participation was crucial because she may be one of the few Indians with the education, sophistication and resources to wage such a complex legal war. Given that and significant disagreement within Indian country on how to fix the system, Cobell’s disqualification as a plaintiff could have been a major blow.
Trial and Error
Missed altogether by Justice was Homan’s later acknowledgment at trial that he and lead plaintiffs lawyer Gingold had been “personal friends and professional associates on a number of matters” since the late 1970s, when both worked for the comptroller of the currency. Homan recommended Gingold, a trust law specialist, to Cobell when the idea of suing the government first arose.
Homan abruptly quit his job in January, claiming Babbitt had stripped him of the authority and money he needed to repair the system. The government already had missed an early chance to put Homan’s credibility as a witness at issue. He gained instant credibility with Lamberth.
The judge later would call Homan’s testimony at the contempt trial “especially credible,” citing his “vast experience in trust management and with [turning around] failing financial institutions.” When the case reached the merits, Homan became a key plaintiffs witness, telling Lamberth that before the administration got boxed in by the lawsuit, it had planned to put off trust reform until after Clinton left office.
“It’s a little bit sleazy how this case came about from inside the department from a guy who couldn’t get his way,” Gover says.
Homan declined a request for an interview.
Justice also took its time in trying to get out from under the heavy equitable thumb of the District Court and into the claims court, which typically handles Indian suits for damages. Besides lacking the broad equitable jurisdiction of a District Court, the claims court is notoriously stingy with Indians.
“The Indians can’t win in the court of claims, so the government always tries to get the case moved into the court of claims,” explains Nell Jessup Newton, dean of the University of Denver College of Law, who has written extensively on the subject.
Although the first lawyers on the case drafted a motion to move it to the claims court within weeks after it was filed, their superiors rejected it. Justice didn’t formally try to get it into claims court until two years later.
Then Lamberth sliced and diced the government’s argument, holding that the accounting the Indians wanted did not add up to a claim for damages in the strict sense: “In the plaintiffs’ view, they only seek to balance the checkbook, not to add any money to the checking account.” 30 F. Supp. 2d 24 (1998).
In a footnote Lamberth casually cut from the complaint passages, suggesting the Indians really were seeking damages, including one demand that the defendants “restore trust funds wrongfully lost, dissipated or converted.”
Although the government at first tried to cut a deal with the Indians, Justice Department lawyers eventually decided the plaintiffs had no remedy, anyway, under a common-law breach-of-trust theory that helped keep them in District Court. Treasury took it one step further, arguing as late as May that Rubin owed the Indians no trust duty at all.
Again, Lamberth was not impressed. In denying a motion for summary judgment, he noted that the 1994 trust reform act and earlier statutes formally bestowed long recognized common-law trust rights on the Indians and gave them remedies against the United States as a whole, including Treasury.
Lamberth also pointed to United States v. Mitchell (Mitchell II), 463 U.S. 206 (1983), the last major Indian trust case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Mitchell came from the claims court, and the government then took the opposite stance that the Indians could indeed seek remedies such as declaratory judgments and injunctions.
“Of course, the government had no problem accepting this position in Mitchell because the equitable jurisdiction required for such … remedies did not lie with the court of claims, as it does with this court,” Lamberth wrote.
Gover chalks it up to amateurs dabbling in Indian law and his own agency’s failure to adequately keep tabs on the lawyers from Justice.
“That’s where more client supervision would have been helpful,” Gover says. “We can’t deny that we owe a responsibility to these people. It’s straight out of the Justice playbook. When you have guys who don’t have any background, they do what they usually do in a case against the United States.”
But the government’s failed pledge to supply the named plaintiffs with documents relating to their trust accounts really made the hair stand up on the back of Lamberth’s neck. Even largely unapologetic Justice Department officials admit blowing that call.
The Document Drama
Growing tired of the defendants’ informal promises to deliver the materials, the Indians finally persuaded the government’s lawyers to stipulate to court-ordered production in November 1996. The effort was doomed before it began.
The documents, some dating back to the formation of the first trusts in 1887, were stored at Treasury facilities, at different Interior Department offices, and at more than 90 Indian agencies throughout the country.
Besides the disarray of the records themselves, the government faced other obstacles.
A major warehouse in Albuquerque, N.M., contained hundreds of boxes stacked on pallets. But they couldn’t be immediately inspected because the building was contaminated with deadly rodent-borne hantavirus.
Moreover, Lamberth read the production order to cover not only the five named plaintiffs but their predecessors in interest, which meant untold thousands of files would have to be analyzed. It could cost as much as $ 80 million to give the plaintiffs everything they want, Gover says.
It was no wonder the government couldn’t comply, but its lawyers never told that to the court.
After two years of meager results, Lamberth finally ordered the defendants last December to show cause for why they shouldn’t be held in contempt. The different agencies started casting about blame.
Justice shoved its two lone lawyers into the background and eventually kicked them off the case, replacing them with a virtual army of attorneys.
Justice’s new top kid on the block, Phillip A. Brooks, cast one of the first stones at Willa B. Perlmutter, the Interior Department lawyer who negotiated the production order. “Ms. Perlmutter obviously didn’t understand what she had just agreed to,” Brooks told Lamberth.
Joe Christie, an Interior official trying to run down the named plaintiffs’ documents, testified that Perlmutter told him to hold off on production until they figured out how to do it simultaneously with the larger statistical sample still being sought. Christie said he never heard anything else about the plan. It turned out Perlmutter had left Interior for private practice at the end of June 1997. She testified that the conversation with Christie never happened.
Perlmutter declined comment. “I’ve been burned on this too many times before,” she says.
There was more.
Treasury officials contended they at first didn’t believe that the production order applied to them. Lamberth called that story “breathtaking,” considering that Rubin was a named defendant and that a Treasury lawyer had attended nearly all the court proceedings.
The government also couldn’t even tell what materials it had turned over to the Indians because it never kept a consistent log. And testimony later indicated that the defendants didn’t discover the hantavirus problem in Albuquerque until July 1998 — well after the production order was issued and the deadline had passed.
On yet another occasion, government lawyers repeatedly told Lamberth a tribal court in Winnebago, Neb., had stopped them from taking trust documents from the Indian agency there. Lamberth later determined that the tribal court order had expired long before.
The Fallout
Some Feds Let Off the Hook
In the end, about all government lawyers could do was apologize and hope for the best.
But they did wriggle free of personal responsibility. With the plaintiffs’ consent, the government lawyers managed to get themselves and other employees off the hook by removing everyone but Gover, Babbitt and Rubin from the show-cause order.
Lamberth let the secretaries off relatively easy, only ordering them to pay the Indians’ attorney fees and expenses, and appointing a special master to oversee the document production. He warned, however, that future violations wouldn’t be treated so lightly.
Although the secretaries were left holding the bag, the contempt proceedings did have other consequences for some government employees.
Christie, two years short of retirement, was transferred away from his home and family in Albuquerque to Washington after he began to cooperate with the plaintiffs.
Besides being reassigned, the original Justice Department lawyers, Andrew M. Eschen and Lewis Wiener, were subjected to a required internal investigation by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The pair’s Washington lawyer, Peter R. Ginsberg, says he expects the probe to wrap up this month.
Although he wasn’t held in contempt, Wiener also has gone to the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, claiming Lamberth’s criticism of his conduct was unwarranted and damaged his professional reputation.
“We just think the judge got it wrong,” Ginsberg says.
Leshy, the Interior solicitor, says he has no plans to internally investigate his office’s conduct. The case is just too strange to draw meaningful conclusions from it, Leshy says. But Leshy and Gover say they’ve learned one lesson: Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
“The magnitude of this thing didn’t really hit us or the Justice Department at first,” Leshy says. “We should have been back before the judge much sooner, saying, ‘Wait a minute.’ That clearly was a huge mistake, and we’re paying for it.”
The plaintiffs also didn’t walk away unscathed. Gover testified later that he had learned plaintiffs lawyers had lobbied congressional staffers against supplemental appropriations the Indian bureau needed to get the document production rolling and to kickstart the computer system the bureau hopes will put its house in order. “It was a cynical attempt to handcuff us,” Gover says.
Plaintiffs lawyers say it didn’t happen that way; they say they were just trying to keep the government from blowing the money on something else.
Although he inherited two miserable situations — the trust system and the conduct of the litigation — Gover says he should have paid closer attention once he got the Indian affairs job.
“I never talked to the lawyers,” Gover says. “I only talked to my staff, and they said the lawyers say this and the lawyers say that. I was not the client I should have been.”
Gover says he’s pleased with the new team of lawyers from Justice and, perhaps more importantly, Lamberth also has complimented them.
Treasury Misery
But the magnitude of the case apparently hadn’t quite hit the Treasury Department as of June.
A few days before the merits trial began, yet another Justice Department lawyer stood up in Lamberth’s courtroom and told the judge that Treasury workers had destroyed 162 boxes of uncashed checks that might have been related to the case. Some documents had been shredded in January, during the contempt trial and after Treasury officials had assured Lamberth that they would preserve potentially relevant materials.
Treasury officials hadn’t even bothered to tell Justice about the destruction for another three months. And when the special master sent lawyers from Justice to investigate, they reported that Treasury lawyers told so many different stories that they couldn’t be sure why the reporting delay occurred.
Lamberth was one unhappy camper.
“I don’t know what else a court can do to ever get a handle on this,” Lamberth said. “I had the very people before me, and I can’t get a handle on it. What’s the court going to do with all this now?”
“I don’t know what to say, your honor,” replied Justice Department lawyer John R. Tyler.
He then whipped out the proverbial 10-foot pole and distanced himself from the other lawyers who already had provoked so much judicial ire.
“I’m not responsible,” Tyler said. “I don’t appear here on behalf of the defendants.”
Struggles Over the Future
Whether the trust system ever can be fixed to everyone’s satisfaction may be the most difficult question of all.
Congress did enact significant reform legislation in 1994, spelling out the Interior Department’s long-recognized duties to the Indians and calling for the appointment of a special trustee — Homan — to oversee the accounts and fix the system.
As trustee, Homan encountered resistance from some tribal leaders with a proposal to privatize the program. A similar proposal now pending in Congress also has encountered opposition.
Gover and others attribute the resistance to a love-hate relationship between the tribes and the Indian bureau. As federally recognized sovereign entities, the tribes view the bureau more as their agent in Washington than as a service agency. Despite their vehement criticism of the bureau, many Indian leaders see any proposed changes as the first step toward its dismantlement and the end of federal recognition.
Moreover, Gover says, trust means much more in the Indian world view than it does in the black-letter law of treatises and hornbooks. Trust includes treaties, case law, statutes, and, most of all, a moral obligation.
“When a tribal leader uses the term ‘trust responsibility,’ he’s talking about everything from soup to nuts,” Gover says.
Chief Joseph evidently understood that kind of trust. When he died in 1904, the Indian agency physician reported the cause as a broken heart.
Copyright © American Bar Association, 1999.
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