Gale Norton’s monster is at the gates
The Denver Post
By: Penelope Purdy
Denver Post Columnist
March 21, 2001
Just after Gale Norton sat down at her desk as U.S. Interior Secretary, a big scuzzy monster rolled into her office.
The monster is among the most mud-encrusted scandals in American history: federal mismanagement of Indian trust funds. If Norton wants to stop the beast’s political dirt from splattering her, she’ll have to do some big-time housekeeping at the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In a very rare action two years ago, a federal judge cited then-Interior and Treasury secretaries Bruce Babbitt and Robert Rubin for contempt of court because they’d failed to produce financial records needed to fix the trust fund mess. Although they’re out of office, Babbitt and former BIA director Kevin Gover may still face more contempt charges.
Now, lawyers for the Indians want Norton cited for contempt, too.
While Norton clearly didn’t create the mess, she’s on the hook because she’s the new boss at Interior, yet hasn’t let a whistle-blower return to work.
More than a year ago, the BIA’s Albuquerque office removed Mona Infield from her job. Infield claims the action was retaliation for her criticism of the BIA’s ineptitude at cleaning up the trust fund mess.
Infield is still drawing her $80,000-a-year salary just for staying at home – which should be a scandal in itself – but says she wants to get back to her job and help untangle the trust funds’ Gordian knot.
Gee, a government employee wants to do some real work – and her bosses won’t let her?
Meantime, a “special master,” or assistant, to U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth obtained an internal memo from another BIA employee, computer expert Dom Nessi. In the memo Nessi, a former Colorado resident, acknowledges the BIA’s efforts to improve trust-fund management are “imploding.”
That’s an explosive comment because the BIA repeatedly assured Congress and Judge Lamberth that the upgrades were on track.
Norton is in a bit of a pickle. She hasn’t yet brought in her own key people to run the BIA or to take over the legal details of handling the case, so she’s relying on advice from Clinton-era holdovers. The up shot: Her decisions about the trust funds are influenced by the very people who got Norton’s predecessor, Babbitt, in hot water and whose efforts for the past five years have yet to produce meaningful re sults.
Gale, you need to get yourself some better lieutenants. You ought to stop listening to the endless baloney about how well the BIA is doing because it’s darn clear that the bureau can’t meet deadlines, locate evidence or even obey a federal court.
Moreover, it is unseemly for the government to continue this ripoff.
In the 19th century, the U.S. Army forced the Indians, at gunpoint, to leave their historic hunting grounds and ancient villages. The government then ordered the Indians to give up their right to make choices about the few assets they had left.
But the feds promised the Indians that the government would manage the assets in trust for them. Over the years, those assets generated billions of dollars. Yet the Indians never saw the money.
“It is, in large measure, the history of the West itself,” said Dennis Gingold, a lawyer who now is fighting to make the government pay the Indians what they’re owed.
All those Indian assets, he noted, are the kind of resources that went into the settlement and building of the modern West. Indian water was used to slake the thirst of real estate booms across the Southwest. Indian lumber fed the Pacific Northwest’s lumber mills. Indian oil fueled the energy industry from Montana to New Mexico.
But while Indian assets made the West rich, the Indians themselves were relegated to utter poverty.
Today, some 300,000 Indians nationwide – most of whom are Westerners – hold assorted fractions of interest in different lands and leases. On their behalf, Gingold and the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund sued the feds in 1996, to make the government clean up the shoddy accounting and pay the Indians what they’re owed. That’s the case where Norton may face contempt charges.
The sorry saga can’t be written off as history, because the ripoff of the Indians is ongoing. Their assets are still being leased and consumed for a pittance by corporate and development powers who clearly don’t have the Indians’ interests at heart. The government still hasn’t told the Indians how much should be in each account, how much is actually in the trust or when or how the overdue payments will be made.
By any definition, what’s continuing to happen in Indian country is barely disguised theft. If any other trustee pulled such a stunt, he or she would be in jail.
But the feds remain untouched and unaccountable.
So you see that monster leaning across Norton’s desk? It’s grinning. It knows that it’s going to take some real work for anyone to make it go away anytime soon.
Penelope Purdy is an editorial writer and member of The Denver Post editorial board. E-mail Penelope about this column.
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