Redeeming a Historic Trust
The New York Times
April 30, 2001
In the new federal budget, the Interior Department has requested $27.6 million “for unanticipated reform projects and costs related to the ongoing Cobell litigation.” Cobell is Elouise Cobell, a modest, slightly formal woman who grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation just east of Glacier National Park in northern Montana. On behalf of perhaps as many as half a million Native Americans, Ms. Cobell has filed a class-action suit challenging the Interior and Treasury Departments to rectify a collective wrong that is more than a century old.
The root of Ms. Cobell’s suit is the government practice, begun in 1887 and discontinued in 1934, of giving land allotments to individual Indians as their reservations were being broken up for sale to whites. Though the Indians owned these allotments and often lived on them, the government retained title and generated income for the Indians from oil, coal and timber leases, from easements and ranching, from all the ways that those lands could yield money short of outright sale. That money was paid into a trust maintained by the Treasury Department, and it was supposed to be paid out to the Native American holders of individual trust accounts, a number that steadily grew as the original allotments were passed down. The responsibility for maintaining the records and keeping those accounts current fell to the Interior Department.
But as this litigation has revealed, the Interior Department over the years lost track of an untold number of beneficiaries. The account records are in a state of physical disrepair, many either lost or decayed. Beyond the matter of records, there is also the matter of money. What has been doled out — usually in very small checks — probably represents only a fraction of what is owed to account holders. At the moment, the actual amount owed can only be guessed at, but it will most likely be in the billions of dollars.
Nearly everything has been done that can be done to force the Interior and Treasury Departments to clean up this mess. In 1994, Congress passed the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act to address this very problem. Ms. Cobell won initial legal battles in Federal District Court and on appeal. A special master was appointed to coordinate access to documents and evidence, and recently a court monitor was named whose sole task is to keep watch over the Interior Department’s efforts to reform the trust system.
The one thing lacking to a solution so far has been political will in the executive branch. This saga is a debacle of historic proportions, a violation of a trust relationship established by the federal government in which the Indians themselves had, and still have, no say. What is needed now is firm political direction from President Bush, from Interior Secretary Gale Norton and from Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Before long, the second part of this trial — the accounting phase — will begin, and a debate will commence over how to assess the actual value of nearly half a million trust accounts. Ms. Norton agreed with the plaintiffs that a court monitor was necessary. Now it is time for her and Mr. O’Neill to bring an equitable resolution of this case, as swiftly as its complexity and its enormous dimension allow.
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