U.S. Makes No Progress In Replacing
American Indians’ Trust Fund
DiversityInc.com
By: Candice Choi
Reporter
July 12, 2001
The mismanagement of American-Indian trust funds by the federal government has continued despite a court ruling that ordered the Interior Department to resolve the situation, a stinging report by a court-appointed monitor has found.
Monitor Joseph Kieffer charted more than a year of delays, policy reversals and miscommunication under Interior Secretary Gale Norton and her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, in determining how much money should be in the trust accounts.
“The historical accounting project remains undefined, understaffed and, with few exceptions, at the starting gate,” Kieffer wrote. “To this date, there is no documented plan for how to conduct the accounting and no projection of when it will be completed.”
The trust funds for American Indians were created in 1887 to hold royalties from grazing, mining and oil drilling on tribal land. From the start, however, the government acknowledged, the accounts were mismanaged. Money was stolen or used for other federal programs or never collected, and record keeping was shoddy.
Attorneys representing 300,000 American Indians in a class-action suit against the Interior Department charged the federal government squandered at least $100 billion in royalties from mining, ranching, logging and other activities on Indian land.
In late 1999, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the Interior and Justice departments to reconstruct the trust-fund accounts, a ruling upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
By failing to reconstruct the dollar figure it has bilked from the trust fund, the Interior Department is “perpetrating a fraud on district, and appellate court,” said Geoffrey Rempel, who is on the litigation team for the American-Indian plaintiffs.
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