Pioneer Press
If the victims of U.S. government flim flams, bungles and monumental neglect of fiduciary duty were white folks, the outrageous matter of accounting for and disbursing funds owed to hundreds of thousands of American Indians would have been handled decades ago. Instead, 115 years after the government in essence took Indian land in exchange for payments from a trust for mineral, timber and grazing rights, Interior Secretary Gale Norton faces the music today in U.S. District Court. She will testify in a contempt case for failure to comply with the court-ordered reform of the Individual Indian Monies trust and for her department's lying to the court about progress in fixing the century-old mess.
Making matters right, the object of the class-action lawsuit that began as Cobell vs. Babbitt in 1996, has been decided -- in favor of the Indians. (Find the history of the trust law and the Cobell litigation at www.indiantrust.com.) Still, the saga remains one of destroyed documents, failures to produce historic accounts, a massive computer security collapse and even a lack of agreement about how to manage the trust reform. Although nobody knows how much is owed to the 300,000 to 500,000 individual Indians or what will constitute effective reform, the monetary cost will most certainly be in the billions of dollars.
What the U.S. government needs to understand here is the sooner, the cheaper for the Treasury and the better for mending its integrity in Indian Country. It is in the interest of the Interior and Treasury departments to agree to a court-supervised receivership or an independent management entity like the Resolution Trust Corp., which sorted out the savings and loan implosions in the 1980s.
Also central to rebuilding integrity is a permanent trust management solution that honors the government-to-government relationship represented now by the direct tie between tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. After making an unacceptable proposal to spin trust oversight to a new Bureau of Indian Trust Asset Management, the Interior Department is constructively engaged with tribal nations on an alternative that respects Indian concerns about sovereignty and more delay in proper accounting. The next public hearing on this question is scheduled Thursday in Portland, Ore.
When Norton appears today in the Washington court of U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, it will be to answer directly to the Indians at the end of a five-week examination of the contempt issues. It is important to remember that this secretary didn't cause the gross disarray of the Individual Indian Monies trust. But neither, on her watch, has the Interior Department been able to cope honestly with delivering remedy.
More delay in rectifying the Indian trust issues carries unacceptable costs all around.
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