by Elouise Cobell
Guest Columnist
Indian Country Today
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., certainly spoke the
truth recently when it said the individual Indian trust system was "created
over one hundred years ago through an act of Congress, and (has) been
mismanaged nearly as long."
Reform has never been a big feature of the IIM trust, which has
been outrageously mishandled by the Interior and Treasury departments, from
the late 19th century to today.
This is a BIA program, after all, that gets pounded rhetorically
into the earth at nearly every hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs
Committee in Washington. Yet its managers never seem to get the message. At
the June 13 confirmation hearing of Neal McCaleb to become the new head of
the BIA, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the former committee chairman, called
the individual Indian trust a "national disgrace ... mismanaged to the
degree that it totally astounds me."
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., lamented, and not for the
first time, the "trust fund mess."
But expressions of congressional disgust have never led, at least
so far, to any discernible change of attitude on the part of senior Interior
officials.
This summer, however, we're beginning to see cracks in the myth of
government immunity that has surrounded the trust since most of our
grandparents were youngsters. Not that this is apparent yet in public
statements coming out of the Interior or Treasury departments.
Both Mr. McCaleb and his boss, the secretary of the Interior, have
stuck with the party line, assuring Congress that the regrettable IIM
problem will be fixed soon, no problem, and communicating pretty much the
same message to the court.
But lately there has been a series of developments, the cumulative
effect of which is to slowly corner Interior and Treasury, blocking off the
exits.
First, it appears the courts are tightening the noose. Besides two
legal decisions that went squarely against the government and now are
landmarks in Indian trust law, the court has put in place two officials - a
special master and a court monitor - whose assignment is to investigate
progress on trust reform, assess compliance with court orders and compare
what Interior and Treasury are telling the court with what's actually
happening in the field.
As their reports to the judge become known, we expect to get a much
clearer picture of the IIM trust's true prognosis.
Second, the people in Congress who hold the purse strings are
running out of patience. Members of the House Appropriations Committee have
been waiting for months for Interior to produce details of a so-called
"statistical sampling" plan, in answer to the court's order to account for
all of the money that has come into and gone out of the IIM trust.
But statistical sampling has some big problems. It would be
extremely expensive and it wouldn't do what the court has ordered done. In
any event, the plan apparently doesn't exist.
When it approved Interior's 2002 budget recently, the House
committee stated bluntly that it had "no interest" in paying "hundreds of
millions of dollars for an historical accounting that provides funds for a
protracted reconciliation process whose outcome is unlikely to be
successful."
Statistical sampling is a non-starter because most of the trust
records have been lost or destroyed by Interior. A study commissioned by
Interior a few years ago found that an attempt to reconcile the trust
accounts could cost more than $250 million to get unreliable results for
just a 20-year period.
Yet former Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and current Secretary
Gale Norton both told Congress and the court that statistical sampling was
the way to go. With its new report, the House Appropriations Committee has
signaled its deep skepticism that that concept is cost-effective, or that
Interior really intends to carry it out.
With both the court and Congress out of patience, and with a
special master and court monitor positioned to dig out the facts, Interior
may finally have been corralled. It was no coincidence that government
lawyers quietly let the deadline pass for appealing their case to the
Supreme Court.
Somewhere in this administration it must be sinking in that, even
for the federal government, two major legal defeats are enough.
Editor's note: Elouise Cobell is a banker in Browning, Mont., and
lead plaintiff in the individual Indian trust litigation (Cobell vs Norton).
for more information: click here
|
