Guest Opinion
by Elouise Cobell
Lead Plaintiff
Billings, Mont., Gazette
Some members of Congress are getting upset over how the new Iraqi government is handling its money. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., complained the other day that it looks as if $10 billion is missing over there.
Emanuel thinks Congress ought to investigate what happened to the money, given the billions that the United States is pouring into the country.
To anyone in Indian Country, that's hardly surprising news. We've been complaining about missing billions for decades. And not one cent of it was U.S. money sent overseas.
It was money that the U.S. government promised to hold in trust accounts for individual Indians, some of the poorest people in our country.
The trouble is few people in Congress or the Bush administration seem to care about what's been happening to these forgotten Americans. In fact, numerous studies confirm that the Interior Department did a horrible job running the trust programs.
Now the department seems determined to suggest that the Indians' money really didn't disappear at all. It was just sloppy bookkeeping by the clerks out in Indian Country, they say.
Concern in Congress
For Indians, the good news about this is that some lawmakers in Washington are beginning to care about what happened to both the money in Iraq and the money that was supposed to be held in trust by the U.S. government for the benefit of some 500,000 Native Americans.
Given the yawns that some lawmakers are expressing about the missing $10 billion in Iraq, the cost of settling the Indian dispute seems like pocket change for Uncle Sam. Indeed, it would be a great bargain for taxpayers.
Although we Indians have argued that we could be due as much as $170 billion for the money the government failed to place in our accounts, the leaders of Indian Country have offered to settle the dispute for $27.5 billion. That assumes that the government could prove it made 80 percent of the required payments to Indians on time and to the proper trust accounts.
Bargain-basement deal
Given the massive number of trust documents that are missing and the time and billions it would cost the government to attempt a reconstruction of the records, the price tag the Indians have set seems like a bargain-basement deal. It would end the 10-year-old court fight over Individual Indian Trust accounts, and it would stop bleeding taxpayers for costly repairs to the admittedly broken trust program. If left undeterred, government bureaucrats are planning to spend $12 billion trying to re-create the long-lost trust records.
That would be yet another huge waste of government funds, one that Congress can stop now. It needs to heed the calls of a growing number of lawmakers who want to settle the dispute with the nation's first Americans.
Senate Indian Affairs Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and his vice chairman, Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., as well as House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., and ranking member Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., are seeking to put trust back into the much-maligned Indian Trust Program.
It will cost billions of dollars to solve this disappearing-money problem. But, unlike the money disappearing in the Middle East, this money will go to needy Americans, helpless people who were robbed by their own government.
Regardless of what you think of our involvement in Iraq, solving the government's admitted decades of abuse of Indian trust beneficiaries makes sense for all Americans. And compared with Iraq, this solution is dirt cheap. A settlement by Congress will end this fighting.
Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet tribal member from Browning, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed in 1996 on behalf of 500,000 Native Americans.
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