by Greg Wright
Gannett News Service
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – A David vs. Goliath court battle to get the government to ante up billions of dollars it may owe impoverished American Indians has dragged on for a year, but tribal members said they will not give up the fight.
“I’ll never give up hope,” said Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet Indian from Browning, Mont., who is lead plaintiff in the class-action suit against the U.S. Interior and Treasury departments. “If we keep them in court, we can make honest people out of them.”
A historic U.S. District Court trial started here in June 1999 to force the Interior and Treasury departments to fix the accounting system that determines what the government owes about 300,000 American Indians for handling oil drilling, grazing and other economic activities on their property.
Even Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt admitted in court the system was grossly mismanaged – thousands of pages of paperwork and payment records dating back decades are missing.
A year later, American Indians have scored one victory – in December, a disgusted Judge Royce Lamberth said he would monitor the agencies for five years to ensure they repair the trust-fund system.
But American Indians may have to wait years before knowing if they will be awarded the minimum $10 billion they claim the government owes them. Here’s why:
The federal government is appealing Lamberth’s ruling, claiming his oversight robs them of the independence needed to fix the system. Oral arguments are scheduled to begin Sept. 5, but an appeals decision is still months away.
American Indians plan to file contempt-of-court charges against Babbitt and Bureau of Indian Affairs assistant secretary Kevin Gover, alleging they destroyed e-mail evidence vital to the case. That could further lengthen proceedings. These charges could be filed next week.
American Indians want to launch a second phase of the trial to determine how much the government really owes them. Lamberth has not set a date for this court case to begin.
“I think we’re going to be there sooner or later,” said Dennis Gingold, who leads a team of five lawyers representing Indians in the case.
Babbitt’s office referred questions on the case to the agency’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, but officials there did not return repeated phone calls about the trial’s status. In recent testimony, government officials said they are committed to fixing the system and will put a new computer system and accounting methods in place.
However, the government lawyers told Lamberth they do not have enough manpower or resources to enact these changes this year.
In the late 1880s, when the last Indian wars were playing out in the West, the government tried to assimilate tribes by breaking up communally owned reservations into plots individual American Indians owned.
But the government stepped in to manage economic activities on much of this land, an action American Indians said showed greed and racism on the part of whites.
Indians for decades have claimed the government cheated them out of proceeds from oil drilling, timber cutting, and farm and grazing rentals on their land. The record-keeping system was so shoddy – hundreds of boxes of documents were exposed to rats and weather in wooden sheds – that many American Indians have no idea who should be paid royalties or exactly how much they are owed.
Some American Indians think trying to work through the government to fix the system is futile. Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Northern Cheyenne Indian who is chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, plans to introduce legislation this fall to create an independent, outside agency to handle Indian trust-fund accounts.
It would function like the Resolution Trust Corp., which was created to settle the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.
“In my mind, enough is enough,” Campbell said.
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