by Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post
The government’s management of Indian trust funds is in such disarray that a
federal judge is considering whether to place the job in the hands of a
receiver.
That would be a huge embarrassment to Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, who
is facing a contempt charge for failing to clean up the mess. But in
November, Norton proposed a remedy: put all the trust fund duties, now
spread among several offices but primarily entrusted to the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, into a new Bureau of Indian Trust Asset Management.
Ironically, Norton’s plan is outraging the very group it is intended to
help. Native Americans, already wary of the federal government’s commitment
to dealing with them on a nation-to-nation basis, see Norton’s move as a
first step in the weakening of the BIA. Despite any complaints Indians may
have had about BIA operations, the agency has become the symbol of the
government’s commitment to a sovereign Indian Country.
“Creating a new agency doesn’t create reform,” Tex Hall, president of the
National Congress of American Indians, told Norton at a Dec. 13 meeting in
Albuquerque attended by members of more than 80 tribes.
“It’s just another stall tactic to divert attention off the real issue,”
said Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana and a
prominent plaintiff in the class action against the federal government over
trust fund mismanagement that is at the center of Norton’s troubles. “I’m
totally opposed to the creation of a new bureau. All you’ll do is you have
the same people involved in trust reform now, and they’re not doing the
right thing.”
If trust management is stripped from BIA, what would be left, the Indians
fear, are functions easily subsumed by other agencies: Indian schools, which
could move to the Education Department, and road building, which the
Transportation Department could take over. If these and other programs are
parceled out, there will be no one office responsible for Indian concerns.
Perhaps what has angered the Native Americans the most is that Norton came
up with her plan without first consulting the tribes.
“It’s a permanent shifting of the government-to-government relationship,”
said Keith Harper, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund,
representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs last October filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge Royce
C. Lamberth to order that the individual trust accounts be placed in
receivership, saying they do not believe that the government is capable of
handling the accounts now. “Once it’s fixed, give it back to the
department,” Harper said.
But Interior officials say what Norton is proposing is not to eliminate or
dilute the BIA, but to rationalize the welter of Indian programs. The Indian
trust fund program, which handles an estimated $3.1 billion in assets from
oil, gas, timber, grazing and other natural resource royalties, has been
hampered by more than 100 years of neglect and mismanagement. The government
does not really know how much is in the trust. The Indians say billions of
dollars in individual trust funds are unaccounted for.
It makes sense, federal officials say, to consolidate the trust functions in
a single entity. Money and personnel would move from the BIA and the special
trustee’s office to BITAM. A new assistant secretary for Indian trust asset
management would oversee the daily management of 1,400 tribal accounts and
at least 300,000 individual trust accounts.
The new bureau is needed, Norton said, “to ensure that we move forward in
the management of Indian trust reform.”
The BIA is widely considered one of the worst-managed agencies in
government, and has long been a target of reformers. However over the
decades, it has gradually been shaped to Native Americans’ needs, with more
than 10,000 employees, most of them in field offices across the country. The
vast majority of its workers are Native Americans.
And the bureau’s very presence on the Indian reservation — that BIA sign on
the superintendent’s office — is about the only reassurance, Native
Americans say, that the federal government is committed to dealing with
Indian tribes as sovereign entities.
If that nation-to-nation relationship weakens, Indians are concerned that
the states will encroach on their jurisdiction, said John Dossett, general
counsel for the National Congress of American Indians. He said, for example,
that some states have tried to assert that Indians cannot speak their own
language in their schools.
Interior Department spokesman John Wright said the federal government is not
weakening the BIA, created in 1824.
“All we’re proposing is that all those functions that are responsible for
Indian trust be under one assistant secretary,” he said. BIA, he said, will
still be “the primary point” for all bureau activities.
“The government-to-government relationship remains whether it’s in the
Bureau of Indian Affairs or in BITAM,” he said.
Interior has tried to allay some immediate concerns: It will keep the Indian
preference in hiring for the new bureau, and, officials said, the idea is to
move BIA employees who work in trust management to the new bureau.
Paul Homan, a former special trustee in charge of trust reform, said the
solution is neither the status quo, nor a receiver. Rather, he said,
Congress and the White House should create a Resolution Trust Corp.-style
entity to clean up the mess. Put a time limit on it, say, five years. Then,
once the records are resolved and modernized — but only then — the agency
can reassume control.
“The real issue is you cannot reform from within,” Homan said. “The fact is
the government has proved incapable of reforming.” In fact, he said,
Norton’s plan is nothing more than “a dressed-up version” of what Interior
staffers proposed to the Clinton administration in the early 1990s. “It
didn’t work then,” he said. “And it won’t work now.”
Interior vows to soldier on. The consultation process with Native Americans
continues through early February. The tribes are putting together a task
force to come up with some alternatives. Norton, officials said, is willing
to consider their ideas.
Litigation over the trust management also continues, as does a hearing in
federal court on whether to hold Norton in contempt.
for more information: click here
|
