by Editorial
Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA)
Interior Secretary Gale Norton says she has a plan to put Indian trust
funds, long in disarray, on the up-and-up again, and just needs a chance
to make it work.
That’s not a credible position. This process has fallen into such
wretchedness, and has languished there for so long, that the Interior
secretary’s plan was born on life-support. By some estimates, $10 billion
may have been lost over the years; the hemorrhage could be ongoing. In
that context, the new plan — to put the trust funds under a new branch of
the old bureaucracy — seems casually insincere.
The consequence is that Secretary Norton is on trial in Washington, D.C.,
for contempt of court, for failing to follow court orders to reform the
Indian trusts. It’s an incomprehensible scenario.
In 1989, when rolling scandal was revealed in the Reagan administration’s
Department of Housing and Urban Development, there were audits,
congressional hearings, a Justice Department investigation, talk of a
special prosecutor. Former HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce was taking the
Fifth before Congress. This was over influence peddling charges of
$400,000 here; over allegations of $20 million embezzled there. It was
chicken feed compared to what has been lost at Interior, yet Interior’s
response remains one of business as usual.
This is not just an historical curiosity. In a nation with such a long
history of shabby treatment of Indians, it is a matter of basic justice —
basic honesty. In a state with 15 percent of the nation’s Indians, where
tribes have recognized claims to sovereignty and rising casino wealth, it
is a political provocation. It’s time this had the investigation the facts
have demanded for a long, long time.
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