by Todd Wilkinson
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Christian Science Monitor
On a cold wind-blown slope outside town, there is a piece of hallowed
ground called Ghost Ridge. It was here, a century ago, that Blackfeet
Indians perished after the US government failed to deliver promised food
rations.
And it is here, today, that Elouise Cobell sometimes walks as she gathers
strength for her ongoing crusade: Forcing the government to hand over
billions of dollars she alleges it has withheld from native Americans.
“When I’m feeling exhausted,” says the Blackfeet accountant and banker, “I
visit Ghost Ridge and I wonder how painful it must’ve been for my people
to starve to death in the middle of winter. Then I have a chat with myself
… ‘Elouise, what are you complaining about? You’re a wimp if you can’t
deal with this.’ ”
Mrs. Cobell’s relentless attention to the details of financial accounting
has made the bashful woman a living legend in the eyes of native Ameri-
cans and a thorn in the side of bureaucrats in two presidential
administrations.
She’s already won several skirmishes in her David-like battle with the
government Goliath. Her class-action lawsuit against the US government
seeks $12 billion in restitution for revenues owed from mining, logging,
and other development on millions of acres of Indian land.
The suit, on behalf of 500,000 native Americans, both living and dead,
revolves around the inability of the US Interior and Treasury Departments
to provide written records of what happened to billions of dollars owed by
the Individual Indian Monies trust fund, set up a century ago to manage
Indian lands and the revenues produced by them. The trust currently
generates about $500 million a year – with payments ranging from pennies
to millions of dollars for individual Indians, depending on the size of
their shareholdings.
This case is the native-American equivalent of the Enron scandal, says Tex
Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “The only
difference is that the Cobell case is bigger … the government is playing
the role of Enron, and this has been going on a lot longer.”
The case has consumed the energies of Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who
faces contempt-of-court charges because she was unable to produce
financial records.
Numerous investigations have confirmed shoddy bookkeeping for more than a
century. When pressed by US District Judge Royce Lamberth, Ms. Norton and
her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, admitted that many key accounting
documents have been lost, destroyed, or never existed.
The Interior Department declined to comment on the case.
As a child on the Blackfeet reservation not far from the Canadian border,
Cobell was raised without plumbing, electricity, telephone, or running
water. A vivid memory is of her parents and grandparents sitting around a
woodstove complaining about government checks not arriving or amounting to
less than they should have been. She often asked why that was.
Only after serving as Blackfeet tribe treasurer did she get answers.
Noticing irregularities in royalty checks to tribal members, she began to
keep records.
‘Nothing matched up’
“When I tried to correlate the payments with government books kept by the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, nothing matched up. Some months, a check would
arrive, but then it might take months before the next one came in the
mail,” she recalls.
What started out as her challenge to reconcile differences on the
Blackfeet Reservation broadened to dozens of other reservations and the
accounts of hundreds of thousands of Indians. The government admits it
doesn’t even have valid addresses for 50,000 who are due money.
Left incredulous by such revelations, Judge Lamberth has called it one of
the worst cases of government fiscal irresponsibility in US history.
Since the end of the frontier era in the West, Indian communities have
suffered severe poverty, says Jim Adams, managing editor of the newspaper
Indian Country Today, which devotes a story nearly daily to the Cobell
case. He says there’s no doubt that fixing the fund would put reservation
citizens on a more equal economic footing with neighboring communities.
Congressman Dennis Rehberg (R) of Montana, whose own non-Indian relatives
operated stores on the Crow Reservation in the state, says that many woes
of native communities are directly related to the fact that Indians never
fully understood the assets they control because government record-keeping
kept them in the dark.
Cobell herself is actively involved in rebuilding her community, where
unemployment exceeds 75 percent. When she’s not off monitoring the trial
or delivering lectures, the wife of a Blackfeet rancher and mother of a
grown son directs a business development fund on the reservation here.
Cobell’s office resides in an old building suffering from a bad case of
chipped paint. Stacked around her are boxes full of legal and accounting
documents, walls covered with Indian artwork, and a tidy desk with an
accountant’s calculator. Behind her are photos of her and national
leaders.
Despite a growing circle of supporters, Cobell confesses that, often since
filing the lawsuit in 1996, she has felt isolated. “In the beginning, there
was just Elouise and a few other people. Along the way, she has confronted
resistance from the government and otherIndians, but today her resolve has
brought a lot of very influential people together,” says her close friend,
The Rev. Dan Powers, a Jesuit priest at St. Anne’s Catholic Parish in nearby
Heart Butte.
Cobell also has many detractors – including some native Americans. Earl
Old Person, Blackfeet tribal chairman, worries that a settlement that
removes the BIA from trust management could hurt Indians, providing
grounds for terminating the government’s trust relationship with tribes
that depend on funding.
With a pained expression, Cobell recalls BIA officials calling her
“stupid” to her face as she persisted in tracking trust-fund money. But
she had her day when the MacArthur Foundation named her a recipient of its
prestigious genius award, a fellowship given annually to those making a
profound difference in society. She applied her $300,000 award to lawsuit
expenses.
Collective impact
“One of the persistent rumors I always hear is that I’m going to somehow
collect millions of dollars in reward money for taking on the lawsuit,”
she says, shaking her head. “I stand to gain no more than any other trust
fund recipient…. It’s the collective impact of a settlement that I’m
most optimistic about.”
The government has fiercely resisted a settlement, and just a few weeks
ago, Secretary Norton announced a costly new plan to fix the broken
accounting system – on top of $600 million already spent to putthe
trust-fund books in order. But Indians and some Interior officials aren’t
confident it can work.
Cobell says the government ought to just admit the system is irretrievably
flawed, stop throwing taxpayer money away, and settle the case.
“I’ve heard from friends that the government thinks I’m tired and that
eventually they’ll wear me down, so that I’ll just go away,” Cobell says.
But with the haunting outline of Ghost Ridge serving as a constant
reminder of challenges confronted by native people in the past, Cobell
says she has no intention to surrender.
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