by Gay Alcorn
Sydney Morning Herald
One determined Indian woman has found the US Government could owe
the Blackfeet Nation billions, writes Gay Alcorn.
ELOUISE Cobell is tired now, and the whispers of the townspeople that
she’s a big-time troublemaker sometimes get her down, but $US10 billion
($18.7 billion) is a lot of money. Sometimes she just knows she’s going to
win.
Cobell’s story is an American tale of a little person who takes on the big
guys, a David against Goliath parable. Hers is also an American Indian
story, of a people so demoralised by massacres, assimilation and broken
treaties that it took a long time for them to fight back.
Cobell, a Blackfeet Indian, is 56, just over 1.5 metres tall , and an Erin
Brockovich figure, the driving force behind a class action lawsuit that
keeps rippling outward, drawing in bigger and bigger players and exposing
bigger and bigger scandals. It has led to two cabinet members in the
Clinton administration being found guilty of contempt of court, a first in
American history, and the Bush Government’s Secretary of the Interior,
Gail Norton, awaits a ruling whether she, too, will be held in contempt.
The case reaches back more than a century to when Indians in the Wild West
states were forced onto reservations. It reaches forward to shredded
government documents, dodgy cheques and a leaky New Mexico warehouse where
rats gobbled government records. A Washington DC judge, Royce Lamberth,
said the case revealed governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.
In a country where the legacy of slavery remains the most hotly argued
racial issue, the lives of America’s 4.1 million Indians, just 1.5 per
cent of the population, are barely noted. The Cobell case has brought the
Indian story back to the front pages.
Cobell’s story begins in Browning, the main town on the Blackfeet Indian
Reservation right up near the Canadian border in Montana. The Blackfeet
live in a desolate, flat region where the ceaseless cold wind blows brown
dust across the main street. They live in one of the poorest counties in
the United States, with unemployment at 70 per cent.
Cobell grew up one of eight children in a house with no telephone, running
water or electricity. She has childhood memories of listening to adults
talking at night about the trust and why it wasn’t paying them any money.
Government cheques would turn up occasionally, sometimes for a few
dollars, occasionally for a few thousands dollars, but nobody knew when
they would come and how much money would arrive. People would grumble,
then shrug.
The trust they spoke of was set up after the passage of the 1887 Dawes
Act, which was supposed to encourage Indians to be self-sufficient
farmers.
In reality, said Lamberth, it was driven by a greed for the landholdings
of the tribes. The act set up a system to allot land to individual
Indians. The millions of acres of land allotted were then held in trust
for the Indians by Washington. The Government would lease it to miners,
graziers and timber companies and would send the money to Indian owners.
The trusts at issue here were created more than 100 years ago, a US Court
of Appeals decision found last year, and have been mismanaged nearly as
long. The trust scheme was a shambles from the beginning. Records were
never kept. Cheques were written knowingly for the wrong amounts. Money
was stolen. Indians bequeathed their land to relatives and cheques stopped
altogether. Companies would send cheques and they would be shoved into
drawers and lost. Thousands of records were destroyed in an effort to get
rid of old government documents.
The money involved is huge. Every year, $US500 million goes through the
accounts, paid by companies exploiting Indian land, but never reaching the
rightful owners. A few years ago, a court held that there were 46,000
trust accounts for which the Government had no idea of the correct
address.
In 1999 Lamberth found the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, then
responsible for Indian Affairs, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Robert
Rubin, in contempt of court for failing to produce historical records as
they had promised. He accused them of a shocking pattern of deception
including covering up documents that might have helped the Indian case.
The US, he wrote in a judgement, could not say how much money was or
should be in the trust.
In her defence, the Secretary of the Interior, Norton, says that decades
of mismanagement mean it is impossible to work out how much money is owed
and to whom.
“All of us are going to have to find a way to deal with the fact that
some information no longer exists,” she said in her own contempt of court
trial.
Cobell acknowledges that the Government has a hellish task to fix up a
century of mismanagement, but she shares the judge’s frustration with
obfuscation and delay. She is also angry that the Government has made no
attempt to settle the case, preferring that it drag on for six years.
“First they took our blood, they killed us, then they took our land, and
now they’ve got our money,” she says, adding “you can imagine, no
management, no audit, no nothing. People could do anything. It’s like
opening the doors of a bank and telling people, walk in fill your
pockets.”
The old people of Browning would still be grumbling about the trust if
Cobell hadn’t got herself an education in accounting. She got a job as the
Blackfeet tribe’s treasurer in the late 1970s. She couldn’t make sense of
the trust statements. Her own family owned parcels of land held in trust,
but she could never find out how much she owned and where it was.
“I kept writing and writing and writing [to the Government]. They tried
to belittle me and intimated that I was a dumb Indian.
“Because we’re not an important people with a lot of votes, because we’re
not people that have a lot of money to contribute to campaigns, we can be
ignored and that’s what they did.”
But members of Congress became interested and, in 1994, Congress ordered
the Department of the Interior to reconcile the tribal accounts. Nothing
happened. A lawyer, Dennis Gingold, told Cobell she would keep losing
until she sued and, in 1996, she sued.
The revelations spilled out in court, an embarrassing litany of errors and
cover-ups. The Clinton administration hoped that the decision of Lamberth
that the Government had breached its trust responsibilities would be
overturned on appeal, but it was upheld.
Late last year, a court-appointed expert proved that the computer security
system the Government used was vulnerable to hackers, and ordered it shut
down to be fixed. That meant that cheques stopped being sent completely.
Not all individual Indians get trust cheques millions of acres are owned
collectively by the tribal councils. But for about 500,000 people who do,
it can mean the difference between fixing a leaking roof or not, or
sending children to college or not. Later this year, the court will start
determining how much Indians are owed. Cobell and her lawyers say anything
less than $US10 billion would be insulting, and a proper accounting could
mean as much as $US100 billion. The Government says it is much less.
When the past payments are reconciled, the task will be to set up a system
that works for the future. Indians want the trust accounts placed in the
hands of a receiver to fix up the mess before handing it back to the
Government. If the judge agrees, it will be the first time that a White
House agency has been placed in receivership.
Cobell drives through the dusty streets of Browning, acknowledging that
most people would see it as an ugly little town. She sees progress. A
Native American bank she started in 1987 is lending money for Indians to
start businesses. Cobell points to a pencil factory, and a recycling
plant, an arts and crafts store, and even a shabby beauty parlour. She
dreams that Indians will use some of their money to buy land sold long ago
to non-Indians.
In the streets of Browning, many residents know nothing of the court case
involving them, thousands of kilometres away in Washington. Others are
scared that making waves is too dangerous, and that the Government will
win in the end. Cobell shrugs. “Sometimes you just get tired of it and
you just need to fight. You have to stand up and say we’re a proud people.
I think my ancestors tried to do just that.”
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