by Editorial
Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA)
Sometimes a mess sits for so long, and gets so big, that it becomes
overwhelming — seemingly impossible even to find a place to begin cleaning
things up. On the human scale, this may be the Problem of the Filing
Cabinet, or the Trouble with the Garage. For the federal government, it is
the Problem of the Indian Trust Accounts.
The Indian Trust mess has been piling up since the 1820s. The trust funds
began as Washington’s supposed amends for lands taken during the nation’s
move west. For the last century, they have been the repository for moneys
paid to lease Indian lands for oil drilling, mining, logging and other
commercial interests.
But right from the start the federal government treated the assignment with
such neglect, such contempt, that the numbers stopped adding up. This was
compounded over a string of presidencies, and there is no reason to think
there hasn’t been fraud and even outright theft, too.
Here is the magnitude of this mess. There are some 1,400 tribal trust
accounts, and some 300,000 individual accounts. There is a backlog of 20,000
Indian probate cases to untangle, no central repository for any of this
stuff, and records of who may owe money are in no better shape. For 30
years, federal audits and bureaucratic fixes have come and gone, to no
effect. Now there is a lawsuit, an allegation that at least $10 billion is
owed, and the last two Interior secretaries have been found in contempt of
federal court for failure to make reasonable progress at cleaning up the
mess.
Well, the thing most people ultimately must face is that, after all, these
problems don’t go away by themselves — there’s always a place to start when
you want to badly enough — and responsibility for this doesn’t just
dissolve over time.
Washington has yet to accept that reality. It’s way past time.
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