by Gay Alcorn
The Age
Elouise Cobell is tired now, and the whispers of the townspeople that she is
a big-time troublemaker sometimes get her down, but $US10 billion ($A18
billion) is a lot of money and sometimes she just knows she is going to win.
Cobell’s story is an American tale of a little person who takes on the big
guys. Hers is also an American Indian story, of a people so demoralised by
massacres, assimilation and broken treaties it took a long time for them to
fight this time.
Cobell, a Blackfeet Indian, is 56 years old, just over 150 centimetres tall,
with a visceral hatred of anyone assuming she is a “dumb Indian’. She is
more like an Erin Brockovich figure, pursuing a class action lawsuit that
keeps exposing bigger and bigger scandals. So far, two cabinet members in
the Clinton administration have been found guilty of contempt of court, a
first in American history, and the present Secretary of the Interior, Gail
Norton, awaits a ruling whether she will be held in contempt.
The case reaches back more than a century to a time when American Indians
were forced on to reservations. It reaches forward to shredded documents,
dodgy cheques, and rats eating government records. A Washington judge, Royce
Lamberth, said the Blackfeet 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 but for squabbles over casino licences
on remote reservations and arguments over whether sports teams such as the
Washington Redskins should change their names.
“We’re invisible, they made us invisible,’ says Cobell. “This case is
bringing visibility back to us.’
Cobell’s story begins in Browning, the main town on the Blackfeet Indian
Reservation near the Canadian border in Montana. The Blackfeet – the
fiercest tribe in the West until the near extinction of the buffalo pushed
them on to reservations – live in a desolate, flat region where the
ceaseless cold wind blows dust across the town.
The reservation borders the Glacier National Park, in the Rockies, which the
Blackfeet had to give up more than a century ago. They live in one of the
poorest counties in the US, 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 was not paying them any money.
Government cheques would turn up occasionally, but nobody knew when they
would come and how much money would arrive.
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 Judge Lamberth, it was driven by a greed for the land holdings
of the tribes. The act set up a system to allot land to Indians. The
millions of hectares of land were held in trust for the Indians by
Washington and leased to miners, graziers and timber companies. The money
was to be sent to the owners.
The trusts at issue were created more than 100 years ago 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 wrong
amounts. Money was stolen. Indians gave their land to relatives and cheques
stopped.
Thousands of records were destroyed in an effort to get rid of old
government documents. Every year, $US500 million goes through the accounts,
never reaching the rightful owners.
In 1999, Judge 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 judgment, cannot say how much money is or should be in
the trust. In her defence, the Secretary of the Interior, Gail Norton, said
that decades of mismanagement meant it was impossible to work out how much
money was 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 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 said. “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.’
Armed with an associate degree in accounting from Montana State University,
Cobell got a job as the Blackfeet tribe’s treasurer in the late 1970s. She
could not make sense of the trust statements. Her family owned parcels of
land held in trust, but she could not 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,’ Cobell says.
Then members of Congress became interested and, in 1994, Congress ordered
the Department of the Interior to reconcile the accounts. Nothing happened.
A lawyer, Dennis Gingold, told Cobell that 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 the decision of Judge 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 the government computer
system was vulnerable to hackers, and ordered it shut down to be fixed. That
meant cheques stopped being sent.
Not all Indians get trust cheques. Millions of hectares are owned
collectively by tribal councils rather than individuals. But for about
500,000 people who do, it can be the means for paying for medical care or
sending children to college.
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 audit could mean as much as $US100 billion. The
government says it is much less. When past payments are reconciled, a
distribution system that works will have to be set up.
Indians want the trust accounts placed in the hands of a receiver to fix up
the mess. If the judge agrees, it will be the first time a White House
agency has been placed in receivership.
Cobell drives through Browning, acknowledging that most people would see it
as ugly. She sees progress. A bank she started in 1987 is lending money for
Indians to start businesses. She points to a pencil factory, a recycling
plant, an arts and crafts store, and a shabby beauty parlour. She dreams
that Indians will use some of their money to buy blocks of land sold long
ago.
Many residents know nothing of the court case 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 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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