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Sunday May 11, 2003
Yes, there are times to fight
by Elouise Cobell Guest columnist Farmington Daily Times President George W. Bush’s policy on Iraq may have had it right, after all.
You remember, the president told us “sometimes you have to fight.”
Sometimes, Mr. Bush said, the other guy just doesn’t get it; that he needs a punch in the stomach to get the message.
That’s just the way a group of American Indians have been feeling for almost seven years in a federal court in Washington. We’ve been punching away at Uncle Sam, determined to get a full accounting of the moneys that the federal government should have been placing in trust accounts for us for more than 116 years.
Billions of dollars money that belongs to some of the nation’s poorest people have been diverted from our accounts.
After repeated victories in the courts, we’re getting close to securing that accounting. But to our surprise, some in the nation’s capital are now demanding we settle our dispute with the federal government outside the courtroom.
Mediate the issues, they are telling us.
I was in Washington recently, sitting in the first day of testimony in the latest phase of our long-running lawsuit. I left fighting mad.
Paul M. Homan, a nationally recognized banking expert, was to testify about the weaknesses in the government’s plan to reform the badly broken Indian trust system.
There’s no doubt that Homan, the former president of a prominent bank in Washington, knows what he is talking about when it comes to trust operations. He was the chief examiner of federal banks for the Comptroller of the Currency for years.
He personally supervised the closing of 22 national banks when they became insolvent and, when he left government service, he supervised the rehabilitation of several large banks that were teetering on the brink of failure.
Equally important, he was the first presidential appointee named special trustee for the Indian trust accounts, overseeing the Interior Department’s handling of the accounts for nearly three years. President Bill Clinton selected him to handle that job and he did it with such candor that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt finally fired him for pressing his argument so strongly.
Now you’d think that Homan would be just the type of guy that a Republican administration would love to have talk about the ills in the Indian trust accounts.
But no, the Bush administration’s Justice Department did everything it could to disqualify Homan from testifying as the expert witness he clearly is.
And once Judge Royce Lamberth rejected those arguments, the government continued to question what seemed like every statement he made about the problems of the trust.
To me, that’s precisely why the fight over Indian trust reform is a difficult battle. It’s also why we want our day in the courts.
We’re tired of having federal officials be they Democrats or Republicans attempt to silence those who would tell the truth about the horrible job that the federal government has done taking care of our money.
All we want is what a federal judge and a federal appeals court have said we are entitled to: a full accounting of our money.
It’s hardly a novel or a radical idea. It’s what every bank and every trust company in the nation has to give its clients.
When the children of America’s first citizens cannot get such a basic request, then something is wrong with our government.
As George Bush would say, it’s time for us to fight.
Elouise Cobell is a member of the Blackfeet Nation and the lead plaintiff in Cobell Vs. Norton, a lawsuit filed in 1996 to force an accounting of trust fund moneys held by the federal government for American Indians.
