by Elouise Cobell
Opinion Column
Oklahoma Indian Times
The new Bush Administration needs to pay immediate attention to one part of the Clinton legacy –- the 1996 lawsuit by American Indians who want long-overdue reform of the individual Indian trust account system, combined with a financial accounting that makes up, at least partly, for 120 years of mismanagement and neglect by the U.S. government.
Mr. Clinton’s Interior and Treasury departments, and especially his Department of Justice, fought to block the suit at every turn, even after losing a two-month trial in 1999 on the trust reform issues and managing to get two of its Cabinet officers – Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as BIA head Kevin Gover – declared in contempt of court.
Now the named plaintiffs in the case, together with the 500,000 American Indian trust beneficiaries we represent, are eager to see whether Bush officials are ready to take a fairer, more common sense approach to ending the court fight and beginning to put an honest, accurate and efficient trust system in place, instead of the national disgrace that has been the norm since the late 19th century.
They will have to decide quickly. The Interior and Treasury secretaries are responsible for their departments’ actions from the day they take office. Unfortunately, they inherit a record of ignoring the orders of the Court that will have them headed for trouble, too, unless they change direction promptly. The court-appointed Special Master who helps oversee the case has called the Individual Indian Monies (IIM) trust system “out of control.”
Shortly after we filed our lawsuit almost five years ago, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth in Washington, D.C. ordered Interior and Treasury to produce all records for the accounts of the five named plaintiffs, going back to the original land allotments in the 1880s. These are records that are supposed to document all revenues generated by allotted Indian lands and held in trust for individual beneficiaries by the United States – leasing fees and royalties for oil and gas drilling (much of it in Oklahoma), grazing, logging, mineral extraction, sand and gravel and so on.
Four and a half years later, Interior and Treasury still have not complied with the judge’s order. Testimony and evidence in the case have confirmed that comparatively few records exist. Documents have been lost, allowed to deteriorate or destroyed for more than a century – and the destruction continues today, in violation of court orders. The government actually does not know, and cannot say, how much money has come into the trust accounts over the past century or how much has been paid out to individual Indians. If bankers ran a private trust this way, they would go to jail. No wonder Judge Lamberth called the IIM trusts “fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.”
The next milestones in the case won’t be long in coming. As one of his final acts, Secretary Babbitt set in motion a proposed “statistical sampling” of individual trust accounts, in place of the specific accounting ordered by the Court. Since critical records have been destroyed and cannot be sampled, the plaintiffs see this plan as an unnecessary and costly delaying tactic, with an estimated price tag of somewhere between $17 million and $70 million. Congress gave Interior $10 million to start the project, but has strongly suggested settling the case. The Bush Administration has an opportunity now to reverse Interior’s course; we hope it will. The government also appealed the outcome of the 1999 trial on trust reform issues, which it lost, claiming it has no real trust duties to Indian beneficiaries. An appellate ruling is expected soon.
As Judge Lamberth has said, “The United States imposed this trust on the Indian people. As the government concedes, the purpose of the IIM trust was to deprive plaintiffs’ ancestors of their native lands and rid the nation of their tribal identity.” The Bush Administration has a choice: It can settle the case quickly or it can continue to fight. Either way, I know we are going to win.
>Elouise Cobell is the lead plaintiff in Cobell v. Babbitt, and chairman of the Blackfeet National Bank. For more information, please visit Indian Trust
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