by Elousie Cobell
The Daily Oklahoman
The way Ross Swimmer, the Interior Department’s special trustee, is talking these days you’d think there really wasn’t any reason for Indians to be upset over the thousands of individual Indian trust accounts the Oklahoman is supposed to be overseeing.
After years of attempting to find the billions of dollars that are missing, Swimmer told a group of reporters recently that his department hasn’t been able to find any serious problems with the accounts it has been checking. There may be some missing money, he conceded.
But Swimmer insisted that any losses are perhaps in the millions — not the billions of dollars that plaintiffs in a nine-year-old lawsuit against the federal government have been suggesting.
What Swimmer isn’t telling his listeners is that his department has only begun to check the records. And the records it is still checking are those from the most recent years — 1985 forward, the so-called “electronic era” of trust records. Even there, the “accounting” is laughable — they don’t review the over 95 percent of “unrecorded” transactions and presume that unverified transactions are correct.
But as Swimmer well knows, the government’s trust records date from 1887. Study after study by the government has documented that massive amounts of documents are missing from the Interior Department’s files.
So how can Swimmer, or any Interior official, truthfully say they’re verifying that the trust records are in good shape? That every thing indicates most Indians were being properly paid? As the former head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Swimmer knows firsthand how bad the trust records are. When he was head of the BIA in the Reagan administration, it was so fouled up that he tried to convince Congress to turn the entire trust operation over to commercial banks.
Congress heeded the warning of Indian tribes and issued a resounding “no” to that idea. First, fix the records, the lawmakers said. That’s the part of the problem Swimmer would just as soon Congress forget. He can’t fix documents he can’t find. Investigators have documented that massive numbers of the records are missing. Destroyed. Lost.
Years after our lawsuit was filed, someone discovered a barn filled with discarded and missing trust records in Anadarko. These records were being watched only by the rats in that leaky building. Interior officials testified that when the barn filled up, they just tossed out the oldest records and stacked in newer ones.
As for the leases of Indian lands that were supposed to be the sources of trust account funds, thousands of those leases were never recorded. So how can the trust records be accurate? They can’t.
That makes all the statements from Swimmer and others at Interior that everything is fine with the records a bald-faced lie.
What they want you to think is that they can paint an accurate picture of the trust accounts by relying on the tiny percentage of the total records that they can lay their hands on. That’s like saying you can tell the entire story of America by beginning with the Jamestown settlement in 1607. All you have to do is forget about the Indians — the first Americans.
But forgetting about Indians is what Interior has been doing since 1887. That’s when it was supposed to create trust accounts for individual Indians. It never did the job right then and just saying that its current records are accurate won’t cut it. It’s time to tell Swimmer and his friends at Interior, no, we won’t forget about the Indians this time.
A member of Montana’s Blackfeet Nation, Elouise Cobell is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that is seeking to correct the government’s accounting abuses in thousands of individual Indian money accounts held in trust for the nation’s Indians by the Interior Department.
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