by Betsy Cohen
The Associated Press
There’s a war room deep in the bowels of the U.S. Department of Justice
building named for Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe.
When she talks about the dubious honor, Cobell laughs, partly because she
knows it’s there, but mostly because the government is on the losing side of
the battle.
“This isn’t about ego, it’s about making the government accountable,” Cobell
said Wednesday in Missoula. “Indian people simply don’t know what they own –
nobody has ever held the U.S. government accountable.”
Cobell is lead plaintiff in the largest lawsuit ever filed by American
Indians against the federal government.
And so far, she’s won the first round of a two-part case, which has resulted
in an overhaul of the government’s accounting system that has for 113 years
mismanaged billions of dollars in land assets belonging to roughly 500,000
Indians and their heirs.
Now, she and all of the Indian nations are waiting for the trial to begin in
which they hope to recover more than $10 billion in land, gas, oil, water
and timber leases they believe are theirs and were denied them because of
poor accounting practices, and is some case, no accounting.
On Thursday, Cobell will give the seventh annual Native American Lecture at
the University of Montana. In her talk “Indian Nations: Empowerment and
Asset Building in Communities,” Cobell will discuss the lawsuit but also the
lessons she’s learned from it.
“When people don’t know their assets, don’t know what land they own and
what’s on top and what’s underneath they have nothing to leverage,” she
said. “If you can’t take it to the bank, you miss out on an entire quality
of life.”
Cobell said she is confident that Indians will win back the billions of
dollars owed to them, but there is no date set for the trial, and the money
may not be handed over any time soon.
“The problem is that nobody in government wants this to be resolved on their
watch,” she said.
In the meantime, members of the Blackfeet Tribe, like Cobell, are working to
lay the foundations for the community’s future.
For the first time, the U.S. government will have an accurate Indian land
and land assets database, and the Blackfeet will know for the first time
what they own and what it is worth.
“We have a new beginning,” Cobell said. “From this point on we have
accountability.”
And because of that, Indians are looking forward to a new world of
unfettered possibilities.
“It’s such an exciting time for people who are building communities,” Cobell
said. “On the Blackfeet Reservation we have the ability to really control
growth, but healthy growth, I think, because of our location. I see so many
opportunities for our young people to come home to. In banking alone, we
need bankers and loan officers. We need environmentalists, we need
naturalists and people who are experienced in land management.”
The bitter pill is knowing that so many tribal members who are now dead had
to live in destitution because they were not given what was owed them,
Cobell said.
“We should all have been living middle-class lifestyles. There’s no reason
people on reservations should be living in poverty,” she said. “It’s going
to take time and I don’t expect to see visible results in my lifetime, but
my grandchildren will.”
In coming months and years, Cobell envisions her community as one that
begins to reinvent itself with the power of ownership.
“It’s freedom,” she said. “There are assets everywhere you look and when you
get to start from the very beginning it’s empowering – you have such pride,
you know who you are because you know where you’ve been.”
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