The Denver Post
The federal government continues to behave outrageously in the Indian trust fund case. The federal court overseeing the lawsuit should throw the book at wayward government employees. And the new secretaries of the U.S. Interior and Treasury departments, Gale Norton and Paul O’Neill, should make resolving the accounts a high priority.
A few years ago, the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund sued the government for mismanaging billions of dollars in assets held in trust for the Indians, including mineral royalties, grazing leases and timber sales.
Despite repeated promises to correct the problems, the case hasn’t been resolved. According to some Indian lawyers and elected officials, the feds even today are shortchanging Indians on payments they’re owed.
The endless delays are maddening enough. But there also have been repeated, disturbing instances of government employees shredding, losing or discarding potentially important documents. The most recent to come to light: a 1999 episode involving the destruction of at least one box of documents stored at the Federal Reserve Bank in Denver.
A single episode of document destruction might be chalked up to incompetence or low-level workers not following instructions.
But the recurring problem seriously undercuts the government’s claim that it wants to resolve the case in a fair and just manner. If the many lost documents can’t be found, it will be far more difficult for the Indians to reconstruct the paper trail to learn how much they are owed and by whom.
Former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Bureau of Indian Affairs director Kevin Gover and Treasury chief Robert Rubin seemed vexed and baffled by their inability to keep their subordinates from ignoring or subverting instructions from the federal court. While Interior and the BIA are directly in charge of Indian matters, Treasury is responsible for making correct trust fund payments.
The Bush administration didn’t create the mess – in fact its roots reach back over a century. But it is now up to the Bush team to sort out the mess and make the bureaucracy obey both court orders and federal statutes.
Norton and O’Neill might gain credibility with both U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is supervising the case, and with the Indian tribes, if they honestly said: We don’t know exactly what has happened, or why, but we darn sure intend to find out.
And then they must make good on that promise.
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