Ray, interesting stuff! Just a couple of comments. On the
Athabascans, neither Georgianna Lincoln nor the grade 10 students appear to be
quite right, though Ms. Lincoln comes ever so close. From what little I
know about languages, Athabascans (or Athapaskans, or Deneans) comprise a large
linguistic family (languages, not dialects - though there could be dialects
within each language, just as Jamaicans don't speak English the same way as
Canadians). Often Eyak, an Alaskan language family, which is very,
very, very nearly if not completely extinct, is associated with them. One
should think about the Athapaskan languages in much the same way as one thinks
about Indo-European language families - e.g. the Romance languages which include
French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, etc. The Athapaskan languages
include everything from Gwich'in spoken in the far northern Yukon and Alaska to
Navaho and Apache spoken in the southern US. I once sat in on an informal
session in which a Navaho woman and some Slavey or Dogrib men (from around Great
Slave Lake) compared words. Despite about a thousand years of separation,
quite a few words were still close in sound and meaning.
And, of course, among Athapaskans, each group and sub-group has its own
Chief, elders and unique features.
On the multi-billion dollar lawsuit, I would suspect that the Indians have
a case that, if not based on theft, would almost certainly be based on
mismanagement or not fulfilling obligatory responsibilities. It reminds me
of a couple of things in Canada. One is a court case: Guerin v.s. the
Queen which was based on a grievance that the federal government (Indian
Affairs) leased part of the Musqueam reserve near Vancouver for a golf course at
less than fair market value and witheld information from band, meaning
substantial lost revenues. What the Guerin case established is that that
the Federal Crown's responsibility towards First Nations is enforceable in law
and trust-like. The federal government must act as a "fiduciary" toward
its Aboriginal clients. The other thing that comes to mind is the Treaty
Lands Entitlement Process which resulted from the transfer of lands and
resources by the Federal government to the governments of Saskatchewan and
Manitoba in 1930. The transfer was accompanied by a provincial undertaking
to continue the process of land selection by Indian bands as required under the
Treaties. The provinces didn't do so, or were far, far to slow in doing
it, so it is continuing now under agreements involving funding from both the
federal and provincial governments.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 07,
2003 1:53 PM
Subject: [Futurework]
History? or Cultural Bias
Lack of True American Indian History in Textbooks
By
Georgianna Lincoln,
Athabascan, Rampart
When I was a little girl, my mother taught me that our Athabascan
tribe contains many subtribes, dialects, and customs, each having its own
chief and set of Elders.
Imagine my surprise to read the following words in a history textbook
called America, America and written for tenth graders in American schools: "A
tribe is a group that is united by a common history, follows the same customs,
and is ruled by the same chief or group of Elders. The people of each tribe
speak the same language, and have the same religion."
Unfortunately, this inaccuracy is mild compared to some of the other
things I discovered while reviewing how Native Americans are portrayed in the
history textbooks used in our schools, and how they have been regarded by
society. It’s no wonder that some of the general public, and to some extent,
even a former president of the United States, continue to think of Native
Americans as "savages."
Georgianna Lincoln, "Lack of True American Indian History in
Textbooks," in Authentic Alaska: Voices of Its Native Writers, Susan B. Andrew
and John Creed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 91-95. Used
with permission of the publisher. Cost and Availability.
January 7, 2003
American Indians Say Government Has Cheated Them Out
of Billions
By JOEL BRINKLEY
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — More than 300,000 American Indians gave a
federal judge a detailed court filing today based on private historical
records asserting that the government had cheated them out of as much as
$137.2 billion over the last 115 years.
The court action marked a significant turn in the largest class-action
suit ever filed by Indians against the federal government and showed just what
kind of sums are at stake.
For generations Indians have complained that the federal government has
lost or stolen millions of dollars earned on tribal lands. And for decade
after decade the government has ignored or disputed those contentions while
failing to offer detailed accounts of how much money has been raised from oil
and mineral, timber and grazing leases, proceeds of which go into a trust fund
for the Indians' benefit.
The conflict — dating from 1887 — escalated into a lawsuit that the
Indians filed against the Department of the Interior in June 1996. In the six
years since, the standoff has become ever more bitter, documents have been
destroyed and interior and Treasury secretaries have been held in contempt of
court. But until now the Indians' evidence of loss was largely
anecdotal.
"We just knew there was a lot of money missing," said Tex Hall, president
of the National Congress of American Indians and the leader of his tribe, the
Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota. "Elders would come to me
and say, `Tex, I got money last year but didn't get any this year.' There was
so much variation in the system that we know something was wrong."
Today, however, the Indians attempted to quantify their loss. In a
voluminous filing that included detailed private records of oil extraction and
mineral mining going back to the late 19th century, lawyers for the Indians
said the government had stolen, lost or misallocated tens of billions since it
was given responsibility for managing assets on Indian lands in 1887. The
lawyers said that if all the figures were added up they would reach $137.2
billion.
Government officials, told what the Indians were claiming, ridiculed the
figure, which is more than 10 times the size of the Interior Department's
budget. J. Steven Griles, the deputy interior secretary, who manages the trust
fund issue, said: "Nobody has shown me that there has been a loss. They
haven't provided one shred of evidence."
For its part, the Interior Department filed a brief today that shows only
how it intends to overhaul trust fund management and account for the money in
the fund.
Over the last several years, Judge Royce C. Lamberth has come down hard
on the side of the Indians, saying he has never seen greater government
incompetence than the department has displayed in administering the Indians'
money and in representing itself in court.
When the government appealed his 1999 order for a full accounting, the
Court of Appeals resoundingly upheld Judge Lamberth and accused the department
of "malfeasance."
The Interior Department's performance has served as "the gold standard
for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century," Judge
Lamberth wrote last September.
Problems with the Indian Trust Fund began almost as soon as it was set
up. It came into existence as a result of a scheme in 1887 by Senator Henry
Dawes, a Massachusetts Republican who proposed dividing much of the land held
by Indian reservations into plots for individual Indians as a way to persuade
them to become farmers on their own land.
Others saw the new law as an opportunity for a great land grab, through
purchases or swindles. Just after passage of the law in 1887, individual
Indians owned 138 million acres. Today they own about 10 million. Tribes own
an additional 45 million acres.
The new law also charged the Interior Department with managing the land.
A timber company hoping to cut down trees on an Indian's land, for example,
would negotiate a lease with the department, which would collect the money and
then pay the landowners.
Almost right away, newspapers began to report that Indians were not
getting their money. But it was another 40 years before the government took
its first look at the problem. In 1929, the General Accounting Office reported
that "numerous expenditures are made from these funds" that were not payments
to the Indian owners "by using a very broad interpretation of what constitutes
the benefit of the Indian."
In general, the accounting office said, the trust fund's books were in
such disarray that it was impossible to verify that "the Indian received the
full measure of benefit to which he was entitled."
In the decades since then scores of reports from government auditors
continued to document the problems, culminating with an influential
Congressional report in 1992 titled "Misplaced Trust: The Bureau of Indian
Affairs' Mismanagement of the Indian Trust Fund."
It documented "a dismal history of inaction and incompetence."
In 1994, Congress passed the American Indian Trust Reform Management Act,
which required the department to account for all the money in the fund — and
to clean up the accounting and payment processes. Interior promised to comply,
but in the following years little was done.
In 1996, Elouise Cobell, a banker and Blackfoot Indian from Montana,
filed the lawsuit demanding a full accounting of the fund. She said she was
left little choice because, when she asked questions of Interior Department
officials, "what I got were patronizing pats on the head."
No doubt, reconstructing trust records for thousands of accounts over the
last 115 years is a daunting task — particularly since many of the records
have been destroyed. But the government continued destroying hundreds of boxes
of trust fund records years after the suit was filed, even after Judge
Lamberth ordered that they be preserved.
When the Interior Department asked the Justice Department to appeal
Judge's Lamberth's ruling calling for an accounting in 1999, Justice
Department lawyers advised that an appeal would not succeed unless interior at
least appeared to be performing an accounting, court records say.
So in April 2000 the government published a notice in the Federal
Register saying it wanted to take opinions on how an accounting should be
done. But even before most of the public opinion was taken, the Interior
Department decided privately to use a statistical sampling technique, instead
of real accounting.
Judge Lamberth wrote last fall that the Federal Register notice was "a
sham." The entire exercise was "an unconscionable scheme" and "gross
misbehavior" that "rises to the level of fraud on the court."
When Secretary Gale A. Norton came into office, she endorsed the sampling
plan but changed her mind a few months later. In the spring of 2001 the
Interior Department opened and staffed a new division, called the Office of
Historical Trust Accounting. Fourteen employees and dozens of contract workers
spent a year determining how a full accounting might be done. When they
finished last July, their report said the work would last a decade or longer,
cost at least $2.4 billion — and might not even produce a usable result.
Joseph F. Keiffer III, appointed by Judge Lamberth to monitor the case,
concluded that "it is time to consider that the department not only will not —
but also cannot — perform the historical accounting mandated by Congress and
ordered by this court."
In interviews last month, department officials acknowledged that they
were scrapping the historical accounting office proposal and writing off the
time and money spent on it. The officials also said they had concluded that a
full historical accounting would be impossible.
Today, the fund holds about $3.2 billion, and the government pays out
about $560 million a year. Some recipients are paid as little as 5 cents
annually; others get as much as a few thousand dollars.
After more than six years in court, some in Congress and elsewhere have
urged the two sides to settle. But views have hardened.
Mr. Griles, the deputy interior secretary who manages the trust fund,
said, "I am not settling a case with taxpayer money for billions of dollars
when there is no supporting evidence that the money they say they lost ever
existed."
But Mr. Hall, the president of the National Congress of American Indians,
counters: "This isn't taxpayer money. This is our money that the government
took, and they have to give it back."
