And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
from: "Craven, Jim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
WHY THE U.S. MAY [SIC] OWE INDIANS UNTOLD BILLIONS
An angry judge demands an accounting
By David Whitman
US News and World REport, March 8, 1999 p. 24
Elouise Cobell may have won a $310,000 'genius grant' from the MacArthur
Foundation, but she still can't figure out how much money the federal
government owes her. That's because her land, passed on to Cobell by her
Blackfeet [sic] Indian ancestors, is held in trust by the U.S. government.
And the U.S. government, well, it's not sure exactly what it owes Cobell--or
several hundred thousand other American Indians who may[sic] have been
cheated out of billions of dollars by government incompetence. As a child on
the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, Cobell would listen to her parents,
aunts and uncles bemoan the Bureau of Indian Affair's inability to document
and diligently disperse the income received from Indian land holdings. Soon,
Cobell had her own initiation into BIA's antiquated trust fund system. In
1979, Cobell's father died. Sixteen years passed before the BIA finished her
father's probate--a delay that Cobell only discovered after she became the
lead plaintiff in a 1996 class action suit over trust fund mismanagement. 'I
still don't know the types of land I own--whether they have timber or oil on
them', says Cobell, who also founded one of the first Indian-owned banks on
a reservation. 'None of us who are trust fund account holders know the depth
of the losses we have suffered.'
Judicial ire. Last week, the sluggish government got a jolt when U.S.
district Judge Royce Lamberth held Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbit and
Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin in contempt of court in the Cobell
lawsuit. Lamberth took the extreme step after concluding that the
government's stonewalling over documents was 'nothing short of a travesty.'
Interior officials said they could not retrieve trust fund records in two
Albuquerque storehouses because rodent droppings ther might spread the
deadly hantavirus. Other records had been lost or destroyed. 'Only in this
litigation', Lambert fumed, could 8,000 cubic feet of documents 'slip
through the cracks'.
Yet well before Clinton officials provoked Lamberth's ire, the trust
funds were a colossal mess. The government began holding funds in trust for
tribes back in 1820; land allotments to individual Indians started in 1887,
when the federal government sought to break up tribes by divvying up tribal
lands, typically in the 80- and 160 acre lots. Today, the BIA is responsible
for arranging leases for grazing, farming, mineral, oil, and timber rights
on the lots, maintaining the leasing income and interest in individual trust
fund accounts.
A 1998 Interior Department report shows there are more than 340,000
individual Indian trust fund accounts, and over $300 million passes through
the accounts each year. But more than 123,000 accounts lack a Social
Security or taxpayer ID number, and a minimum of 46,000 accounts are for
Indians whose whereabouts are unknown. Indian account holders generally find
it impossible to check whether their holdings are correct, often don't
receive regular account statements, and typicaly require BIA permission to
lease their lands. Meanwhile, several billion dollars may well have been
lost over the years in undervalued and uncollected lease payments and in
destroyed or lost checks for Indian beneficiaries. A 1992 congressional
report concluded that 'the Indian trust fund is equivalent to a bank that
doesn't know how much money it has.'
To date, the accounts are in such bad shape that audits are virtually
impossible. A 1997 report for the Interior Department by Griffin &
Associates warned that trust fund problems and the Cobell lawsuit 'may
result in a potential liability to the Federal government so large that it
is not reasonably estimable.' Administration officials last week apologized
for their mistakes in handling the lawsuit but said they were moving forward
with multi-million dollar plans to finally modernize trust fund accounting.
The most troubling price of BIA mismanagement is that it has denied tens
of thousands of needy Indians the opportunity to escape poverty. Throughout
'Indian country', the stories are legion of tribal members who live in
shacks without a phone or a car, near a lucrative oil well or mining claim
from which they reap little profit. Cobell recalls going out a few years ago
with one indigent Blackfeet [sic] tribe member to find his oil wells because
the man had been unable to learn from the government how many wells were on
his lands--three--or where they were located. 'The government', she says,
'has been preying on poor people.'
Judge Lamberth seems inclined to agree. Later this year, or in early
2000, he is expected to preside over a trial to determine how much the
Indians are due. 'The court', as Lamberth put it, 'cannot tolerate more
empty promises.' "
Editorial Note: This article also missed so much. For example, these thefts
of tribal lands and funds are aided and abetted by corrupt sell-out Indians
within the tribes/Nations as well as by the corrupt and incompetent in BIA
and Interior. The featured person of this article, along with her husband,
is considered by many at Browning to be highly involved in the corruption
there that has facilitated the arrogance, abuse, theft and mismanagement
that Indians have suffered throughout US history and that is amply
demonstrated in this article. She has the big bucks to sue; just think about
the individual poor Indians who have no access to information, court
decisions or legal representation. I can add the name of Leonard
Mountainchief who died last week; he lived in a poor HUD home riddled with
holes through which the cold winds off the mountains at Browning passed--he
was trying to clean up tribal corruption and had no money for specialized
medical treatments.
Jim Craven
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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