Seattle Times Editorial
"They have run our trusts like a bank totally out of control."
Elouise Cobell
For the past century, the federal government has held hundreds of thousands of acres of Indian land (some with valuable mineral and other resources) “in trust” for the land’s Native American owners. The government was supposed to collect the land-use money for individual Indian property owners and turn it over to them. It appears that it usually did the first half okay but often failed to do the second. Congress scrutinized the situation and passed corrective legislation. When that still did not solve the problem, Native Americans went to court, and the Cobell v. Norton case (also known as the Indian Trust Fund scandal case) is still not resolved. Now members of Congress are threatening to take the matter into their own hands because billions of dollars are involved. Even though the trust funds were never taxpayer dollars, the replacement funds would probably have to come from taxpayers.
Here is what you ought to know about the situation:
1. It’s their money. Individual Native Americans and their families own the land. Acting as trustee for them, the government entered into contracts with many different companies to use the land for mining, cattle grazing, timbering, and similar uses. The government collects the land-use money for the Indians, and was supposed to turn it all over to them. The court case has proven that the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has not always done that.
2. Native Americans want an accounting, just as you or I would want from a bank which collected our money for us. The first request made in the case was that the government provide to the Indian owners an accounting of how much money was collected, and how much has been turned over to them. So far, over the nine years that the case has been going on, the BIA has not done that.
3. The Department of Interior has done a scandalous job of keeping trust fund records. Evidence submitted in the case showed that at least 162 boxes of records were destroyed by employees of the BIA while the case was pending. BIA also allowed additional boxes of records to be ruined by mold in a building in New Mexico. And then it covered up those facts in statements submitted to the court. It appears that either the department was terribly sloppy, was concealing what happened to the money, or both.
4. The federal district court judge found the Department of Interior to be severely recalcitrant on several occasions. The judge has been unusually blunt in criticizing the department for its actions. Most recently, on February 7, 2005, he took the department to task for having stopped issuing checks to Individual Indian Money account holders while the case is going on. He stated, “The idea that Interior would either instruct or allow BIA to withhold trust payments, and then to stonewall the Indians who dared to ask why, is an obscenity that harkens back to the darkest days of United States–Indian relations.” He went on to say, “The Court is offended that the individuals responsible for these acts would cite the Court’s Orders as justification; but the perniciousness and irresponsibility demonstrated by blaming the Court pales in comparison to the utter depravity and moral turpitude displayed by these individuals’ willingness to withhold needed finances from people struggling to survive and support families on subsistence incomes.”
5. American Indians cannot afford to go without what is due to them. The economic situation of American Indians is well documented. For example, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights stated in July 2003, “Native Americans rank at or near the bottom of nearly every social, health, and economic indicator. For example, the national poverty rate in the United States for the period between 1999 and 2001 was 11.6 percent. For Native Americans nationally, the average annual poverty rate was 24.5 percent. That is, nearly a quarter of Native Americans – more than twice the national average – live in poverty.”
6. If we hadn’t taken their land in the first place, they would not need to rely on the federal government to manage their funds for them, and instead they would be getting paid directly by the companies involved. These Individual Indian Money accounts were created by U.S. governmental policy that was in place under the Dawes Act between 1887 and 1934. Known as the General Allotment Act, the policy compelled the breakup of a great deal of Indian territory into small parcels placed in the name of individual owners, and simultaneously made the “surplus land” available for settlement by non-Indian farmers and ranchers. That policy preserved for the federal government the right to manage the sale of the natural resources located on the land. Ironically, the government had put the land in trust to protect “ignorant savages.”
7. This is not a partisan issue in any way. American Indian plaintiffs first filed suit during the Clinton administration. Interior Department officials at the time were just as recalcitrant in responding as officials in the Bush administration have been. In 1999 a U.S. district court judge held Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin in contempt for failing to follow court orders. He entered similar findings against the current Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton in 2002 and again in 2004. The judge was a Reagan appointee.
8. Governmental officials have acknowledged that they did not handle the Indians’ money properly. Testifying in court under oath, Secretary Babbitt acknowledged that the “fiduciary responsibilities” of the U.S. Government are “not being fulfilled.” The U.S. Court of Appeals referred to “the magnitude of the government’s malfeasance” in affirming the actions of the district court judge in the case. The Senate Government Affairs Committee cited the department’s bungling of the Individual Indian Trust accounts as one of Washington’s “Ten Worst” examples of federal government mismanagement.
9. This money is not welfare, it is simply a matter of giving Indian people what they are owed. At no point has the government claimed that the Individual Indian Money accounts did not belong to the people whose names were on the accounts. The court has simply said that the government must act the same as any other trustee does when holding someone else’s money. It is true that the money will need to be allocated by Congress, but that is simply to honor the responsibilities that the department took on when it entered into leases on behalf of the Indian owners.
10. The government has a history of bailing out private entities who squander money; it has an even greater responsibility to pay up when its own agencies do not handle money properly. It is not as if Congress has no history of allocating large sums of money to pay people who are due money on account of malfeasance. The savings and loan bailout is only one example of Congress coming to the aid of victims of poor fiscal management, and in that case, it was a series of private companies which acted improperly. Here, it is government employees themselves who failed to fulfill their duties. That creates a special duty for Congress to see that each victim of the financial mismanagement is fully reimbursed for his or her losses.
A common misunderstanding is that the land trust profits are reparations or a pay-off for past wrongs committed against Native Americans. Most people understand that the problems with Indian trust funds are not a welfare issue or a program funding issue. A few wonder what the problem is if everyone is now rich from gaming-- clearly a gross misunderstanding of the continuing poverty in most of Indian Country.
The talking points above deal with what the situation really is but be sure that you can explain what the trust scandal and obligation to settle the class action law suit is NOT about. The withheld Indian trust funds should be immediately returned because it is the property and the financial nest eggs of individuals, money that has been taken, lost, or mismanaged by the federal government.
- Trust money returns are NOT compensation and atonement. Examples of such cases are the U.S. giving money as an apology to Japanese Americans interred during World War II and Canada's consideration of giving descendents of Chinese laborers money because these laborers were forced to pay the government to stay in Canada unlike any other group of immigrants.
- Trust money returns are NOT simply a matter of conscience and justice. Repaying descendents of slaves would be a form of reparations. There were no banking accounts established in the names of individuals or families because unfortunately they had no resources.
Instead, the situation of affected Individual Indian Money account holders is parallel to Jewish families who could not get their own money back from European banks after the war ended. The banks had no right to money in individual accounts and eventually were forced to pay out billions of dollars they held of the Jewish families' money. After all, it was their own funds.