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CounterPunch
September
5, 2002
Stolen Trust
Gale Norton,
Native Americans and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Elouise Cobell comes right to the point. "Gale
Norton should be thrown in jail." Cobell is a leader of
the Blackfeet tribe, and lives along the Rocky Mountain Front
in northwestern Montana. Norton, of course, is secretary of the
interior and, as such, oversees the US government's relationship
with Indian tribes.
Norton also controls the purse strings
on federal trust funds holding more than $40 billion dollars
owed to Indians across the nation. For her role in the mismanagement
of the trust fund, Norton is facing a contempt court citation
from federal judge Royce Lamberth. If she gets slapped, she'll
be in bi-partisan company. In 2000, Lamberth hit Bruce Babbitt
and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin with contempt citations for
failing to halt the destruction of Indian trust account documents.
The case begin in 1996 when Cobell, who
has been called the Rosa Parks of Indian Country, filed a federal
class action suit against the Interior Department, seeking both
money that's been owed to Indian people and a radical change
in how the trust fund is managed. Six years later, the case now
stands as the largest class action suit in history, with more
than 500,000 claimants. And, as it wound its way through the
courts, it has tarnished two administrations and exposed the
continuing war on Indian people by the federal government.
"We're not after money from the
government," Cobell says. "The government has taken
money that belongs to us."
Of course, stealing from Indians goes
back to the origins of the republic. Mismanagement of Indian
trust accounts was first noted by congress in 1823. But the Cobell
suit is targeted at the notorious Dawes Act of 1887, which was
a attempt to shatter Indian solidarity and culture by privatizing
the reservations into 140 acre allotments put in the names of
individual Indians. It was a set up, naturally. Indians were
soon swindled out of more than two-thirds of their land, about
135,000 square miles in all. The remaining 57 million acres was
put into a trust held by the Department of Interior. This too
was a scam. With little or no input from the tribes, the land
was leased out to white ranchers, oil companies, mining firms
and timber companies. The land was stripped of its resources,
often left in a ravaged condition.
The revenues from these leases (often
sold at bargain-basement rates) goes into a trust fund administered
by the Department of Interior. These days the fund receives about
$500 million a year. Since 1887, more than $100 billion has gone
into the accounts. Although the ranchers and oil companies have
made a killing, little of that money has ever reached the tribes,
where the per capita income hovers at less than $10,000 a year
and unemployment rates hover near 70 percent. A new study shows
that more than 90 percent of elderly Indians across the country
are without access to long-term health care.
Lots of people have made money in futile
and half-hearted attempts to straighten out the mess. In the
early 1990s, Enron's favorite bookkeepers, Arthur Anderson was
hired to make sense of the trust fund accounts. After two years,
they retreated in failure, but collected $20 million for their
time.
"This scandal makes Enron look like
a pimple," Cobell says. "It's worse than Enron, because
it's the government that is lying, covering up and breaching
its trust. They stole people's entire life savings. They robbed
an entire race of people. If banks had ripped off white people,
they'd be shut down in a New York second and everybody responsible
would go to jail."
Before filing suit, Cobell tried to meet
with Bruce Babbitt, then Clinton's Interior Secretary. Despite
his high-minded rhetoric about environmental justice, Babbitt
slammed the door in Cobol's face. She then sought out Janet Reno.
Reno too brushed her aside. Cobell was disgusted at the hypocrisy
and cowardice of the Clinton crowd. "They ought to have
been ashamed," Cobell told one of Reno's deputies. "People
are dying in all Indian communities. They don't have access to
their own money."
In 1999, Lamberth ruled that the Interior
Department had grossly mismanaged the accounts. "This case
reveals a shocking pattern of deception," Lamberth wrote
in his ruling. "I've never seen more egregious misconduct
by the federal government." It was a huge victory for Cobell,
who heard the news as she was driving across the wind-swept Blackfeet
reservation. "I pulled over to the side of the road and
I cried and cried," Cobell recalled.
But victory didn't prove that simple.
Three years later, not a single Indian account has been straightened
out and the government has done its best to defy the court and
subvert its ruling. Incriminating emails were deleted. Subpoenaed
documents were trashed, burned and shredded. The recalcitrance
and malfeasance were so pervasive that Lamberth cited both Babbitt
and Rubin with contempt of court.
Cobell thinks that the Clinton team was
simply running out the clock, waiting to hand the mess off to
the next administration. "It was crystal clear to me what
the Clinton administration was up to," Cobell says. "Stalling,
stalling and stalling."
When Norton took over, things got worse.
Norton is a protege of James Watt, who once described Indian
reservations as "the last bastions of socialism in the western
world". Watts desperately wanted to revive the malicious
spirit of the Dawes Act and sell off the rest of Indian country
to the highest bidder. He was driven from office before he could
realize this ambition, but Norton holds many of the same ideas
and prejudices.
A few weeks after taking office, Norton
told Judge Lamberth that she was intent on developing a plan
that would restructure the Indian trust account system. In the
year it took to develop, Norton and her team didn't consult once
with the tribes. When the plan was unveiled nearly every tribe
in the country denounced it.
Meanwhile, a string of special masters
appointed to oversee the Interior Department's implementation
of the rulings of the court have denounced Norton and her colleagues
for tardiness, incompetence and "government malfeasance".
Norton claimed that the Department's
new computer system would provide a quick fix to the problem.
But last year a computer hacker successfully penetrated the site
to demonstrate how easily the trust fund's records could be manipulated.
Lamberth ordered the department to shut down all of its computer
systems until the security problem could be fixed.
Norton's flacks used the ruling as a
pretext to withhold dispatch of the year-end trust fund checks
to 40,000 Indians. It was a move designed to punish the tribes
and to try to undermine Cobell and her cohorts. Denied their
money during Christmastime, several Indians called Cobell, blaming
her for the bleak circumstances. "It was an act of retaliation",
says Cobell. "They knew that Indians were starving, because
they had no checks. Yet they did nothing."
Only a couple of members of congress
were angered by these strong-arm tactics. "These people
were subject to losing their car or their house," said Rep.
Tom Udall, the Democrat from Colorado. "If this happened
to security, all of Congress would be in an uproar."
But Lamberth was less tolerant. He has
threatened to hold Norton and Bureau of Indian Affairs head Neal
McCaleb in contempt. They could face jail and fines. Lamberth
has already warned that the fines will be paid from their personal
accounts and not government funds.
But Norton remains undeterred. In late
July she engineered the forced resignation of Thomas Slonaker
from his position as the special trustee for the Indian trust
fund system. Slonaker, a Republican banking executive from Phoenix,
had recently reported that the Interior Department had done little
to make corrections to the trust account system. Slonaker had
been called to testify before a senate hearing on the mismanagement
of the trust fund and Norton instructed him not to submit his
prepared testimony. When Slonaker refused, he was handed a letter
of resignation by Steven Griles, Deputy Interior Secretary.
"It was like telling the emperor
that she has no clothes," said Slonaker. "Sometimes,
criticism is not welcome."
Cobell won't be so easy to get rid of.
In the past, government officials have always counted on the
poverty of Indian people as they trample over their rights with
near impunity. But Cobell is a creative businesswoman and a master
fundraiser. So far she has raised $9 million for the trust lawsuit
from private sources and foundations, notably the Lannan Fund
of New Mexico, which contributed $2 million to the cause.
She'll probably need every penny, because
there's no indication that the Bush administration is backing
down. "The government is going to fight this no matter what,
even if it's morally, legally or ethically in the wrong,"
Cobell says. "That's a real country in itself." That's
just the way things go in Indian country.
But Cobell also sees the litigation has
having served to unite the tribes in a common front. "I
actually see it as a miracle," Cobell says. "I've never
seen tribes come together and work so hard."
Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at: counterpunch@counterpunch.org
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