Free Republic

The House approved settlements today for black farmers whom the federal government had discriminated against in the past. In the debate beforehand, however, Rep. Steve King compared this to "slavery reparations" from the "very, very urban" Barack Obama. The Senate last week finally approved the multi-billion-dollar funding for the Pigford II and Cobell settlements, which will allow the government to pay out claims to African-American farmers and American Indians who were discriminated against in recent decades by government agencies. Now, the House — which has passed the funding several times over — will have to approve it, probably this week....

A top priority of DOI Secretary Ken Salazar was to settle the 13-year old Indian Trust lawsuit. That goal was just met and announced. The settlement says the Federal Government will: o Establish a $1.4 billion fund to settle historic trust mismanagement and accounting claims. o Create a $2 billion fund that DOI will use to buy back fractionated Indian lands to ensure the problems raised by Cobell do not occur again. To provide an additional incentive for account holders to sell their interests in fractionated lands, Interior will direct up to 5 percent of the value of fractionated land...

WASHINGTON - Officials in the federal agency that oversees American Indian trust assets had an improper social relationship with an accounting firm and pressured subordinates to give the firm preferential treatment, a government investigation found. Senior managers in the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians based in Albuquerque, N.M., golfed, drank and partied with the executives of the New Mexico accounting firm Chavarria, Dunne & Lamey, which won $6.6 million in contract work over eight years, according to the report by the Interior Department's inspector general. The investigation, first reported this week by U.S. News & World Report,...

WASHINGTON - Federal officials are investigating how National Archives documents of interest to Indians suing the Interior Department were found discarded in a trash bin and a wastebasket. The discovery came to light on Sept. 1, when Archives staff noticed federal records in one of the trash bins behind the National Archives Building near the Capitol. They notified the Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, whose staff recovered the documents. They found at least a portion of the documents were Bureau of Indian Affairs records dating to the 1950s, according to Jason Baron of the Archives' Office of General Counsel, in...