Still swindling the Indians

WASHINGTON (SH) - No matter who is running the Interior Department - Republicans, Democrats or a hybrid of both - they can't seem to get it right with Native Americans, leaving one to believe that the nation's integrity got buried at Wounded Knee alongside Crazy Horse's heart.

Ever since the U.S. 7th Calvary of Custer fame (or infamy, whichever side one is on) massacred a harmless bunch of Ghost Dancers and their women and children at that now-sacred site, officially ending 30 years of armed hostility toward the Indians, the government has maintained a policy of corruption that even the federal courts can't seem to straighten out despite a persistent and valiant effort by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. That unspoken bureaucratic policy seems to be that if it is no longer permissible to shoot the sons and daughters of Sitting Bull, it is at least fair to pick their pockets.

And, brother, that is exactly what has been going on with hundreds of millions of dollars paid for the use of their land undistributed and unaccounted from a Washington trust fund that has been engendering controversy since 1887. The amount reported in this fund is about $13 billion, but there are substantial allegations that the government has cheated the beneficiaries out of as much as $137 billion. No one seems to really know how much.

One court order after another has failed to bring about a clear accounting. Even Lamberth's drastic step of holding more than one official or another, including the last two Interior secretaries, Democrat Bruce Babbitt and Republican Gale Norton, in contempt of court and ultimately appointing his own investigator to look into the mismanagement hasn't been able to produce an audit in which anyone has any faith.

Now it seems Lamberth's investigator, Alan Balaran, has thrown up his hands in disgust and resigned, charging that both the Interior and the Justice departments have been working overtime to thwart his efforts since he came across evidence that the feds have negotiated oil and gas leases on Indian land with private companies that were only a fraction of the rate paid private landowners.

Balaran reported last year that Interior's chief appraiser in New Mexico in particular had repeatedly worked deals for energy companies to pay less than fair market value to the Indians. One incident he cited was a negotiation with a company to compensate the Indians $4.50 a yard for the right to put a pipeline across their land when the company paid private landowners $104 a yard for the same pipeline rights.

His diligence, Balaran alleges, brought the wrath of the Justice Department down on him. He was ordered out of an Interior repository in Dallas where he was trying to review files on audits of gas and oil leases and accused of unethical behavior. That, of course, should surprise no one given the fact the government long has been protecting a Bureau of Indian Affairs that has set a standard for corruption and mismanagement for over a century that is hard to match.

Who's to blame for all this perfidy? The answer probably is nearly every administration since the commanding general of the Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, uttered his startling, then politically correct assessment that the "only good Indian is a dead Indian." How ironic that this should come from a man who bears the name of one of those "savages." While it would be unfair to attach such ignoble sentiment to the current government or its predecessors for at least the last 100 years, the neglect, hidden behind a policy of benign benevolence, would indicate that deep down it is still hanging around in some bureaucratic quarters.

How else would one explain the refusal to clean up this mess, this injustice? Even after Congress 10 years ago passed the American Indian Trust Reform Management Act requiring the department to account for all the money in the trust fund and the department said it would do so, nothing really much has happened to straighten out what at best can be called incompetence and, at worst, wholesale malfeasance.

In fact, as the result of Balaran's investigation, Lamberth recently ordered Interior to shut down most of its Internet access because of security problems with the fund. It was unsafe from hackers.

It would be easier to believe the official government line that Balaran himself has been unethical and unscrupulous if history wasn't so thoroughly on his side. Lamberth accepted Balaran's resignation with regret. What is equally regrettable is the seeming inability of any administration to do right by fellow Americans who want nothing more than fair treatment.

It is only an accident of administrative rearrangement that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is part of the Department of Interior. In a perfect world, it would be a branch of the Department of State. Effectively, they are being run as a branch of the Department of Justice.

That said, what is the equitable answer of providing compensation to the various Tribes? Old grievances kept being thrown into the negotiations, even though they may have been considered fully settled, because some important piece of paper was lost or deliberately destroyed. Some Tribes simply do not accept the compensation, and think they may still get Manhattan back for $24 in trinkets. Or worse, they want compensation paid for land rental going back over 200 years.

There are enormous problems regarding fractionation of ownerships, where some 40-acre tract in Nevada may have some 250 owners. How are the owners compensated for their share of ownership, when each fractional share may have about $0.04 as their annual lease value? And that is actually pretty good for unirrigated greasewood pasture.

Every form of making compensation to the Tribes, or the individual Indian, has been attempted in the history of the United States. And what is fair compensation? What the neighbor paid for use of the land? The only other landowner for a dozen, or a hundred miles either way, might be the Department of Defense, or the Bureau of Land Management, or the Forest Service. These agencies settle into making a given compensation for rights of way, or for grazing leases, or mineral extraction rights, and then these are applied to adjacent Indian lands. That is how the anomaly of some Tribe being paid $4.50 per yard for right of way, and private ownership some fifty miles away, being paid $104 per yard of right of way, arises in the first place. The closer comparable is NOT the private ownership, it is the land held by the US Government five miles down the road (or as the crow flies).

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