Restoring Indian Trust Will Be Costly

INSIGHT magazine ^ | August 5, 2002 | Sean Paige

[Stand Watch Listen]

A century of mismanagement, malfeasance and mistrust won't be reversed or rectified quickly or cheaply, according to a new report from the Department of the Interior (DOI) indicating that making sense of badly jumbled Indian trust accounts dating to the late 1800s will take at least a decade and cost $2.4 billion [see "DOI Speaks With Forked Tongue," June 10; "Bureaucrats Circle Their Wagons," Dec. 31, 2001; and "Total Lack of Trust," Sept. 17, 2001]. And even then that probably won't fully account for all the royalties and fees that American Indians were supposed to have paid to them for the use of their land.

So badly managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) were 1,400 tribal and 300,000 individual accounts that it will cost taxpayers about $900 million just to reconstitute and reconcile trust records dating back to 1985. "The magnitude of the historical accounting is enormous," according to the report. Paper trust records dating from 1906 have been stored in 120 different locations, often in a state of decay and disarray, and so may be impossible to reconcile completely.

The magnitude of the task and the high probability that it will fail to achieve a full and complete accounting (and almost certainly fail to satisfy lawyers for American Indians suing to sort out the trust accounts) have reportedly made Congress reluctant to allocate full funding to the effort. "Congress will not appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars for a historical accounting that provides funds for a protracted reconciliation process whose outcome is unlikely to be successful," the report indicates.

As a result of those concerns, House appropriators have tried to cap total spending on the accounting project at $500 million. They also recommended that the DOI, instead of going back to 1906, concentrate on reconstituting accounts from 1985 to 2000, a suggestion American Indian groups oppose.

The record reconciliation effort is the result of a 1996 lawsuit in which American Indians sought a full accounting of trust payments. It resulted in a drawn-out court case, appointment of an independent overseer to reform BIA management of trust accounts and contempt-of-court charges against former interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and current Secretary Gale Norton.

Sean Paige is a writer for Insight magazine.

[BikerNYC]

And even then that probably won't fully account for all the royalties and fees that American Indians were supposed to have paid to them for the use of their land.

Landlords can certainly understand the anger over a tenant not paying the agreed upon rent.

[Red Jones]

bump

[meenie]

Cheating by oil companies that leased from the indians didn't help the trust that indians have for the Great White Father either. These royalties are included in the trust funds that the gov't owes the indians.

[DManA]

What could be more condescending, not to mention racist, and unconstitional than a pot of money held in "trust" for an ethinic group by the Federal Government.

Turn the money over to a private Indian group and be done with it.