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Blackfeet Tribe Holds Feds Accountable

A historic victory for the Blackfeet Nation may have Interior Secretary Gale Norton scrambling for a rock to hide under, On Sept. 17, a federal judge found Norton and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Neal McCaleb guilty of four counts of contempt for gross mismanagement of a trust handling billions of dollars in revenue from Indian lands.

Six years ago, Elouise Cobell, the leading plaintiff in the Blackfeet case, sued to get the federal government to cough up billions of dollars belonging to approximately 300,000 American Indians and their heirs.

For more than a century, the Department of the Interior has held the purse strings to money belonging to some of the nation's poorest citizens. In 1887, Congress confiscated 90 million acres from Indian tribes and offered it to white homesteaders. The unclaimed land was divided into allotments and leased to timber and mining companies and ranchers. The Department of the Interior was assigned to ensure Indians received the proceeds from these ventures. Cobell and her fellow plaintiffs allege that as much as $10 billion in royalties may be missing or stolen from the Individual Indian Monies (IIM) trust.

Although Norton's ineptitude is shameful, the Secretary stands in a long line of sketchy appointees. Clinton's Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were both found guilty of contempt for inaction in resolving the same case. And this summer one of Norton's top aides, James Cason, admitted before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs that the GAO audits of 1928, 1952, and 1955, and 30 Inspector General reports since 1982 had found fault with the department's management of the system.

In spite of their recent victory, Cobell and her fellow plaintiffs have learned too much from history to simply rest on their laurels. She puts it plainly: "It is time to put the IIM trust in competent, professional, accountable hands and make it into a proper trust.

Driving Without an ID