McCain: U.S. May Settle Indian Trust Case

Wednesday July 13, 2005 11:46 PM
By JENNIFER TALHELM
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee said Congress may settle the nearly decade-old lawsuit in which American Indians accuse the Interior Department of cheating them out of billions of dollars in royalties.

But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Wednesday the $27.5 billion the Indians are seeking in a proposed settlement is too much.

"That number is just way out of sight," he said at a breakfast on Capitol Hill. "We would never get the Congress to support that kind of money."

For more than a century, McCain said, it appears the government "never really even made any serious attempt at keeping track of the revenues" it owed the Indians.

The Indians claim the department mismanaged oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties from their lands dating to 1887. Blackfeet Indian Elouise Cobell and others sued in 1996 to force the government to account for billions of dollars belonging to about 500,000 Indians.

Last month, in response to a request from McCain and other lawmakers, the Indians who sued said they were willing to settle for $27.5 billion and that they had agreed on 50 principles to guide the process.

That figure is probably far less than the government actually owes the Indians, said their lawyer, Elliott Levitas.

"If you rob, burglarize the house of someone who has a lot of money, you're going to be liable for a lot of money," Levitas said Wednesday. "That's what (the government) took. That's what they misappropriated. That's what they failed to account for."

Department officials say that although some records are probably lost, they have amassed millions of pages of documentation.

"We have still a lot to do on the historical accounting, but there is a lot of documentation available," said Jim Cason, the department's associate deputy secretary.

The court battle has centered on whether the government can produce an accurate accounting of exactly how much it owes the Indians. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth has held both Interior Secretary Gale Norton and her Clinton administration predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, in contempt of court. He routinely has criticized the department for its failure to correct problems with accounting and records.

On Tuesday, Lamberth issued a scathing decision ordering the department to acknowledge that its information about Indian trust assets might be unreliable.

"It is undeniable that Interior has failed as a trustee-delegate," Lamberth said.

Congress ultimately may have to decide what the Indians are owed. McCain's committee will hold a hearing soon on legislation to resolve the case.

"I think we're going to get a settlement because I think it could drag out for 20 or 30 years in the courts," McCain said. ``But I don't think we're close yet on the number.''

Levitas said he thinks McCain would change his mind if he hears the Indians' stories of how their money was mismanaged and even stolen.

U.S. Berated Over Indians' Treatment
Judge Orders Interior Dept. to Send Written Warnings About Its Credibility

By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 13, 2005; A19

In a scathing rebuke of the federal government's treatment of Native Americans, a federal judge yesterday ordered the Interior Department to include notices in its correspondence with Indians whose land the government holds in trust, warning them that the government's information may not be credible.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who has presided for nearly 10 years over a class-action suit on behalf of 500,000 Indians whose land the government has leased to mining, ranching and timber interests, issued one of his most strongly worded opinions on the case.

Lamberth ruled that the government essentially has to tell trust-account holders the information it sends them is not reliable. He also described in his 34-page opinion the history of the lawsuit as proof that the government continues to treat Indians "as if they were somehow less than deserving of the respect that should be afforded to everyone in a society where all people are supposed to be equal."

Lamberth wrote: "For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few."

The Interior Department, in a statement, said the opinion "contains intemperate rhetoric uncommon to jurisprudence, but made common in this case" and pointed out that the District Court's opinion has been overturned in the three most recent appeals filed.

Since 1996, when Eloise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Indians of Montana, brought the class-action lawsuit against Interior seeking a complete accounting of the money collected and distributed in the trust accounts dating to 1879, Lamberth has found that the federal government has not lived up to its responsibilities in handling the trust accounts or the lawsuit. He has held two interior secretaries, Gale A. Norton of the Bush administration and Bruce Babbitt of the Clinton administration, in contempt of court.

Yesterday, he wrote that "the entire record in this case tells the dreary story of Interior's degenerate tenure as Trustee-Delegate for the Indian trust, a story shot through with bureaucratic blunders, flubs, goofs and foul-ups, and peppered with scandals, deception, dirty tricks and outright villainy, the end of which is nowhere in sight."

Elliot Levitas, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said the opinion could be a turning point in the case. The ruling will require the agency to notify individual trust-account holders who were not aware of the suit that they have a place to turn to if they suspect the government has been withholding money or information.

"I predict that as a result of that, we'll be getting information from class members who will tell us about misconduct, misdeeds and mismanagement that we've not heard before. That will help us pursue the litigation," Levitas said. "I think that the public and the Congress are going to be enlightened, and be motivated to see that this injustice is ended and that the taint on our government be removed."

too much?

how much have they spent to FREE Iraq?

they need to tread carefully

Sad that they have their 'God' and Great Spirit is the same yet they choose to ignore that and do unChristian acts in the name of their God