Last September, I blogged about Judge Royce Lamberth adding Gale Norton to the list of Interior Department officials held in contempt of court for their persistent mismanagement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Since 1887, the federal government has forcefully “managed assets” on American Indian land, and is legally required to pass the profits on to the legal owners (mostly individual Indians but also some tribes). Instead, the government has withheld billions of dollars, and has kept records so poorly that it can’t even say how much money is owned, and to whom. (For readers unfamiliar with this story, LiP magazine’s summary is pretty good).
Not much has changed since September… the BIA remains the single most incompetent and corrupt part of the Federal government, and their court-ordered efforts at reform continue to be as ineffectual as they are insincere. But there have been a couple of blackly funny quotes in the press lately. I laughed out loud when I read this bit, about Interior Department Assistant Secretary Steven Griles. Griles (a man whose political career defines the term “conflict of interest”) was explaining to a skeptical House of Representatives panel his request for an increase of $183 million to the funding for fixing the accounting problems (for a total of $554 million). The Billings Gazette reports:
“Many members will think that we are throwing good money after bad,” Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said. “What would happen if we did not fund this request?”
Griles said, “I would go to jail.”
Frankly, if that were all at stake, I’d say send him to jail – he probably deserves it.
Another interesting new development since September happened this January, when the Indians suing the government “attempted to quantify their loss.” According to the New York Times:
In a voluminous filing that included detailed private records of oil extraction and mineral mining going back to the late 19th century, lawyers for the Indians said the government had stolen, lost or misallocated tens of billions since it was given responsibility for managing assets on Indian lands in 1887. The lawyers said that if all the figures were added up they would reach $137.2 billion.
Government officials, told what the Indians were claiming, ridiculed the figure, which is more than 10 times the size of the Interior Department’s budget. J. Steven Griles, the deputy interior secretary, who manages the trust fund issue, said: “Nobody has shown me that there has been a loss. They haven’t provided one shred of evidence.”
In fact, there’s a ton of evidence. Maybe Griles would know more about it if his agency wasn’t so prone to illegally destroying evidence. According to LiP, “From 1998 to 1999, at the same time government lawyers were telling the court they were searching for relevant accounting records, the Financial Management Service of the Treasury Department actually destroyed 162 boxes of such records.” And Neal McCaleb, who last year resigned from his position as chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has “violated court orders and federal law by destroying individual Indian trust records with impunity,” according to Alan Balaran, the court-appointed special master overseeing this mess.
Finally, the Supreme Court recently handed down decisions in two Indian suit cases, which the Bush administration was hoping would defuse the trust lawsuit. The cases ended up being split – the Navajo Nation lost their suit, but the White Mountain Tribe won theirs – but Elouise Cobell, the person more-or-less running the trust lawsuit, seems optimistic about the effects of the rulings.
I am currently writing my dissertation on education…BIA run schools and effects…i taught at Sherman Indian hs and need emails on treaties, education etc would be appreciated…Ruth