DOI speaks with forked tongue; a court-appointed monitor says the slings and arrows of Interior Secretary Gale Norton are off target and thinks Indian trust monies need to be put into a receivership

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 10, 2002 | by Kelly Patricia O'Meara

The Forrest Gumpism that "Stupid is as stupid does" is being cited even within the federal bureaucracy to describe the way the Department of the Interior (DOI) has handled American Indian trust money (see "Total Lack of Trust" Sept. 17, 2001, and "Bureaucrats Circle Their Wagons," Dec. 31, 2001). Certainly for 300,000 American Indians who are owed an estimated $10 billion in back payments, life has not been a box of chocolates. Indeed, another Gumpism being quoted to describe this dodgy federal rip-off is that "sometimes there just aren't enough rocks."

The recently released report by the court-appointed monitor on the missing billions is the seventh in a long line of such reports. They each document the ineptness of one federal agency after another at carrying out the congressionally mandated task of managing the American Indian trust monies generated from Indian lands leased for more than 100 years.

Under the General Allotment Act of 1887 nearly 11 million acres of land were divided among American Indians but placed in a trust by the federal government. The income generated from the leasing of oil, mineral, timber and grazing rights on these lands was to be paid from the trust to the individual Indians. In 1996, Eloise Cobell and four other American Indians filed a class-action lawsuit against the United States claiming that tens of billions of dollars were owed on the leases.

Six years later they still are waiting for an accounting on the money. Meanwhile, the court-appointed monitor has spent nearly 100 pages describing the efforts of federal agencies, including the departments of the Interior and Justice, to obfuscate and avoid such an accounting. In fact, most of the report reads like a long account of the tricks and cruelties perpetrated by older siblings on a vulnerable kid brother.

For example, according to court-appointed monitor Joseph Kieffer III, "the hostility shown by the [Interior] Secretary's [Gale Norton] memoranda to the Special Trustee and the documented errors in her memoranda's reasoning (or those who advised her or prepared the memoranda for her) cast doubt on the ability of her office to continue to work and communicate with the Office of the Special Trustee. It places the Special Trustee and his career employees at risk, working under a cloud of suspicion even greater than found in the past between DOI, BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], DOJ [Department of Justice] and the OST [Office of the Secretary of the Treasury]."

Kieffer continues: "This Shakespearean tragedy has no end. Now the reputation of a trust professional with 36 years of experience in civilian business and banking who came to government service to help the DOI, the IIM [Individual Indian Money] account holders and all Indian trust beneficiaries, has been placed under a cloud by the defendants' attorneys in an apparent effort to oppose and evade his and, possibly, this court's oversight."

According to Kieffer, "The actions defendants have taken against these two officials and contempt-trial witnesses and the methods used by them come very close to constituting retaliation. The reason for these actions may be even more suspect and may require the court's investigation."

The memoranda from Norton amount to scathing criticism of the performance of the Special Trustee. Taking up nearly 30 pages of the report, Kieffer succinctly rebuts each of Norton's claims about the Special Trustee and says "it is beyond comprehension that the secretary would go before this court and testify to the advances being made under her November 2001 directive. This action casts doubt on whether the secretary understands the actual status of her subordinates' trust-reform planning and activities or has been correctly advised about the statutory role of the Special Trustee."

Kieffer made it clear that, rather than make an honest attempt to reconcile the Indian accounts, Norton and her subordinates have chosen the low road. "Nearly 40 former or current senior managers, attorneys and employees of the DOI, BIA, Solicitor's Office and DOJ are before this court on allegations of contempt. In the same period two secretaries of the interior and their assistant secretaries--Indian Affairs, and the Secretary of the Treasury, have been brought before this court for trial in their official capacities under contempt causes of action."

According to the report: "The present secretary's contempt trial was replete with testimony of the attempts of the defendants, including their attorneys, to `go around' the Special Trustee to thwart his oversight responsibilities and authority and to block his candid observations about the defendants' nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance. Now, when the issue is ripe for review regarding the secretary's and her subordinates' own accountability for possible contempt of this court, defendants have chosen to accuse none other than the Special Trustee and his staff of actions constituting contempt when the action of her own subordinates and attorneys were the true predicates for the contempt causes before this court."