A Blackfeet’s crusade to settle accounts with US

BROWNING, MONT. – On a cold wind-blown slope outside town, there
is a piece of hallowed ground called Ghost Ridge. It was here, a
century ago, that Blackfeet Indians perished after the US government
failed to deliver promised food rations.

By Todd Wilkinson | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

And it is here, today, that Elouise Cobell sometimes walks as she
gathers strength for her ongoing crusade: Forcing the government to
hand over billions of dollars she alleges it has withheld from native
Americans.

"When I’m feeling exhausted," says the
Blackfeet accountant and banker, "I visit
Ghost Ridge and I wonder how painful it
must’ve been for my people to starve to
death in the middle of winter. Then I have a
chat with myself … ‘Elouise, what are you
complaining about? You’re a wimp if you
can’t deal with this.’ "

Mrs. Cobell’s relentless attention to the
details of financial accounting has made the
bashful woman a living legend in the eyes of
native Ameri- cans and a thorn in the side of
bureaucrats in two presidential
administrations.

She’s already won several skirmishes in her David-like battle with the
government Goliath. Her class-action lawsuit against the US
government seeks $12 billion in restitution for revenues owed from
mining, logging, and other development on millions of acres of Indian
land.

The suit, on behalf of 500,000 native Americans, both living and dead,
revolves around the inability of the US Interior and Treasury
Departments to provide written records of what happened to billions of
dollars owed by the Individual Indian Monies trust fund, set up a
century ago to manage Indian lands and the revenues produced by
them. The trust currently generates about $500 million a year – with
payments ranging from pennies to millions of dollars for individual
Indians, depending on the size of their shareholdings.

This case is the native-American equivalent of the Enron scandal,
says Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American
Indians. "The only difference is that the Cobell case is bigger … the
government is playing the role of Enron, and this has been going on a
lot longer."

The case has consumed the energies of Interior Secretary Gale
Norton, who faces contempt-of-court charges because she was
unable to produce financial records.

Numerous investigations have confirmed shoddy bookkeeping for
more than a century. When pressed by US District Judge Royce
Lamberth, Ms. Norton and her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, admitted
that many key accounting documents have been lost, destroyed, or
never existed.

The Interior Department declined to comment on the case.

As a child on the Blackfeet reservation not far from the Canadian
border, Cobell was raised without plumbing, electricity, telephone, or
running water. A vivid memory is of her parents and grandparents
sitting around a woodstove complaining about government checks not
arriving or amounting to less than they should have been. She often
asked why that was.

Only after serving as Blackfeet tribe treasurer did she get answers.
Noticing irregularities in royalty checks to tribal members, she began
to keep records.

‘Nothing matched up’

"When I tried to correlate the payments with government books kept
by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, nothing matched up. Some months, a
check would arrive, but then it might take months before the next one
came in the mail," she recalls.

What started out as her challenge to reconcile differences on the
Blackfeet Reservation broadened to dozens of other reservations and
the accounts of hundreds of thousands of Indians. The government
admits it doesn’t even have valid addresses for 50,000 who are due
money.

Left incredulous by such revelations, Judge Lamberth has called it
one of the worst cases of government fiscal irresponsibility in US
history.

Since the end of the frontier era in the West, Indian communities
have suffered severe poverty, says Jim Adams, managing editor of
the newspaper Indian Country Today, which devotes a story nearly
daily to the Cobell case. He says there’s no doubt that fixing the fund
would put reservation citizens on a more equal economic footing with
neighboring communities.

Congressman Dennis Rehberg (R) of Montana, whose own non-Indian
relatives operated stores on the Crow Reservation in the state, says
that many woes of native communities are directly related to the fact
that Indians never fully understood the assets they control because
government record-keeping kept them in the dark.

Cobell herself is actively involved in rebuilding her community, where
unemployment exceeds 75 percent. When she’s not off monitoring
the trial or delivering lectures, the wife of a Blackfeet rancher and
mother of a grown son directs a business development fund on the
reservation here.

Cobell’s office resides in an old building suffering from a bad case of
chipped paint. Stacked around her are boxes full of legal and
accounting documents, walls covered with Indian artwork, and a tidy
desk with an accountant’s calculator. Behind her are photos of her
and national leaders.

Despite a growing circle of supporters, Cobell confesses that, often
since filing the lawsuit in 1996, she has felt isolated.

"In the beginning, there was just Elouise and a few other people.
Along the way, she has confronted resistance from the government
and other Indians, but today her resolve has brought a lot of very
influential people together," says her close friend, The Rev. Dan
Powers, a Jesuit priest at St. Anne’s Catholic Parish in nearby Heart
Butte.

Cobell also has many detractors – including some native Americans.
Earl Old Person, Blackfeet tribal chairman, worries that a settlement
that removes the BIA from trust management could hurt Indians,
providing grounds for terminating the government’s trust relationship
with tribes that depend on funding.

With a pained expression, Cobell recalls BIA officials calling her
"stupid" to her face as she persisted in tracking trust-fund money.
But she had her day when the MacArthur Foundation named her a
recipient of its prestigious genius award, a fellowship given annually
to those making a profound difference in society. She applied her
$300,000 award to lawsuit expenses.

Collective impact

"One of the persistent rumors I always hear is that I’m going to
somehow collect millions of dollars in reward money for taking on the
lawsuit," she says, shaking her head. "I stand to gain no more than
any other trust fund recipient…. It’s the collective impact of a
settlement that I’m most optimistic about."

The government has fiercely resisted a settlement, and just a few
weeks ago, Secretary Norton announced a costly new plan to fix the
broken accounting system – on top of $600 million already spent to
putthe trust-fund books in order. But Indians and some Interior
officials aren’t confident it can work.

Cobell says the government ought to just admit the system is
irretrievably flawed, stop throwing taxpayer money away, and settle
the case.

"I’ve heard from friends that the government thinks I’m tired and that
eventually they’ll wear me down, so that I’ll just go away," Cobell
says.

But with the haunting outline of Ghost Ridge serving as a constant
reminder of challenges confronted by native people in the past, Cobell
says she has no intention to surrender.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0320/p01s03-ussc.html