The Bureau of
Indian Affairs
"More Than a Century of Mismanagement"
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
~ o ~
March 09, 2007
Artman gets long-awaited
Senate confirmation
by: Jerry Reynolds / Indian Country Today
The Senate confirmed Carl Artman as the next assistant secretary for Indian affairs, voting 87 - 1 in his favor March 5.
Artman will fill the top post at the BIA, an agency of the Interior Department. The slot has been vacant for two years following the resignation of Dave Anderson, founder of the ''Famous Dave's'' barbecue restaurant chain. If Anderson, a self-made man who followed his entrepreneurial instincts to off-reservation success against steep odds and personal demons, represented President Bush's first choice in Indians, Artman's career is a study in stable accomplishment. In interviews following his confirmation, he credited his Oneida of Wisconsin tribe for providing him with access to a career in policy formulation. He has also served as congressional staff on Capitol Hill, and leaves his current post as a solicitor within Interior.
Bush nominated him to the post in August 2006, but the Senate didn't take action until now. According to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Artman dedicated himself to personal meetings with senators, during which he overcame most of their concerns. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., cast the only vote against Artman, reputedly over concerns about Artman's position on land into trust applications by tribes planning casino openings. Last year in the 109th Congress, Vitter unsuccessfully proposed a moratorium on tribal casinos.
Bush administration proposes $7 billion to settle Cobell and other trust claims
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs has announced its notification in writing of a Bush administration offer to settle all Indian trust mismanagement claims against the government for $7 billion, payable over 10 years. The lawsuit brought by Elouise Cobell and an injured class of plaintiffs, the Individual Indian Money beneficiaries, seeks an accounting of IIM funds and has added a lengthy chapter to the already exhaustive anthology of reports, studies, audits and court records charging Interior with ''well over a century of systematic mismanagement of the Indian trust fund accounts,'' to quote from the committee Web site.
Committee Chairman Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., announced the offer March 7 on the Internet at http://indian.senate.gov. ''This is the first time that the federal government has acknowledged a multibillion-dollar liability for the mismanagement of the Indian trust funds over the past century and more. That is a significant admission.''
But he added, ''The conditions the administration has attached to the settlement offer are going to be very controversial.''
Among them are that all individual and tribal claims against the government for mismanaging the accounts must be dropped.
Tribes opposed the condition when it surfaced last year as one of the ''settlement concepts'' put forward informally by the administration. But it comes as no surprise, either: a March 1, 2006, joint hearing on settlement of the SCIA and the House of Representatives Resources Committee featured testimony from Stuart Eizenstat, a former U.S. ambassador best known for helping to settle the property claims of Holocaust survivors in Europe. He urged the assembled lawmakers to settle every item of the Cobell v. Kempthorne lawsuit through legislation, leaving as little as possible to the courts. ''Legal peace'' will never be possible otherwise, he said, because ''creative lawsuits'' and other claims will continue to crop up.
''Avoid at all costs sending this back to the federal courts ... You cannot have courts settle historical wrongs,'' he advised. ''They're not set up to do that.''
While tribes have so far resisted the comprehensive trust settlement offered by the administration, Cobell and plaintiff attorneys have previously maintained that $8 billion (the figure surfaced at the same time as the informal ''settlement concepts'') is not enough to compensate the losses of IIM beneficiaries.
Dorgan stated on the Web site that he plans to hold a committee hearing on the administration's offer within weeks.
Native Hawaiian bill pulled from House mark-up hearing
A bill that would authorize the first steps in a federal process for recognizing a Native Hawaiian governing entity got pulled from a scheduled mark-up hearing in the House of Representatives March 7.
Patricia Zell, of Zell and Cox Law in Washington, said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, could not get back to Washington from his district in Hawaii in time for the hearing, and decided to pull the bill from a mark-up session of the House Natural Resources Committee. (Mark-up is Capitol Hill jargon for committee meetings at which bills are reviewed, debated and perhaps amended prior to being voted out of committee, or not, to the consideration of the full House.)
Zell said the bill will be re-scheduled for mark-up, possibly in April. She added that Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., is preparing to offer a hostile amendment to the bill, possibly in cooperation with Sen. Jon Kyl, also R-Ariz., who led Senate opposition to the so-called ''Akaka Bill'' in the last Congress. The Akaka Bill, after Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, is the Senate counterpart of Abercrombie's bill in the House, H.R. 505; it failed last year in the Senate on a procedural vote, following a Republican-orchestrated campaign of public assertions that it sought to establish racial preferences rather than a governing entity for Native Hawaiians.
''We are hearing, as you well know, that the same race-based assault is going to take place against the Indian Health Care Improvement Act,'' Zell said. ''So we assume those concerns have not abated. They've spread to other things.''
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414634
March 10, 2006
INTERIOR SECRETARY
GALE NORTON RESIGNS
By JOHN HEILPRIN, ABC News
WASHINGTON (AP)— Interior Secretary Gale Norton resigned Friday after five years in President Bush's Cabinet and at a time when her agency is part of a lobbying scandal over Indian gaming licenses.
In a letter to Bush, Norton said she the resignation would be effective at the end of March.
"Now I feel it is time for me to leave this mountain you gave me to climb, catch my breath, then set my sights on new goals to achieve in the private sector," she said in the two-page resignation letter.
Norton, who turns 52 on Saturday, said she and her husband "hope to end up closer to the mountains we love in the West."
The leading Republican and Democrat on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee have said that e-mails uncovered by the committee show that Steven Griles, Norton's former deputy, had a close relationship with Abramoff.
Another one-time Norton associate, Italia Federici, helped Abramoff gain access to Griles in exchange for contributions from Abramoff's Indian tribe clients, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., the committee chairman, and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., have said.
A former Colorado attorney general, Norton guided the Bush administration's initiative to open Western government lands to more oil and gas drilling.
As one of the architects of Bush's energy policy, she eased regulations to speed approval of drilling permits, particularly in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming's Powder River Basin.
She also was the administration's biggest advocate for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's North Slope to oil drilling.
The first woman ever to head the Interior Department, Norton was a protege of James Watt, the controversial interior secretary during President Ronald Reagan's first term in office. Watt was forced to resign after characterizing a coal commission in terms that were viewed by some as a slur.
Before joining the administration, she was one of the negotiators of a $206 billion national tobacco settlement in a suit by Colorado and 45 other states. She was Colorado's attorney general from 1991 to 1999.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1710266
November 19, 2004
Investigating the Indian Gaming Scandal
Etched in the history of our great nation is a long and lamentable chapter about the exploitation of Native Americans.... Every kind of charlatan and every type of crook has deceived and exploited America's native sons and daughters. While these accounts of unscrupulous men are sadly familiar, the tale we hear today is not. What sets this tale apart, what makes it truly extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit.
— Statement of Senator John McCain, Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Oversight Hearing on Lobbying Practices Involving Indian Tribes, 9/29/04
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs has, for nine months, been investigating charges that former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public relations executive Michael Scanlon manipulated Indian tribes and walked away with millions of dollars from "less than honorable" dealings.
Senator McCain is only one of many shaken by the scandal. As Senator Byron L. Dorgan responded to the evidence building in this case, he called the activities "a cesspool of greed, a disgusting pattern, certainly, of moral corruption, possibly of criminal corruption...a pathetic, disgusting example of greed run amok."
Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who presided over the oversight hearings and is currently the only Native American U.S. Senator, detailed the evidence before the committee:
It appears, from their own words, Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon held their tribal clients in absolute contempt — clients, mind you, that paid them millions of dollars. E-mails obtained by the committee show that they regularly referred to their clients using contemptuous, even racist language.
What's the story behind these accusations of exploitation, greed, and contempt? As profiled in NOW's segment "Double Dealing," Washington insider Jack Abramoff promised free assistance to the Tigua tribe, claiming he could help to reopen their tribal casino that had been shut down by the state of Texas. What the tribe didn't know was that Abramoff had worked as part of the anti-gambling lobby that helped close that very casino, and that he had a secret deal with Scanlon to share the profits.
The Tiguas weren't the only tribe to be seduced by false promises; Abramoff and Scanlon worked with six tribes in various parts of the country, offering to build grassroots networks and garner support for gaming on Capitol Hill. Now the FBI, a Grand Jury, and several federal agencies — in addition to the Senate Committee — are looking into the evidence behind these allegations.
www.pbs.org/now/politics/indiangaming.html
March/April 2002
A Broken Trust
The government cannot account for billions of dollars
it owes to Native Americans.
by Tom Dunkel and Bill Hogan, Motherjones.com
Josephine Wild Gun lives with her son's family in a run-down house on the Blackfeet reservation in Heart Butte, Montana. Like many of her neighbors, she owns several tracts of reservation land that are held in trust by the US government. Federal officials manage her nearly 10,000 acres, leasing much of the property to private interests for grazing and oil drilling.
In return, Wild Gun is supposed to receive royalties from the Indian Trust Fund, created in 1887 to oversee such payments to Native Americans.
But despite the lucrative leases, Wild Gun has never received more than $1,500 a year from the trust fund. A few years ago, the payments began trickling off; one check totaled only 87 cents. When her husband died in 1994, Wild Gun had to borrow money to pay for the funeral. Now in her early 80s, she survives on less than $400 a month in Social Security. "I think they're cheating her really big," says Wild Gun's daughter-in-law, Diana.
Wild Gun is one of approximately 300,000 Native Americans who are suing the Interior Department, claiming that they are owed at least $10 billion in payments on some 10 million acres. The fund is in such disarray, the government concedes, that it doesn't have any way of knowing how much it actually owes - or to whom.
"It's a total mess," says Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit. "They've stolen from the Indians because we're minorities and we're poor. It's one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of the country."
Cobell's harsh assessment is shared by Republican John McCain of Arizona, a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, who calls the fund's mismanagement a "national scandal," and by US District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is hearing the case. "I've never seen more egregious misconduct by the federal government," the judge declared.
This spring, Lamberth is expected to consider placing the fund in the hands of a court-appointed receiver, a move that would give the judiciary an unprecedented degree of control over an entire federal bureaucracy.
The trust fund proved to be a disaster from the start. To give the government greater control of tribal lands, Congress divided reservations into parcels called "allotments" and awarded them to each member of a tribe-but reserved the authority to manage the property.
Anyone who wanted to lease Indian-owned lands made their payments directly to the government, which was then supposed to pass the money along to the Indians who had been allotted the lands.
But officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs often failed to collect lease payments-and when they did, the money didn't always make its way to Native Americans. As many as 90 percent of the fund's records may be missing, and the few that are available are in comically bad condition.
An Interior Department report provided to the court refers to storage facilities plagued by problems ranging from "poisonous spiders in the vicinity of stored records" to "mixed records strewn throughout the room with heavy rodent activity."
Federal officials have "spent more than 100 years mismanaging, diverting, and losing money that belongs to Indians," says John Echohawk of the Native American Rights Fund, which is directing the lawsuit.
"They have no idea how much has been collected from the companies that use our land and are unable to provide even a basic, regular statement to most Indian account holders."
In 1999, Judge Lamberth found Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt for failing to produce documents and slapped the government with a $625,000 fine. But the effort to sort out delinquent payments drags on.
In December, the judge began considering contempt charges against Babbitt's successor, Gale Norton, for providing "false and misleading" information about the government's attempts to clean up the fund.
Norton has fought the charges and has established a new agency to oversee Indian accounts, but the senior official in charge of overhauling the system admitted in an internal memo last year that the government's implementation plan submitted to Lamberth was based on "wishful thinking and rosy projections."
In December, the judge also ordered the Interior Department to shut down most of its Internet operations after an investigator discovered that the department's computer system allowed hackers easy access to Indian trust accounts.
With the Internet off-limits for weeks, many federal employees could not receive or respond to emails, and thousands of visitors to national parks were unable to make online reservations for campsites. The shutdown also prevented the trust fund from making payments to more than 43,000 Indians, many of whom depend on the quarterly checks to make ends meet. In Montana and Wyoming, some beneficiaries were forced to apply for tribal loans to help them through the holidays.
The check delays heightened the frustrations of Native Americans, who have asked Lamberth to take control of the trust fund. In December, a special master appointed by the court issued a 154-page report urging the judge to name an independent receiver to oversee the fund. "Without such direct oversight," the report concluded, "the threat to records crucial to the welfare of hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries will continue unchecked."
However the current case is resolved, the problem is likely to get even bigger in the coming months. The accounts now under dispute involve only royalties owed to individual Indians; some tribes are expected to file new lawsuits to recoup payments they are owed on 38 million acres of tribal land. Taxpayers have already spent an estimated $800 million to sort out the fund's records and pay for the government's court defense. Yet officials appear no closer to making past-due payments.
"Right now all they have is a plan to make a plan," says Keith Harper, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund.
"Our view is, beneficiaries can't wait that long."
January 4, 2006
Lobbyist Abramoff’s Clients Made
Donations To Sen. Inouye
HONOLULU - KITV has learned that Sen. Dan Inouye was among dozens of Congress members who received campaign donations from lobbyist Jack Abramoff or his clients.
Abramoff on Wednesday pleaded guilty to felonies that insiders say have brought corruption to a new level in Washington. Abramoff admitted bribing members of Congress.
Abramoff pleaded guilty in Florida and Washington courts to five felony counts. As part of his pleas, Abramoff will help investigators determine if gifts and donations from him and his clients helped buy favorable treatment from lawmakers.
Inouye received a total of $6,000 from Abramoff’s Indian clients during the years 2002 to 2004. He received $2,000 from the Mississippi Band of choctaw Indians, $2,000 from the Pueblo of Sandia and $2,000 from the Agua Caliente Bank.
In a written statement, Inouye said those tribes contributed to his campaigns for years before Abramoff retained them.
Rep. Neil Abercrombie received $2,000 in 2002 from the Agua Caliente Band before they became a client of Abramoff. Abercrombie received two donations from the tribe in 2001 and once in February 2002. Abramoff began working for the tribe in July 2002.
Abercrombie is a member of the House committee that handles Indian affairs.
Abercrombie said the and other committee members got donations from the Indian tribe because it already trusted them to do the right thing. Not because Abramoff was trying to buy influence.
“He’s a sleaze bag. He stole from his clients who gave him money in good faith,” Abercrombie said....
- For more poop on where the wampum went, GO TO > > > Capital Eye
November 10, 2005
Call on Gale Norton to Testify:
Interior Secretary’s Fingerprints all over
Indian Gaming Scandal
Denver – ProgressNow.org sent a letter to Senator McCain this morning asking him to call on Secretary of Interior Gale Norton to testify about her role in the Indian gaming scandal during the Committee on Indian Affairs hearing scheduled for next Thursday, November 17th. To date only one witness has been called who is a former campaign aide to Norton and the president of a political group founded by Norton that received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Indian casinos.
“We ask Sen. McCain to invite Secretary Norton to testify on her involvement in and her knowledge of any undue influence on behalf of Indian casinos,” stated Michael Huttner, Executive Director of ProgressNow.org. “Given that there is now evidence that Sec. Norton’s fingerprints are all over the scandal, she should be required to answer questions about her role in it.”
Former Committee hearings revealed that Sec. Norton’s personal aide, through an advocacy group that Sec. Norton founded, collected at least $250,000 from Jack Abramoff and his casino clients. Dept. of Interior records reveal that this aide repeatedly contacted Sec. Norton and her top deputy at Interior on behalf of Abramoff who sought to have Sec. Norton ban a competing Indian casino from opening.
Norton ruled for the Abramoff casinos’ interest but claims she wasn’t influenced by her aide or her top deputy.
Yet earlier this year Sec. Norton admitted that she had a “few contacts” with the aide and the political group that funneled the money. She also admitted she had “brief discussions” with the group after becoming Secretary of the Interior.
We would like Norton to disclose the details of the ‘few contacts’ and ‘brief discussions’ with this political group under investigation,” noted Huttner. “A through investigation requires Sec. Norton to disclose the lobbying around her decision which helped Abramoff’s casino clients, yet she has not been questioned.”
The Norton Fingerprints:
1. Gale Norton had dinner with Jack Abramoff and his Indian casino clients on September 24, 2001 after they had sent a $50,000 check to the political group Norton founded on March 1, 2001.
2. Norton’s Chief Deputy, J. Steve Griles, had numerous discussions with Abramoff-who represented the casinos-about the Indian casinos and even admitted that he had conversations about potentially working for Abramoff’s lobbying firm.
3. Norton former personal aide, Italia Federici, took over the political organizations that Norton founded and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Abramoff and his casino clients. She has been subpoenaed to testify next Thursday, after eluding Federal Marshals last week.
4. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars funneled by Abramoff to the group Norton founded that Norton later admitted she had a ‘few contacts’ and ‘brief discussions’ since she became Secretary.
5. FOIA request revealed that there were additional contacts with Italia Federici, including a reception on 3/6/01, a planned call at 10:00a.m. on 4/30/01, a meeting on 7/10/01 and a reception on 9/1/04.
Indian Affairs Committee will hold its next hearing on Indian gaming next Thursday, November 17, 2005. To date the only witness is Italia Federici, Gale Norton’s former aide who took over the political group, Council for Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA) that Norton founded.
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ProgressNow is a nonpartisan, grassroots media nerve center which mission is to be a strong credible voice in advancing progressive solutions to critical community problems....
Progress Now | Press Release: Call on Gale Norton to testify
August 29, 2004
Senator cites 'shameful' U.S. history
By Frank Oliveri, Honolulu Advertiser
WASHINGTON - Sen. Dan Inouye said he has been an advocate for American Indian issues because of the United States' "shameful" history.
But his involvement with the tribes happened by default.
In 1978, as a leader of his party, it was Inouye's job to make committee appointments for Democrats in the Senate.
The Senate Indian Affairs Committee had five members and was about to lose a senator. Inouye could find no one to fill the seat.
At that point, then-Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., suggested that because Inouye "looked" like an Indian, maybe he should take the post.
Inouye demurred, saying, "At that point my knowledge of Indian affairs was one degree above nil." He also had no reservations in Hawai'i.
Nonetheless, he appointed himself to the committee. With the help of Patricia Zell, then staff member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Inouye studied American Indian history. He said he was appalled at what he learned. Zell is now the minority staff director and chief counsel of the committee.
"There were just outright slaughters," Inouye said. "At one time, anthropologists suggested there were as many as 53 million Indians. At the end of the Indian era there were about 250,000. This is the kind of history we have."
Inouye also said there were boxes filled with thousands of American Indian remains at the Smithsonian Institution. They were collected during the Civil War, when the U.S. Army's surgeon general was interested in measuring intelligence based on cranial capacity.
"They sent thousands of them," Inouye said. "It is a shameful record. I decided I will do something about it."
Inouye let it be known to tribal leaders that he would consult with them and "carry their agenda forward," Zell said.
He became chairman of the Indian affairs committee in 1987. Inouye will soon give up a leadership role on the committee but will remain a member. He will become ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee and cannot serve in leadership roles on more than one committee.
"My name appears on important legislation involving Native Americans, such as healthcare," Inouye said. "I have been designated as the author of the measure that established the National Museum of the American Indian, and to date $214 million in federal and private funds have been raised for this project. I have also assisted numerous Indian tribes and nations in establishing businesses on their lands."
Ernest Stevens, executive director of the National Indian Gaming Association, said Inouye "will always fight for sovereignty."
© COPYRIGHT 2004 The Honolulu Advertiser, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
www.moolelo.com/inouye-shameful.html
WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?...
December 12, 2003
CGI inks $19.5M pact with federal division
CGI Group Inc. said it has signed a five-year, $19.5 million contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs for technology outsourcing services.
Under the agreement, CGI will provide data development, conversion and related support services for the bureau’s 55.7 million acres of land assets across the United States. The bureau is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Also as part of the contract, CGI will use its training facility to train bureau workers on its asset and accounting management software system.
Work will be handled mainly by CGI’s Dallas-based data center, where the bureaus’ data will be housed.
The agreement renews an existing relationship between CGI and the federal division that began in 1998 with the signing of an initial outsourcing contract, CGI said in a statement.
CGI (NYSE: GIV), a technology outsourcer, has its headquarters in Montreal....
Company Web Site: www.cgi.ca
For more outrageous outsourcing, GO TO > > > Black Berets-Red China; The Story of Enron; Marsh & McLennan’s Mercer Consulting; Zephyr Insurance
September 18, 2002
Norton and McCaleb found guilty of
contempt of court
Join ranks of former officials Babbitt and Gover
by: Jim Adams, Indian Country Today
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In a decision dripping with years of frustration, the federal judge hearing the Indian Trust Fund class action suit found Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Assistant Interior Secretary of Indian Affairs Neal McCaleb guilty of contempt of court.
The ruling, in a spin-off from the main case, found the two officials had "committed a fraud upon the court" on five issues central to resolving the Trust Fund debacle involving massive funds, possibly as much as $10 billion, owed to at least 300,000 individual Indian trust account holders and further sums owed to tribes.
"The department has now undeniably shown that it can no longer be trusted to state accurately the status of its trust reform efforts. In short, there is no longer any doubt that the Secretary of Interior has been and continues to be an unfit trustee-delegate for the United States," wrote U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth.
Norton did have some defenders, U. S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R.--Ariz., co-chair of the Congressional Native American Caucus, praised Norton's "extraordinary attention" to the 115-year -old problem and called the ruling "misdirected, unfair and untimely."...
The case has been before Judge Lamberth in the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia since 1999, and he previously issued contempt orders against Clinton Administration officials Bruce Babbitt, then Secretary of the Interior, and Kevin Gover, his Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs.
The decision leaves open the question of future control of the trust accounts. Rather than put them into receivership, as class-action plaintiff Elouise Cobell has requested, for now Judge Lamberth promoted court monitor, Joseph S. Kieffer III, to the role of special master-monitor with added powers to enforce court orders.
Kieffer, who has been court monitor since April 2001, issuing scathing reports on Interior's progress and for coming under fire from Norton's attorneys, who called for his removal. . . .
For more on Gale Norton, GO TO > > > Birds on the Power Lines; The Nature Conservancy
July 31, 2002
Indians' special trustee leaves post
By Billy House, Republic Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Thomas Slonaker, the special trustee for American Indians who has clashed with the Bush administration over fixing the government's historically mismanaged Indian trust fund system, has resigned.
His resignation, effective Tuesday, comes after a special court monitor declared in a May 5 report that Interior Secretary Gail Norton hasn't given Slonaker the support he needed to fulfill his fund oversight duties. Slonaker took over the job in the final months of the Clinton administration.
"It has been my pleasure to serve two presidents of the United States as the special trustee for American Indians," Slonaker, who is from Phoenix, wrote in his resignation letter to President Bush....
In a statement released by the Interior Department, Slonaker added, "I have worked diligently to highlight a number of important issues that must be resolved for trust reform to be successful in the long term."
Norton, in her own prepared statement, thanked Slonaker for his service and wished him well. She also announced that Donna Erwin, the deputy special trustee for projects and operations, is being appointed acting special trustee.
The Interior Department has held American Indian-owned lands in trust since 1887, leasing the properties and managing revenues.
In 1996, a group of Native American beneficiaries filed a class-action lawsuit, contending that shoddy bookkeeping over the decades has caused the government to lose track of billions of dollars owed and to whom.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs continues to hold in trust about 11 million acres. Some valuable oil and gas leases pay thousands of dollars a month.
In 1999, a federal district judge found then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in civil contempt for not producing records and documents on the trusts they initially said they would produce. Many had been lost or destroyed. The judge also ordered the Interior and Treasury departments to begin piecing together how much is owed.
But Slonaker, as the special trustee for the funds, ran afoul of Norton when he refused to vouch for a quarterly progress report on efforts toward fixing the management of the funds.
His testimony proved damaging to Norton and other top Interior officials during yet another contempt hearing earlier this year.
Slonaker's departure from the post created by Congress to provide independent oversight of the Indian money, prompted concern from advocates and admirers.
Keith Harper, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund, said, "This is clearly a penalization, a retaliation, for him telling the truth."
"Mr. Slonaker's resignation is just one more sign that legislation is clearly necessary to cause reform to the Interior Department's management of Indian trust funds," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
"It's shameful that we can work to reform corporate America, yet we cannot resolve a century-old problem of returning Indian money to its beneficiaries."...
Catbird ponderings: I wonder why we don't hear a peep from Senators Dan Inouye and Dan Akaka on this? Is this the TRUE REALITY of what will happen to the native Hawaiian’s if the AKAKA BILL passes in Congress?
For more on "valuable oil and gas leases," on Indian lands, GO TO > > > The Myth & The Methane
December 15, 2002
Non-Indians benefit
most from casinos
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
WASHINGTON -- We were told that the glitzy gambling casinos springing up on Indian reservations across the land would lift poor Indians out of poverty. Certainly the slot machines and gaming tables produce plenty of money. The nearly 300 casinos pull in almost $13 billion a year in revenue, of which more than $5 billion is pure profit.
But where is that money going?
In Time magazine's cover story last week, titled "Wheel of Misfortune: Look Who's Cashing In at Indian Casinos," Donald Barlett and James Steele -- a team twice awarded Pulitzer Prizes when at The Philadelphia Inquirer -- present the troubling answer.
A few tribes near big cities haul in as much as $900,000 per member. States with only 3 percent of the Indian population -- California, Florida and Connecticut -- take in 44 percent of the gambling revenue, while states with half our 1.8 million Indians account for less than 3 percent of the take. The poorest of our aboriginal Americans are getting poorer, while non-Indians get rich hiring lobbyists to get federal recognition of a tribal front for the sole purpose of buying land to build a casino.
Lim Goh Tong, for example, is the Malaysian contractor billionaire behind the Foxwoods spread in Connecticut. As a foreigner, he can legally avoid most U.S. taxes on his profit, likely to run about $40 million a year.
The South African developer Sol Kerzner, "first of the Mohegans," worked a similar deal that was OK'd by a federal official now doing just fine as a lobbyist.
And Minnesota's Lyle Berman, a tycoon reported to have taken down $18 million a year in salary and stock options in his leather business, has a hot casino deal going near Chicago. And those are only the most blatant examples of non-Indians cashing in.
I'm a free-enterprise freak who doesn't begrudge big profits to investors who take big risks, but this is no gamble; rather it is a financial-political scandal of stunning proportions.
Under the cover of helping the 28 percent of Indians now mired in poverty, financial vultures and highly paid, revolving-door lobbyists are ripping off the U.S. taxpayer and promoting a noxious something-for-nothing slots philosophy -- not to mention degrading the countryside's moral and physical environment -- by gaming the American political system.
Who's to blame?
The Department of the Interior, with its moribund Indian Affairs bureau, professes to have no authority to oversee the National Indian Gaming Commission, whose three members have just been appointed by Secretary Gale Norton. The new chairman, Philip Hogen, a friendly member of South Dakota's Oglala Sioux, was a commissioner through the late '90s and will rock no boats.
He tells me he was "disappointed" with the critical tone of Time's story (another one is coming) and notes that even the small, less profitable casinos far from big-city markets provide some jobs for Indians. What about the secrecy, fraud, corruption and intimidation rife in so many lucrative tribal casino operations? Hogen's agency has only 63 employees to inspect and audit the $13 billion take in the nearly 300 all-cash businesses.
Despite many complaints, that toothless tiger has never uncovered a single case of corruption.
Here's why: The casino tribes lobbied for, and Congress supinely agreed to, a cap of $8 million that can be collected from casinos to finance the nation's Indian gaming commission. That should be tripled.
Will Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, next chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, ask why, as Rep. Frank Wolf notes, 80 percent of the Indians in the United States have received not one nickel from skyrocketing gambling revenues?
Will Rep. Jimmy Duncan of Tennessee, likely to head House Resources in January, pull that committee's head out of the sand?