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McCain seeks closure to trust issue, cites other needs

WASHINGTON—The chairman of the Senate committee on Indian Affairs said this week that the government’s mishandling of the Indian trust accounts “reads like a bad novel,” an issue that has the potential of costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

In a one-hour Capitol Hill session on Monday with a group of 20 reporters on a traveling seminar of Indian country, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., discussed a wide range of issues facing Native Americans and said he wants to help bring closure to the trust matter that has cast a shadow over everything in Indian affairs.

McCain laid out his road map for resolution of trust issues, saying there has to be a settlement that’s viewed as fair by all parties, and the amount cannot be “too high.” McCain did not give an exact figure, saying the process hasn’t gotten far enough to determine an amount.

Some community leaders describe the lawsuit that has thrust the trust matter into the spotlight—Cobell v. Norton—as one of the top three issues facing Native America.

“I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that a lot of Indian accounts that were revenues from mineral, oil and other leasing were badly mismanaged by the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) which was supposed to take care of these revenues as trustees for both individuals and tribes,” he said.

Accounts—many of which cannot be found—date back more than 100 years.

“The fix has to be that everyone is confident that we will not revisit this issue and we made the correct remedies to this deplorable and despicable situation,” McCain said.

A member of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, Elouise Cobell is the lead plaintiff in Cobell v. Norton, which has challenged the government’s mishandling of individual Indian trust lands and accounts.

The complex class-action lawsuit was filed in 1996 by Cobell, a banker, on behalf of nearly a half-million Indians who contend that during more than a century, the government has cheated them of about $137 billion in royalties from the leases. The government pays beneficiaries a total of more than $500 million each year from the fund, which exceeds $3 billion dollars, according to the New York Times.

“It’s been an incredible and bizarre story,” McCain said, adding that Native Americans have suffered because of a lack of full accounting for an orderly management of funds.

But McCain said a full accounting could cost billions of dollars and “frankly the Congress of the United States will never appropriate
that kind of money.”

“I am going to try one more time to see if we can’t get some kind of overall settlement because if we don’t get a settlement, it could be decades before we have a final resolution of this issue and it would have to go to the Supreme Court of the United States,” he said.

When asked why the government was non-responsive and how the case could have mushroomed from Cobell to encompass so many plaintiffs with billions of dollars at stake, McCain said that the Department of Interior, in hindsight, did not give the trust issue the attention it deserved initially.

Anecdotally, the senator continued, he’s been told that the case had some lower level attorneys assigned to it early on.

“I don’t think anybody envisioned that we’d have secretaries of the interior held in contempt of court and a secretary of the treasury, the (BIA website) shut down,” he said.

On another front, McCain said many people view flourishing Indian casino tribes as representative of all of Native America.

“One of the problems that we have is ... a lot of people (in the Northeastern part of the United States) say, ‘Gee, here are all these rich Mohicans, and here are all these rich Pequots, they’ve got billions, the largest single casino in the world is the Foxwoods Casino.’ So, we have to fight the impression on the part of many that all Native Americans now are rich,” McCain said. “In reality, that’s simply not the case.”

Of the 562 federally recognized tribes, 224 have gaming operations, he said, but some of the largest tribes do not have gambling.

Indian gambling has exploded from a $200 million industry in 1988 to $18 billion today, he said.

In calling for more transparency in casino operations, McCain asserted.  That wherever huge sums of money is exchanged, there’s a risk of corruption.

One of things he said he wants to do is examine closely the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988.

A commission of some 40 members oversees Indian gaming, while a roughly 500-member commission oversees the gambling enterprises in Nevada, McCain said.

Gaming “has expanded beyond our wildest imagination,” McCain said. More than 200 entities are seeking tribal recognition from the federal government, a number he said has grown since the passage of the Indian gaming act.

“Strangely enough prior to the influx of Indian gaming activity, there was very little of that kind of activity,” he said, a statement that was refuted later in the day by a BIA representative who also spoke with reporters who are part of the cross-country traveling seminar with the University of Southern California’s Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism.

Lee Flemming, the director of the Office of Federal Acknowledgment, said there had been no demonstrable increase in tribes seeking federal recognition in recent years. The complex recognition process can take more than a decade.

McCain said sufficient oversight and regulations are a must to prevent any scandals in Indian gambling, but added that he is not putting the industry on notice.

“I am saying that we will continue to exercise our oversight responsibilities under the legislation that we passed in 1988,” he
said.

Speaking to education levels and poverty problems on Indian reservations, McCain said, there’s no magic fix because the tribes are so different.

Studies have shown that self-governance has been very effective for Indian tribes, McCain said, with those that exercise it showing educational improvements and a decline in poverty.

For Indian country economies to flourish, McCain suggested that tribes need to be more accommodating of business.

“In many ways today, tribal governments are socialist in nature and they micromanage the reservation and they serve as an impediment to economic development, unintentionally,” he said.

--Vik Jolly, The Orange County Register

Posted on 03.10.05 at 2:45 AM by Victor Merina
Permalink and comments (473)

McCain Weighs in on Indian Gambling, Trust Mess

image

While Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., denied Monday that he was putting Indian gambling on notice, it certainly appeared that way in a meeting with reporters participating in a fellowship through the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism.

The chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee suggested that Indian gambling is ripe for scandal and also weighed in on the contentious trust reform issue embodied in the Cobell vs. Norton case.

Following are a few comments from McCain on each issue.

On Indian gambling: 
He noted the rapid expansion of Indian gambling “beyond our wildest imagination” since Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act In 1988. The industry soared to an estimated $18.5 billion in gambling Revenue last year.

“Wherever money is the item that’s exchanged, there’s going to be the risk of corruption,” McCain said. He cited Nevada’s early battles with corruption and subsequent strong regulation and referred to the state as the experts in requiring “transparency” in keeping the industry clean.

McCain cited the need for “transparency, transparency, transparency” in Indian gambling.

Asked how that squares with tribal sovereignty, McCain responded that “this is always the rub” determining where tribal sovereignty ends and federal sovereignty begins.

While some gambling experts consider McCain’s home state a model for Indian gambling regulation, he said regulation varies among states and suggested the issue needs clarification.

Hearings to determine things like tribal land acquisition for gambling are following IGRA guidelines and to identify the nature and size of Indian gambling problems are important, he said.

“We will continue to exercise oversight responsibilities,” he said.
McCain, however, did note that Indian gambling, while wildly successful for some tribes, hasn’t dug all tribes out of their social and economic woes.

“We have to fight the impression on the part of many that all Native Americans are rich,” he said, reiterating his call to ensure the industry is run as well as possible to avoid any corruption that could, in his terms, kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

On Cobell vs. Norton:
McCain has said he wants to settle the case else it will drag on for years and end up in the Supreme Court.

Claims for more than $100 billion for full accounting of alleged trust mismanagement could never be paid, he said.

“The Congress of the United States will never appropriate that kind of money,” McCain said calling for a settlement that would be viewed as bringing “closure” and seen as fair to all parties.

Asked how much he thinks could settle the issue, he said it “can’t be too high,” but added that he doesn’t know the amount.

There must be a fix, though, to what McCain called a “deplorable and despicable situation” on the trust issue.

While McCain said the Bureau of Indian Affairs has had many failings, he said he’d rather fix BIA than abolish it. If it weren’t around, who would administer Native American programs? he asked.

-- John Stearns, Arizona Republic

Posted on 03.09.05 at 1:41 AM by Victor Merina
Permalink and comments (1093)

NCAI Director Pushes Tribes to Reach Out, ‘Turn the Tide’

With the lessons of her clan’s late chief to guide her, Jacqueline Johnson is trying to change the way things get done in Indian Country.

imageJohnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, wants to “turn the tide” and help tribes become more effective at fighting for their rights from Congress to the courthouse. The key to that success, she said, can be found in the words of her Tlinglit mentor.

“We need everyone. We can’t always be our best advocates,” Johnson said, recounting her mentor’s words to a group of journalists Sunday in Washington, D.C. “We know that we have to reach out further.”

Johnson, who heads the nation’s oldest and largest American Indian organization, kicked off a weeklong journalism fellowship with a talk about her group’s priorities. The journalists are spending eight days studying how to cover Indian Country, with some intensive training first in Washington.

Johnson said tribes are getting better at working together to pursue more strategic court cases, as civil-rights groups did in the past, and are trying to be more productive at lobbying lawmakers. American Indians traditionally have done a good job of communicating among themselves about the important issues, she said, and now she hopes they are getting better at talking to others.

In doing so, Johnson hopes tribes can be successful at her organization’s three top priorities: preserving sovereignty, promoting economic development and pushing for a resolution to the drawn-out trust problems.

Posted on 03.07.05 at 3:23 AM by Michelle DeArmond, Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise
Permalink and comments (199)

  

 
About the Blog
The Covering Indian Country Blog is dedicated to fostering excellence in media coverage of Native American issues, communities and cultures through the sharing of resources, stories, viewpoints and journalism tips. Learn more about the blog or begin by reading the introductory post.

Photographs at the top of this page taken by Lee Marmon.

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