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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