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O'siyo Brothers and Sister!
The editorial this week is not from my pen
(keyboard). It is straight from the Indian Trust website
http://www.indiantrust.com/ maintained by the Blackfeet
Reservation Development Fund, Inc.
The message is from primary litigant Elouise Cobell, and is one of
extreme importance to all of Indian Country. Whether you will ultimately
be a recipient of the Indian Trust settlement or not, the decisions
arrived at in this eleven-year-long class-action suit will impact every
single human in the United States who identifies him or her self as
Indian.
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U.S. District Judge James Robertson has agreed to our request for
another trial in our case.
Among other things this trial should determine whether the government is
able to provide a fair and accurate accounting of the thousands of trust
accounts in accordance with traditional equitable terms, what has
happened to our Individual Indian Money accounts and whether the
government has corrected the breaches of its fiduciary duties which the
court previously has found to exist.
The trial will be a momentous event, one that we have been seeking for
11 years.
Not surprisingly, the government resisted our request.
It urged Judge Robertson to do nothing while it continues it slow pace
of attempting to reconstruct trust accounts. Even the government lawyers
had to concede to the judge they have no idea how long this will take or
how much money it will cost.
True to his promise not to "dawdle" on our case, Judge Robertson has
swung into action. We are grateful for his decisiveness.
This is his first major decision in our case. It is a hopeful omen for
all 500,000 Indian Trust beneficiaries.
But the road ahead remains difficult.
The trial has been set for Oct. 10 in Washington. It will be preceded by
many hearings.
One thing is certain. The government will continue to resist our efforts
to secure this basic right of an accounting of our trust assets. They
will, no doubt, continue to seek ways to reduce the number of
individuals covered by the accounting, an issue that they have raised at
every court hearing and in Congress.
We will resist these moves because both the U.S. District Court and the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia have stated
repeatedly that the accounting is our right under the trust laws that
govern the conduct of the U.S. government.
Yes, the courts have held, the Interior Department is not above the laws
that long have govern the trust operations of banks and other financial
institutions.
That is a principle that we think is crucial to our lawsuit. Be assured
we will continue to resist the government's efforts to undo our victory
on that point.
Meanwhile, a lot of foolish things continue to come out of the Justice
Department these days. A March 1 letter from Interior Secretary Dirk
Kempthorne and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has to fall in that
category.
The letter went to Chairman Byron Dorgan of the Senate Indian Affairs
Committee and it proposed that Congress spend $7 billion during 10 years
on various Indian programs. Some news reports called this a "settlement
offer" for the Cobell litigation.
As I told the committee at a March 29 hearing, whatever this letter
purports to be, it is not a proposal to settle the Cobell case.
Make no mistake about it; this letter clearly seeks to terminate the
individual Indian Trust. It would eliminate our hard-won right for
Indian Trust beneficiaries to an adequate accounting of their Individual
Indian money accounts. And it destroy any opportunity for monetary
relief for the losses that an accounting is certain to uncover.
Consider the $7 billion figure. Interior's own experts have estimated
that the government's liability in the Cobell case alone to be at least
$10 billion and perhaps as high as $40 billion. But the Kempthorne-Gonzales
letter proposes a $7 billion cap that would eliminate "all existing and
potential individual and tribal claims for trust accounting, cash and
land mismanagement, and other related claims, along with the resolution
of other related matters . . . that permit recurrence of . . .
litigation."
In other words, it would kill our lawsuit, leaving trust beneficiaries
no chance of recovering the monies that the government took from their
accounts decades ago.
It's a cheap fix to problems that the government - not the Indian trust
beneficiaries - created.
And the administration wants all those problems settled on the backs of
the Individual Indian Account Beneficiaries.
I have stated repeatedly that we will not sacrifice the more than 120
years of wrongdoing by the government for a quick settlement that would
deny Indian people the money that is theirs.
Elouise Cobell
Copyright c. 2007 Blackfeet Reservation Development Fund, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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Dohiyi Ani Oginalii
Gary Smith (*,*)
wotanging@bellsouth.net
P. O. Box 672168 (`-') gars@nanews.org
Marietta, GA 30006, U.S.A. ===w=w===
http://www.nanews.org
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"Vernon was a great representative of the
Ojibwe Nation and one of the great communicators of our generation."
"He was the best at getting across the message of treaty rights, human
rights, mascots and racism to people from the grass-roots all the way to
national officials." -- William A. Means, Oglala - speaking of Vernon
Bellecourt, who took his Spirit Journey October 13, 2007
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As
historian Patricia Nelson Limerick summarized in "The Legacy of
Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West...
"Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition
of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it had for centuries, and
eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens,
the federal government will be freed of its persistent 'Indian
problem.'"
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Once a language is lost, it is gone forever. Of the 300 original Native
languages in North America, only 175 exist today. * 125 of these are no
longer learned by children. * 55 are spoken by 1 to 6 elders; when they
die, their language will disappear. * Without action, only 20 languages
will survive the next 50 years. Source: Indigenous Language Institute
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