[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 119 (Thursday, September 13, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1639-E1640]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    ELOUISE COBELL'S NOBEL EFFORTS TO FIX THE INDIAN TRUST FUND MESS

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                         HON. DENNIS R. REHBERG

                               of montana

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 13, 2001

  Mr. REHBERG. Mr. Speaker, for over 100 years the Federal Government 
has grossly mismanaged Indian Trust Funds derived from grazing, 
minerals and other natural resources revenues. Elouise Cobell of the 
Blackfeet Tribe in Montana, who after years of getting stonewalled in 
her efforts to get an accurate accounting of Indian Trust Funds, filed 
the monumental lawsuit Cobell v. Babbitt in 1996.
  Federal Judge Royce Lamberth has ruled in favor of Elouise and other 
plaintiffs on numerous occasions. In a December 1999 civil contempt 
ruling, he stated ``The Federal Government here did not just stub its 
toe. It abused the rights of these plaintiffs to obtain these trust 
documents, and it engaged in a shocking pattern of deception of the 
court. I have never seen more egregious conduct by the Federal 
Government.''
  I urge my colleagues to read the following article from the September 
9, 2001 issue of Parade Magazine focusing on Elouise Cobell's nobel 
efforts to fix the Indian Trust Fund mess.

                           The Broken Promise

                            (By Peter Maas)

       On the wall next to Elouise Cobell's desk is a blown-up 
     reproduction of a famous Peanuts cartoon strip. After Lucy 
     assures Charlie Brown, ``Trust me,'' she once again snatches 
     away the football he's about kick, and he ends up flat on his 
     back.
       ``I decided to stop being Charlie Brown,'' Cobell told me. 
     For her, ``Lucy'' is 5 feet 4, a wife and mother, Cobell is a 
     member of the Blackfeet Indian tribe sequestered in the 
     northwest corner of Montana. As a result of a lawsuit she 
     filed on behalf of her fellow Native Americans, they finally 
     are about to collect a staggering sum of money--as much as 
     $40 billion--from Washington.
       ``It's not as if we're taking money from the government,'' 
     she explained, a steely edge creeping into her normally soft-
     spoken voice. ``It's our money that was taken from us.'' 
     Indeed, a federal judge declared. ``I have never seen more 
     egregious misconduct by the federal government.'' And were it 
     not for Elouise Cobell, it would still be going on.
       What she finally could not take anymore was the betrayal 
     for more than a century--``a shocking pattern of deception,'' 
     as the court put it--regarding the property rights of the 
     Blackfeet and many other Native American tribes. This 
     betrayal began in 1887, when Congress opened up previously 
     established tribal reservations to white settlers. In return, 
     individual Indians were granted land allotments--generally 
     ranging from 40 to 320 acres. But they were judged to be 
     incapable of managing their own affairs, so the federal 
     government decided to do it for them.
       As a result, Indians could not lease or sell their property 
     without government approval. This included grazing and 
     quarrying rights as well as leases for timber, agriculture, 
     oil, natural gas and minerals. The government would make all 
     the deals. The income would be held in trust and distributed 
     to each Indian family. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 
     the Department of the Interior was to be in charge, and the 
     Treasury Department would send out the checks.

[[Page E1640]]

       But the Indians never got what was owed them.
       At one of the endless meetings she attended to try to 
     rectify matters, Cobell actually heard a Treasury Department 
     official admit that millions and millions of Indian dollars 
     were being forwarded by the Department of the Interior with 
     no instructions. ``So we just put it in the general fund,'' 
     said the official.
       Cobell said she eventually discovered that the money 
     apparently had been used, among other notable examples, to 
     help bail out New York City during its 1975 fiscal crisis, to 
     save the Chrysler Corporation from going under and even to 
     reduce the national debt.
       On assignment for PARADE, I recently visited Cobell. Along 
     with her husband, she has a 320-acre allotment ranch with 
     about 100 head of cattle in Glacier County, which encompasses 
     much of the Blackfeet reservation and ranks as the 35th 
     poorest county in the U.S. This is where she grew up in a 
     house with no phone, electricity or running water and where 
     she began her education in 1950 in a one-room grade school.
       As it happened, Cobell's teacher subscribed to the Sunday 
     New York Times, which she shared with her students. ``It 
     would arrive a month late, but it exposed me to a world I 
     never knew existed,'' Cobell told me. ``It gave me a chance 
     to dream a little.''
       She went on to high school, which required a daily 50-mile 
     round-trip by bus. Then Cobell made a daring move to the 
     nearest city, Great Falls, to enroll in a two-year business 
     college, where she specialized in accounting. ``I wanted to 
     learn more and to help out at home,'' she recalled. ``My 
     dream was to buy my mother a new dress.''
       Cobell cut short further studies at Montana State 
     University in 1968 to return home and care for her mother, 
     who had terminal cancer. Then her father died.
       Because of her accounting background, the Blackfeet Tribal 
     Council appointed Cobell the tribe's treasurer in 1976. ``I 
     remembered, as a little girl,'' she said, ``the elders would 
     come to my father's house and wonder where the money was. You 
     lived with it all the time. But they didn't know what to ask. 
     They had no information, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was 
     something to be feared. You felt so powerless.''
       She already had seen the local office of the BIA in action 
     in a college work-study program. ``I was people treated very 
     badly,'' she recalled. ``People sitting all day on hard 
     benches, with no rest rooms. Some were begging for money, for 
     food, for clothes for their children. I would tell my mother, 
     and she'd say, `Don't make waves.' ''
       Under the BIA's management of the so-called Individual 
     Indian Money trust fund, Native Americans never were informed 
     who had leased their land or for what purpose, how much the 
     lease was for or how long the lease was to run. On occasion, 
     the Treasury Department would mail checks to individuals for 
     a pittance, with no accounting or explanation of any kind. 
     (In addition to the Individual Indian Money trust, the 
     government manages a separate trust fund covering more than 
     300 tribes.)
       ``As the tribe's treasurer,'' Cobell said, ``I tried to get 
     a handle on everything. I found that the BIA's investment of 
     Blackfeet tribal trust funds was accruing negative interest. 
     How could this be? Under the law, this money was only 
     supposed to be invested in the safest government securities. 
     But when I asked about this at a meeting with the BIA 
     supervisor, he just stared at me and said, `Why don't you 
     learn how to read a statement?' It was so humiliating.
       ``Later--a lot later--I discovered what had happened. The 
     BIA had taken a big chunk of money from the Blackfeet, loaned 
     it to another tribe for whatever reason and forgot to replace 
     it. After all, it was not their money, and we were just dumb 
     Indians.''
       After getting nowhere at local and regional BIA offices, 
     Cobell tried the Interior Department in Washington, D.C. And 
     still got nowhere. ``I did spreadsheets,'' she said, ``and 
     saw huge gaps where oil and gas companies that had leased out 
     land weren't paying anything. There was no accounting system 
     in place, so the Interior Department had no idea who was 
     paying and who wasn't. They didn't care.''
       Then, in 1989. Rep. Mike Synar--an Oklahoma Democrat with a 
     large Native American constituency--helped to arrange a 
     meeting at the White House under the first Bush 
     Administration with officials of the Office of Management and 
     Budget. Cobell was invited, as well as some outside experts, 
     including a prominent banking attorney named Dennis Gingold. 
     Very little came out of it, except that Cobell remembered 
     Gingold acidly saying at one point to the government men, 
     ``I'm amazed you guys haven't been sued.''
       In 1994, Synar got Congress to authorize the Presidential 
     appointment of a special trustee to provide a full
       And, despite repeated attempts to see Babbitt herself, 
     Cobell never did. ``He wouldn't meet with me,'' she said. ``I 
     was told he didn't have the time. All I got were empty 
     assurances that mismanagement of our trust funds was a top 
     priority.''
       Cobell already had reached the breaking point after meeting 
     Attorney General Janet Reno at a conference where Reno was 
     the main speaker. Cobell sketched out what she was going 
     through, and Reno invited her to Washington. But when Cobell 
     arrived in February 1996 with high hopes, Reno also declined 
     to see her and relegated her to underlings. She was treated 
     with such rudeness and condescension, Cobell told me, that 
     ``a lawsuit was the only option I had left.''
       She went back to Dennis Gingold and asked the attorney if 
     he would accept the case. He agreed, telling her, ``We cannot 
     allow this to happen. Our government can't operate like 
     this.'' But Gingold warned her that it would be extremely 
     costly. Cobell said she'd get the money somehow. And she did, 
     pleading her cause to private foundation after foundation, 
     eventually raising nearly $8 million. During this period, to 
     her astonishment, she received a John D. MacArthur ``genius 
     award'' and immediately threw the $300,000 grant into the 
     pot.
       The class-action suit representing 500,000 Native Americans 
     was filed in the District of Columbia on June 10, 1996. The 
     Justice Department, representing the Interior and Treasury 
     Departments, declined to enter into settlement talks. The 
     presiding federal district judge, Royce Lamberth, twice 
     ordered Interior and Treasury to produce documents involving 
     the Individual Indian Money trust fund. Despite promises to 
     do so, a special investigator appointed by Judge Lamberth 
     discovered that, during the course of the proceedings, 
     Interior had in fact been destroying documents. What's more, 
     Treasury officials had shredded 162 cartons of ledgers 
     listing transactions and disbursements plus records of 
     uncashed checks--some 100 years old--that never reached their 
     intended Indian recipients.
       On Aug. 10, 1999, after holding Interior Secretary Babbitt 
     and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt of court, 
     Judge Lamberth fined them a total of $625,000, which the U.S. 
     paid with our tax dollars.
       On Dec. 21, 1999, Judge Lamberth ruled that the government 
     had breached its sacred trust duties across the board. He 
     ordered the Interior and Treasury Departments to file 
     quarterly reports detailing efforts to reform the trust 
     system and decreed court supervision of these efforts. The 
     Justice Department appealed on the grounds that the judge had 
     overstepped his authority. But a federal appeals panel of 
     judges unanimously upheld Lamberth's ruling.
       This May, the Bush Administration abandoned an appeal to 
     the U.S. Supreme Court. What remains now, in the second phase 
     of Cobell's lawsuit, is to determine how much the Native 
     American plaintiffs will receive. Some estimates range from 
     $20 billion to as much as $40 billion.
       Whether the government will continue the battle or begin 
     serious settlement talks remains up in the air. In June, the 
     House Appropriations Committee said it had no interest in 
     funding more litigation, which so far has cost the U.S. more 
     than $31 million.
       Meanwhile, Elouise Cobell has dedicated herself to helping 
     Native Americans achieve economic self-sufficiency. She is 
     the founder and current chairperson of the Blackfeet National 
     Bank--the first bank in the nation owned by Indians.
       In Montana, when Cobell drives from her ranch to her bank 
     office in the woebegone town of Browning, with an 
     unemployment rate as high as 70 percent, she passes a sign. 
     It marks the site of the government's first Indian office on 
     the Blackfeet reservation, under agent John Young. It says 
     that this is where, in the terrible winter of 1884, 500 
     Blackfeet Indians died of starvation.
       ``The truth is,'' Cobell told me, ``that agent Young kept 
     the rations he had on hand for white people.'' She pointed to 
     a ridge opposite the sign, where a trench was dug to bury the 
     Blackfeet bodies, ``We call it Ghost Ridge,'' she said. ``I 
     think of those souls every day. I'm fighting for them too.''

     

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