[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 10 (Monday, February 2, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S361-S362]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ``A TRUST BETRAYED''

  Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, a recent article in the January 26, 2004 
edition of TIME Magazine entitled ``A Trust Betrayed'' has again 
reminded the Nation of the shameful and illegal manner in which the 
United States treats Native Americans.
  A pending class action lawsuit alleges that the United States owes 
over $100 billion to some 500,000 Native Americans. For over 100 years, 
the Department of Interior has served as the trustee for the proceeds 
from the leasing of oil, gas, land and mineral rights on Indian land, 
yet the Department cannot tell us how much is owed or to whom it is 
owed. This money is desperately needed to address basic human needs and 
stimulate economic development.
  There are important legal issues at stake. The concepts of 
sovereignty, treaty rights, and government-to-government relations all 
come into play.
  Indian trust reform is also a civil rights issue. We are becoming a 
much more diverse country. How can Hispanic Americans, or African 
Americans, or anyone else, trust the United States if we are still 
breaking our legal obligations to our first Americans?
  I commend this article to the attention of my colleagues, and once 
again urge the Department of Interior to provide the accounting 
required to all Native Americans.
  I ask unanimous consent to print the article in the Record.
   There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   [From Time Magazine, Jan. 26, 2004]

                           A Trust Betrayed?


 Native Americans claim the U.S. mismanaged their oil and gas legacies 
                         it promised to protect

                    (By Marguerite Michaels/Shawnee)

        Ruby Withrow remembers the happy days she spent as a young 
     child on her grandfather Moses Bruno's 80-acre homestead near 
     Shawnee, Okla. There the extended Bruno family, members of 
     the Potawatomi tribe, tended large gardens of vegetables and 
     fruits and raised chickens, hogs and cows. On Sundays the 
     whole family attended the Sacred Heart Catholic Mission just 
     down the road. But all that changed soon after oil was 
     discovered on the Bruno property.
        Lease agreements were arranged with oil producers, wells 
     were dug, and pumping began in 1939. But family members say 
     Grandpa Bruno never knew how much oil and gas were being 
     taken out of his land or how much money he was due from their 
     sale. All his royalty payments went into a trust fund managed 
     by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). If Bruno needed to buy 
     something, he had to appeal to the local BIA agent, and he 
     was rarely given cash. When the he wanted to buy a cow, the 
     price was deducted from his account and given directly to the 
     seller. When he bought groceries, he paid for them with a BIA 
     voucher.
        The wells were plugged just 28 months later--Bruno family 
     members say the wells' operator never gave a reason for 
     ending production--but in that short time, they say, the soil 
     was ruined, and the Brunos were able to grow hardly anything 
     on it. Younger family members moved away to find jobs, and 
     the old folks limped along on public assistance until 1960, 
     when Bruno and his wife Frances died within a month of each 
     other. Their heirs decided to sell what remained of the land 
     the next year.
        Such stories are common among Native Americans. Like 
     legions of others, Bruno acquired his holdings under the 
     Dawes Act of 1887. Its allotment program was an effort by 
     Congress to break up the tribal structure by encouraging 
     self-sufficiency among the Indians. The Dawes Act mandated 
     that the land given to Natives be managed by the 
     Department of the Interior's local BIA agent and promised 
     that any profits from the property would be held in trust 
     for its owners, The problem, say hundreds of families like 
     the Brunos, is that the owners received relatively little 
     of the money coming to them.
       Over the past decade, many of the families have begun 
     actively pursuing what they say is their rightful legacy. In 
     1996 Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, filed a 
     $135 billion class action against the U.S. government, 
     claiming that billions of dollars belonging to some 500,000 
     Native Americans and their heirs had been mismanaged or 
     stolen from accounts held in trust since the late 19th 
     century. Through document discovery and courtroom testimony, 
     the Cobell case revealed mismanagement, ineptness, dishonesty 
     and delay by federal officials, leading U.S. District Judge 
     Royce Lamberth to declare their conduct ``fiscal and 
     governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.''
       The BIA holds 11 million acres in trust for individual 
     Native Americans. Money from timber sales and agricultural 
     and oil leases

[[Page S362]]

     of this property is distributed under the same program that 
     dealt with Moses Bruno. Five years ago, his descendants began 
     tracking their patrimony. Their experience shows how 
     difficult it can be to prove past wrongs and have them 
     redressed.
       Family members say Moses Bruno was never allowed to see his 
     oil and gas account ledgers. It might not have done him much 
     good if he had been, given that, like many Indians of his 
     generation, he had never learned to read and could write only 
     his name. When his eldest son Johnnie argued that the 
     government was robbing him blind, the older man insisted that 
     the Indian-agency people would never cheat him.
       After World War II, Bruno's children tried to sue the oil 
     company for saltwater damage to their soil caused by the 
     pumping from the wells. ``But even though my dad Johnnie took 
     photos,'' says Ruby Withrow, 69, ``we couldn't prove Moses 
     had not allowed the salty runoff. There was no paper trail at 
     that time.'' Nor was there money to pay for a lawyer. Over 
     the years, family members looked for documents that could 
     prove the bureau had treated Moses Bruno badly. They went to 
     the National Archives in Washington, visited historical 
     societies in Oklahoma and requested records from BIA offices 
     in Shawnee and nearby Anadarko, Okla. Always they were told 
     that few records were available.
       The Cobell case reassured the Brunos that others had had 
     similarly unhappy experiences with their BIA trust funds and 
     motivated them to dig deeper for documents to support their 
     complaints. Finally, after a 16-hour marathon on the Internet 
     in the fall of 1998, Dana Dickson, Ruby Withrow's 
     daughter, discovered on an obscure Indian arts-and-crafts 
     site a link to Oklahoma Indian--agency files located at 
     the regional National Archives in Fort Worth, Texas. A 
     family delegation immediately made the trip. ``I'll never 
     forget the first time we went down there,'' says Dickson's 
     cousin Johnnie Flynn. ``Dana and I were pulling file after 
     file. One of them was Moses Bruno's. It was three inches 
     thick. I stopped and looked over at my mother and my Aunt 
     Ruby. There were tears streaming down their faces.''
       They found grocery receipts and bills from JCPenney for 
     socks at 15[cents] a pair and a coat for $14.66. The purchase 
     order from the Indian agency for Moses' first car was there, 
     as were numerous voucher slips endorsed with his tentative, 
     spidery signature. Most important, there were pages of ledger 
     sheets detailing his individual BIA money account.
       More than half a dozen visits later, Moses' grandson Leon 
     Bruno has accumulated enough photocopies of documents to fill 
     19 loose-leaf notebooks. Papers show that Moses' entire 80-
     acre allotment first came under an oil lease in 1923. Six 
     years later, according to BIA documents, 20 of those acres 
     were sold to two local white men for $1,311, or $65.55 an 
     acre. The family has found contradicting government estimates 
     of the land's royalty value at the time, ranging from $50 to 
     $400 an acre. And documents are unclear about whether Moses 
     Bruno understood before the transaction was completed that 
     the land was being sold. A well was drilled on these 20 acres 
     in 1933 and still pumps to this day.
       In 1931 Bruno got permission from the BIA to withdraw 20 
     separate acres of his allotment from the trust, and he began 
     selling percentages of his oil and gas royalty interest. Four 
     wells were eventually drilled on the remaining BIA-controlled 
     40 acres and pumped from march 1939 to the end of 1941. It 
     was the practice then for oil companies to send royalty-
     payment checks for Indian-owned property directly to the 
     superintendent of the local BIA office. Each day the Shawnee 
     office made a deposit via certified mail to the Federal 
     Reserve Bank in Oklahoma City, Okla. The deposit sheet listed 
     the source of each check, its amount and the day's total 
     deposits. Daily entries were also made in the office's cash-
     receipts journal, registering the payment to each individual 
     Indian account on a ledger card.
       Sorting through those old documents, with the lingering 
     resentments the families have toward the BIA, can be 
     confusing. When Dana Dickson began comparing the amounts 
     posted to her great grandfather's ledger card with the sums 
     on the deposit sheets for the same days, she discovered that 
     10% was routinely funneled from the oil check to a special-
     deposit account. Dickson and her relatives suspected that 
     corrupt agents were taking the money for themselves. But Ross 
     Swimmer, a Department of the Interior ombudsman working on 
     behalf of Indian-trust beneficiaries, told TIME that the 
     deduction, which was not exclusively to Moses Bruno's 
     account, was simply a fee that the BIA charged for 
     managing the oil and gas properties held by the trust 
     funds.
       Nearly two years after the elder Brunos died in 1960, a 
     Shawnee bureau agent suggested that the family sell its 
     remaining 40 acres, along with the property's mineral rights. 
     ``[The minerals have only a] nominal value,'' the agent wrote 
     in a letter to the regional BIA office in Anadarko. The 
     family signed off on the sale, netting a $3,022.50. In 1982 a 
     new oil well was drilled on that land and is still pumping.
       The Bruno family acknowledges the pressure the BIA was 
     under during the oil-boom years. In the 1935 annual report of 
     the Shawnee agency, the superintendent called his office 
     ``woefully undermanned,'' handling 1,500 Indian money 
     accounts with only one clerk, who had no modern account 
     machines. ``Maybe there were some mistakes made,'' says Leon 
     Bruno. ``[But] a lot of what went on was deliberate.'' The 
     family estimates that Moses Bruno earned a total of $35,000 
     from his oil and gas leases. The production figures the 
     descendants unearthed, on just one well on the land that was 
     sold in 1993, amount to almost $70 million.
       It is not clear whether the family will ever receive 
     compensation for any miscalculations that may have been made 
     on their land sales and oil leases. Elouise Cobell's class 
     action has stalled in the face of the Department of the 
     Interior's estimate that it would take five years and $335 
     million just to account for the money from land and mineral 
     leases covering a period of more than 100 years. And Congress 
     is balking at the expense--even though its committees have 
     issued more than one report over the years about gross 
     mismanagement of Native American trust funds. In December the 
     Bruno descendants decided to withdraw from the Cobell suit 
     and hired a lawyer to pursue their own.
       ``It's not about the money,'' says Moses' granddaughter 
     Ruby Withrow, a nurse who administers a diabetes program for 
     the Absentee Shawnee tribe. ``I want some justice for a man 
     who trusted the United States and was betrayed.'' The BIA has 
     looked into the family's claims and says that while the 
     records for Moses Bruno's account may not be complete, ``no 
     instance of malfeasance was found in the records that we 
     examined.'' In a fax to TIME, the agency stated that 
     ``understandably, the family did not review these files with 
     a historian's commitment to objectivity.''
       Still, the search for what happened to Moses Bruno's land 
     has produced a new sense of equanimity for his family. There 
     have been several meetings to bring all the descendants--some 
     200 plus--up to date on the stories the documents tell. Leon 
     Bruno has started a nonprofit corporation, funded by garage 
     sales, raffles and donations from family and friends, that he 
     hopes will eventually allow the family to pay for an 
     organized study of its Potawatomi culture and language. He 
     and his wife Veta attend the annual gatherings of the nine 
     Potawatomi bands, now scattered over several states. Leon has 
     gone through the training and fasting that are required of 
     those chosen as the tribe's honored fire keepers. And he has 
     built a roundhouse on his property in Tecumseh, OK, where 
     family members gather four times a year to light a sacred 
     fire and pray for the memory of their ancestor Moses Bruno.

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