By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer Sat May 6, 2:16 PM ET
LENEXA, Kan. - Seventy feet beneath the prairie, the government is filling limestone caverns — protected by guards and a bomb-sniffing dog — with truckloads of American Indians’ financial and cultural records.
What is ground zero for an accounting that will take seven years and cost $335 million owes its existence to a bitter class-action lawsuit brought against the Interior Department a decade ago. Still, it’s only a short version of the historical accounting that Indians demanded but no longer want, because they do not think it can be done properly.
The Indians say the government mismanaged a trust in their names for 120 years and now owes them tens of billions of dollars.
The dispute dates to 1887, when Congress made the Interior Department the trustee for 145 million acres of Indian lands. Indians were supposed to benefit, but the government gave most of the land to white settlers.
Today, the department manages 10 million acres of trust land for individual Indians and 46 million acres for tribes. In 1996, the Indians sued to reconcile their historical accounts. The Indians, and Congress, demanded an audit. The Indians may be owed a century’s worth of grazing rents, oil and gas royalties and timber sales from the land, plus interest.
Both the Indians and the Interior Department agree $13 billion was collected between 1909 and 2001.
The Indians had claimed the unpaid interest could be more than $150 billion, but have offered to drop the whole thing if the government coughs up $27.5 billion. They would spread the money among individual Indian accountholders, about one-fifth of the 2.5 million Indians now living in the U.S., mainly in the West.
No way, the Bush administration replied, saying the government all along has forwarded most of the rents and royalties to tribes and individual Indians.
“It could be just $30 million that’s owed to the Indians,” said Ross Swimmer, the department’s special trustee for Indians. He also is a member of Oklahoma’s Cherokee Nation.
During a tour of the Kansas cave, Swimmer and other department officials were eager to show that many more Indian records exist than people realize. They also wanted to demonstrate their ability to check the accuracy of financial transactions with Indians.
“They’re finally going to get their accounting,” Swimmer said. “For once we’ve gotten something right for the Indians.”
In an irony befitting an “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” legal war, the government is relying on the Indian-demanded accounting — actually, it’s a statistical sampling — to come up with figures that Indians claim low-ball what they are owed.
“It’s a number in the m’s, not the b’s,” said Fritz Scheuren, who oversees the department’s sampling. Scheuren was president of the American Statistical Association last year.
The Indians who sued say now that too many records have been destroyed to come up with an accurate figure. Before 1990, the Treasury Department](http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?p=Treasury+Department)** routinely destroyed the Indian trust’s canceled checks, and court documents attest to numerous destroyed records.**
“The documents that the government has preserved are a fraction of those that have been lost and destroyed,” said Dennis Gingold, a lawyer for the Indians. “Massive hard copy and electronic destruction … make the accounting legally and factually impossible.”
The Indians’ biggest ally is U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a former Reagan administration official whose strongly worded rulings condemn the Interior Department.
After nine years presiding over the case, Lamberth concluded last July that the agency is a “pathetic outpost” that has bungled its fiduciary duty.
“For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few,” the judge wrote.
Not surprisingly, the department wants Lamberth removed from the case and a different judge assigned.
i am 10000000000% behind reparations for indians. this is an important issue for america…billions of dollars are at stake along with making an attempt to correct atrocities of our nation’s past…but did you hear anything about it over this weekend?