Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 18, Number 12, 1 December 2001 — Indian trust reform [ARTICLE]

Indian trust reform

Interior Secretary Gale Norton is scheduled to stand trial on Dec. 3 on contempt allegations related to a 1996 lawsuit accusing her department of mismanaging a bil-lion-dollar Indian trust fund. The suit stems from the mismanagement of royalties from mining, grazing, timber harvesting and other activities on 54 million acres of Indian land held in trust by the Interior Dept. for over a century. Payments were supposed to be paid to Indian beneficiaries but mueh of the money was lost, misappropriated, stolen or never collected. Norton will have to show that her office has complied with a federal judge's 1999 order that the Interior Dept. account for what is owed to See NEWSBRIEFS on page 13

NEWSBRIEFS from page 3

300,000 Indians who sued the agency claiming it squandered over $10 hillion in royalties since 1887. Norton must also prove she did not file false or misleading reports about the accounting and the department's system of tracking payments.

In November the department created a new office, the Bureau of Indian Trust Assets Management, to assist reform of the troubled accounting system. But the National Congress of American Indians criticized the move, saying the agency devised a band-aid reorganization without consulting with aggrieved tribes while failing to make substantive reforms. In Dec. 1999, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered the agency to conduct a review of 300,000 Native American trust accounts dating back over 100 years. Lamberth also held then-Secretary Bruce Babbitt and other federal officials in contempt for failing to produce records. In July, a court-appointed monitor's report accused agency officials of foot-dragging and concluded that Interior had not made a good-faith effort to eonduct a comprehensive review of the agency's mismanaged lndian trust fund accounts, nearly two years after Lamberth's ōrder. ■