In one of the largest class action suits ever filed
against the federal government, 300,000 American Indians have
demanded a full statement of their Individual Indian Money accounts
that are managed, much like a bank, by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs.
“They have no idea how much has been
collected from the companies that use our land,” says John
Echohawk, executive director of the Boulder, Colo.-based Native
American Rights Fund, which helped file the lawsuit in June. “The
BIA has spent more than 100 years mismanaging, diverting and losing
money that belongs to Indians.”
Scandal is
hardly new to the beleaguered federal agency. In May, the General
Accounting Office confirmed that the BIA cannot verify 32,900
transactions involving $2.4 billion in tribal trust funds. Even
worse, these funds cannot be fully audited because of incomplete
record-keeping. The separate individual money accounts, comprised
mainly of rents and royalties for Indian-owned land, oil, gas and
timber, are similarly disorganized. On top of bad BIA accounting,
the class action suit alleges a host of misdeeds, including
deliberate destruction of records, illegal use of funds and sloppy
investing.
Congress recognized some of these
problems when it passed the Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act
in 1994. The act created a new office, the Special Trustee for
American Indians, to oversee cleanup of the trust funds. The
Clinton administration, in its 1997 budget, requested a $17.7
million increase for the Special Trustee. But by June 10, the date
of the suit, the House had approved just $1 million, and the Senate
had not acted. “We got tired of waiting,” says Echohawk. “The court
will order them to do it, and they will have to come up with the
money.”
*Jared
Farmer
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline BIA comes under fire – again.
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