Whose Trust?
Eloise Cobell is the great granddaughter of Mountain Chief, a legendary Indian Leader of the West. Ms. Cobell is the Executive director of the Native American Community Development Corporation, and she served as Chairperson of the Blackfeet National Bank. The Cobell v. Norton case is a class action lawsuit, to force the federal government to account for billions of dollars belonging to hundreds of thousands of American Indians and their heirs. After more than a century of negligence and ineptness, the federal government has no accurate records for billions of dollars owed to hundreds of thousands of American Indians. The federal government in 1880 broke up tribal lands and divided them up in to parcels, individually owned by Native Americans, of 60 – 180 acres. These lands were leased to oil companies, farmers, ranchers, and miners. The money made was given to the government and placed into government ran trust funds with the intention of giving the money back to the Native Americans. The breaking up of tribal lands into allotments destroyed the land base of Native Americans. In 1996, Blackfeet Treasurer, Eloise Cobell launched a class action lawsuit to account for all royalties owed to tribes and individual heirs of Native Americans since the 1880’s. This became a mountain of a task quick as land owners had no way to determine how much they are owed due to poor records keeping and the destruction of key documents by government officials. Attempts by congress to fix the system has failed, the Interior Department tried and failed. The government turned to accounting giant Arthur Anderson to fix the system. Anderson, the main government expert on financial matters was paid 20 million dollars to solve the problem, yet the only thing he succeded in was further undermining the case litigation.
Eloise in her radio interview made an excellent point. “If this were a bank mishandling trust funds, people would be going to jail. Instead the...