Indian Trust Money

Preface

In all of the following posts about the problem of Indian Trust Monies I have gotten much information, used some direct quotes and paraphrased others from the following web site: <http://www.indiantrust.com/index.cfm>. I encourage all to visit the site. I don’t think you can read it without getting quite angry.

I have been needing to write about something that is one of the worst things our government has done and that is the mismanagement and outright theft of the trust lands and money that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has supposed to have been managing all this time. They have managed it alright, but not in the interests of the native peoples that were supposed to be protected. The situation is so bad that that US District Judge James Robinson, who is the presiding judge in the case of “Cobell vs. Kempthorne” has stated that an historical accounting of the Indian Trust is impossible. This case has been in the court system for 11 years now and was started by Elouise Cobell, a Blackfoot from Montana sued the federal government in a class action lawsuit to force an accounting of billions of dollars belonging to some half million American Indians and their heirs, and held in trust by the federal government since the late 1800′s.

More later on the how the Clinton administration, who touted itself as the “most ethical administration in American history” handled the case.