Finally, Tribes Are Heard

Picture a bank keeping records so poorly that it didn’t know who deposited or withdrew funds and what the balance was in individual accounts. Picture that going on for a century. Unimaginable, but that’s exactly what the government did with funds belonging to Native American tribes. After decades of complaining about this--in vain--the tribes finally took the government to court and won, to the tune of perhaps billions of dollars.

In a scathing decision issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth blasted the Interior and Treasury departments--the keeper of the fund and the banker to the tribes--for the mismanagement of the Indian money and decided to personally oversee reforms. He was furious with the government’s slow response to his orders to produce documents and earlier this year held then-Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in contempt for what he called their outrageous pattern of obfuscation.

The mishandling of the $500-million fund, which pays some $300 million each year to as many as 500,000 individuals, adds insult to the U.S. takeover of Indian lands that resulted in creation of the fund in 1887. The money was to compensate Indians for the use of the land from which they were driven, with the funds from oil, gas and timber leases to be held in trust by a government that believed the tribes incapable of handling their own finances. The ruling affects Indians in every state west of the Mississippi River, including some in Southern California.

Over the decades, Congress had found repeatedly that the Individual Indian Money fund, as it is called, was hopelessly mismanaged. Finally, in 1994, it passed legislation--vehemently opposed by the Interior Department--appointing a special trustee to fix the problem. The trustee, Paul Homan, found the mess even worse than thought, with more than $2.4 billion in transactions that could not be reconciled. He resigned earlier this year in disgust, convinced that Babbitt was frustrating his work.

Judge Lamberth rejected the Indians’ request to appoint a special master to supervise reforms and back payments, saying that the government has an obligation by law to fix the fund. But, given the government’s past behavior, he will supervise the reforms for five years and use his judicial powers to force Babbitt and his successors to clean up the mess.

Considering Washington’s poor record, however, it may well be necessary to appoint an independent overseer of the fund when the five years is up. A century of carelessness and disregard is not easily overcome.