Tribal Leaders Oppose Norton’s Plan on Assets

Tribal leaders from across the nation told Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton on Thursday that they oppose her plan to reorganize and consolidate the management of billions of dollars in Indian trust assets, saying they were never consulted.

“You should be looking out for the tribes,” Ernie L. Stensgar of the National Congress of American Indians told Norton, who faces contempt charges on whether she misled a judge about efforts to fix a century of mismanaged trust funds.

“If you’re going to have the trust of the tribes who you’re supposed to represent, you must do better than this,” Stensgar said at the crowded, daylong meeting, the first of seven on the proposal to move trust responsibilities away from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and into a new Bureau of Indian Trust Assets Management.

The Bush administration wants the BIA to handle education, social programs and law enforcement, and the new bureau to handle minerals, natural resources and the trust assets.

Stensgar said consulting with tribes “is not something you must endure before you do what you were going to do all the time.”

Navajo Nation President Kelsey Begaye of Window Rock, Ariz., said the Navajo tribal attorney general is asking Norton’s department for documents having anything to do with trust asset management since Sept. 1.

The request went to Norton on Thursday as a Freedom of Information request, and Begaye said he wants consultation meetings halted until the Interior Department provides the information.

At last week’s meeting of the National Congress of American Indians, 193 tribes adopted a resolution opposing the reorganization and transfer of trust responsibilities to the Bureau of Indian Trust Assets Management. They suggested the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BIA, set up a task force that would allow tribes a chance to comment on what should be done.

Norton, during a break in the meeting, said she agreed Thursday to the task force. She said the panel would study her proposal and “provide alternatives to the Interior and the tribes.”

“There’s widespread consensus that we need improvement,” Norton said. “We need to work together now on what process will allow that improvement to happen.”

Norton announced the formation of the Bureau of Indian Trusts Assets Management last month to oversee the accounting of $500 million a year in historically mismanaged royalties from Indian land. The bureau would report to a new assistant secretary. A federal court had ordered reform of the system.

Norton said Thursday that her agency has been criticized for waiting too long to make a proposal and for consulting with tribes too soon in the process.

The Interior Department doesn’t have a lot of details to offer the tribes yet because it is awaiting tribal comments, she said.

“We are in a position of having to have a proposal for change. This is the best that we’ve been able to come up with in looking at the issue,” she said. “Until we have something to substitute, this is the best we have to offer.”

Tribal leaders objected to the changes in the BIA and the way the administration presented it to the tribes.

Olney Patt Jr., chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, said the reorganization “is a defense strategy.”

“I think the final result is the BIA will be dismantled, and that’s our only presence in the federal government. We’d like to see it retained and not destroyed,” Patt said.