Indian Trust Fund Can Be Fixed, Official Says

A federally run trust fund for Native Americans that was mismanaged for more than a century can be fixed within four years, President Bush’s nominee to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs said Wednesday.

Neal McCaleb acknowledges that it will be difficult to determine how much the government owes thousands of Native Americans for past mismanagement and to create safeguards against future malfeasance.

“That’s a quick fix under the schedules I’ve seen,” McCaleb said. He added that “my desire and expectation is [finishing] both jobs.”

The trust accounts were set up in 1887 to hold revenue from grazing, logging, mining or oil leases on tribal land for Native American landholders. Since the beginning, however, the accounts were mismanaged, the government acknowledges.

“It’s a national scandal,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday during an Indian affairs committee hearing.

Record-keeping was shoddy, money was stolen or used for other federal programs, some money was never collected, and thousands of accounts have money in them but no names attached.

More than 300,000 Native Americans are included in a class-action suit filed in 1996 claiming they are owed at least $10 billion because of mismanagement.

A federal court has ordered the Interior Department, which oversees the BIA, to overhaul the trust fund management and piece together what the Native Americans are owed.

Dennis Gingold, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said reform of the trust fund has been a myth and McCaleb is a “babe in the woods” if he thinks he can fix it in four years.

“He’s only repeating the same lines every one of his predecessors have said for the last 30 years,” said Gingold.

McCaleb said the BIA is working out glitches in computer databases created to help reconstruct and track the trust accounts. McCaleb said that staffers who briefed him on the progress said: “We know what we’re doing. We know how to do it. We just need a little time.”

McCaleb was praised by senators from both parties, but they also expressed serious concerns about dilapidated schools, inadequate health care and depressed economies on Indian reservations.

“We have a crisis in Indian country--in housing, in education, in health care,” said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.).

McCaleb is a member of the Chickasaw Tribe in Oklahoma. Most recently, he served as secretary of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. He was a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1974 to 1982 and lost a bid for the Republican nomination for governor in 1982.