The United States government made a commitment, through solemn treaty obligations, when it divided Indian lands in 1887, to hold those lands in trust, to manage them wisely and to give any income from the sale or lease of the land to its Indian owners. Our government has never fulfilled that promise.
The Indian trust has been so badly mismanaged, for so long, by administrations of both political parties, that no one today has any idea how much money should even be in the trust - let alone, how much is owed to individual account holders, and for what. That’s not just wrong, it’s negligent.
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Last September, the judge in the Cobell case ordered the Interior Department to make a full and accurate historical accounting of all individual Indian trust accounts. Weeks later - behind closed doors - House Republican leaders, working with the Bush Administration, used legislative sleight-of-hand to derail the judge’s order for a year.
For years, Congress has left it to the Executive branch to resolve the Indian trust dispute, yet the problems are no closer to being solved now than they were a decade ago. It is time for Congress to step up and accept its share of the responsibility for finding a timely and fair solution to the trust management problem.
Link:
http://www.indiancountry.com/?1080319728