A couple of weeks ago Native American leader Elouise Cobell was present as the US federal government announced it would settle a lawsuit over Indian trust funds. Cobell is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that represents about half a million American Indians, and one that is filed against the U.S. Government. As CNN explains, the suit was originally filed in 1996 and ‘accused the U.S. Department of the Interior of failing to account for and provide revenue from a trust fund representing the value of Indian assets managed by the government.’ Because of the length of time that the suit has gone on for it has been Cobell v. Kempthorne, Cobell v. Norton, Cobell v. Babbitt and Cobell v. Salazar, changing with the Secretary of the Interior. However, on the 8th December 2009 Cobell was shaking hands with current Secretary Ken Salazar after a $3.4 billion Settlement Agreement had been announced.
The United States is a trustee of Individual Indian Money accounts, which are meant to represent individuals’ property. Lands were allotted to Native Americans in an 1887 agreement with the US Federal Government. The Dawes Act of that year split up reservations, allotting plots to individuals where previously several members of a tribe would have held the land. The 1996 suit sought to claim royalties due from industrial activity on the properties. Julia Whitty of Mother Jones commented on the ongoing lawsuit in 2005: ‘[The Department of the] Interior leases these private Indian lands to oil, timber, and agricultural corporations and other commercial entities, then pays the Indians the revenues those leases yield. But Cobell claims the government has been grossly negligent in its 118 years of managing the Individual Indian Trust.’ Ann Woolner’s very good and impassioned description of the thirteen-year lawsuit on Bloomberg.com notes: ‘How much money each person was owed, no one really knows, so sloppy was the record-keeping. Thousands of critical documents were lost or destroyed.’
In the wake of the new Settlement Mother Jones has noted that ‘Cobell's forensic accountants estimated the government owed the Indians $176 billion.’ So while Elouise Cobell acknowledges the £3.4 billion Settlement will mean a ‘great deal’ to tens of thousands of impoverished Indians it is—in her words—a bittersweet victory: ‘Indians did not receive the full financial Settlement they deserved, but we achieved the best Settlement we could [1].’
If the Settlement is accepted then thousands of Native Americans will receive up to $1000. The federal government will also use $2 billion of the money to buy up partial interests in land, so that land ownership can be consolidated into larger parcels for the tribes. This is to simplify the current system, the complexity of which can be seen from the Interior Department deputy secretary’s quote in the New York Times: ‘one 40-acre parcel today has 439 owners, most of whom receive less than $1 a year in income from it. […] The parcel is valued at about $20,000, but it costs the government more than $40,000 a year to administer those trusts.’ Overall, the Settlement and intended improvements to accounting and record keeping should allow American Indians to begin to obtain the value of their ancestral lands.
The Settlement will also create a $60 million federal Indian Education Scholarship fund to improve access to higher education for Indian youth [2]. This last feature is worth noting, as on December 13th a New York Times piece by Erik Eckholm discussed gang violence on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In it 24-year-old Richard Wilson is ominously described as having been a pallbearer for at least five of his homeboys. All were from the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, ‘a ‘Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang.’ Other gangs mentioned were Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads [sic] and Indian Mafia. The article’s figures have 5000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe involved with at least 39 gangs on the reservation, and Eckholm notes the gang-related thefts, vandalism, assaults (including sexual assaults) and four murders that police have documented.
An article by Kevin Gray in Details states that the gangs dabble in pot and sometimes coke, but mostly drink (the reservation itself is dry, but there are four beer outlets in a town across the border two miles south. Between them they sell 12,000 cans of beer daily and make $4 million yearly—the town’s population is 14). Gray also mentions a Wild Boy who got his hand broken by a group of Tre Tres with a bat. Eckholm notes that, in comparison with their counterparts in America’s cities, the Pine Ridge gangs are ‘more likely to fight rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with semiautomatic pistols.’ In their do-rags and XXL Tupac T-shirts they may appear wannabes, but they still die and kill. The suicide rates for teenagers on the Pine Ridge Reservation are 150% higher than the U.S. national average for that age group. [3]
The Eckholm article has been getting the attention of blogs and forums recently, but going back a few months to an article in the Washington Post the focus was on Allen (about 36 miles from Pine Ridge and designated the poorest place in America, using the Census 2000 data). The article followed 23-year-old Clarence as he identified the graves of his generation:
Away from the blunt realities of a gravesite, go to the Lakota Country Times online and you will find a letter to the editor from the Poor Bear family. Even if it doesn’t tear an emotional response out of you, or marshal some of the more intense thoughts in your head, it does at least pull you out of passive news consumption for a while. This letter shows the family bond and identity that Desmond Poor Bear experienced for at least part of his life, and also the family’s tolerance towards his detractors and those involved in his death.“This guy, he killed himself in a car accident,” Clarence said, pointing to the grave of a 25-year-old next to the grave of a 21-year-old who also died in that accident. “He was drunk.”“This is Desmond Poor Bear, the one who got shot by police,” he said of a mound of fresh dirt with a marker: 4-17-82 to 7-29-09. “He was drunk, and he had a knife.”
In the 1960s John Betjeman noted that modern developers who claimed that their housing estates offered living conditions and amenities equal to the old houses of the rich ‘must be stupid, and also malevolent [4].’ For Betjeman, developers selling that dream to people on tighter incomes were ignorant of the architectural heritage they were laying claim to, and yet at the same time cleverly and maliciously duping people into needlessly substandard housing. For 122-plus years the specific departments and persons involved with the administration, finance and laws affecting American Indians have made stupid mistakes—misjudgements that may well have been malevolent also.
Calculated neglect and its not quite directly resulting social problems—for those who would have to fund the recovery and repair the damage those social problems conveniently drain the wider public’s sympathy. As blame is placed on the troublesome—rather than troubled—communities the authorities who failed them get off the hook. Sloppy bookkeeping? Stupid bureaucracy slowing things down? That and the pragmatism and malevolence of a few too many people in charge along the way. In Shannon County where the Pine Ridge reservation is centred unemployment is 80%. It is one of the three poorest counties in America, and has been for 30 years [6]. The Cobell v. Salazar Settlement Agreement won’t fix this quickly, but a more immediately crucial test is whether it sends a message that will stop neglect and withdrawn financial support being pragmatic realities in the administration of Indian affairs.“We got all that land taken away, know what I mean? […] They put us on these reservations, gave us alcohol, make us stupid and shit. They left us in this hole and they all forgot about us. No one ever thinks about us no more. And now I’m a product like everyone of this system. Like all these guys, these fuckers. I’ll probably die here [5].”Vinny Brewer, 18, having just got a Wild Boyz tattoo.
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[1] Julia Whitty, 'Elouise Cobell's Bittersweet Victory', Mother Jones, <http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/12/elouise-cobells-bittersweet-victory> 8th December 2009
[2] ‘Settlement Agreement Reached in Cobell v. Salazar’, CobellSettlement.com, <http://www.cobellsettlement.com/>
[3] ‘Shocking FACTS about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation’, Homer’s Music, <http://www.homersmusic.com/bluesviews/shocking-facts-about-the-pine-ridge-indian-reservation> 9th November 2009.
[4] John Betjeman In The West Country, TWW, 1962.
[5] Kevin Gray, ‘Brave New World’, Details.com, < http://www.details.com/culture-trends/news-and-politics/200608/south-dakota-reservation-has-become-gang-territory?currentPage=6> September 2006
[6] Kevin Gray, ‘Brave New World’, Details.com, < http://www.details.com/culture-trends/news-and-politics/200608/south-dakota-reservation-has-become-gang-territory?currentPage=3> September 2006
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