Bu**sh** admin spending $120M/yr to fight lawsuit by Native Americans ?

[eppur_se_muova]

Democracy Now! covered this yesterday: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/23/1446238

A press release, released before the conference, is reproduced in full below.

Much more background at the links (bottom right of page) on http://www.indiantrust.com/

Friday November 17, 2006

AMERICAN INDIANS FACE CONTINUED ABUSE, MONTANA ACTIVIST WILL TELL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
NEW YORK, Nov. 17 -- A Native American leader will tell participants at an international conference on indigenous people this weekend that they do not have to look overseas to find abuses of Native people.

"It's happening right now, right here in America, in broad daylight," Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation from Browning, Mont., will tell a teach-in Nov. 18 sponsored by the International Forum on Globalization at Cooper Hall in Manhattan.

What's worse, the federal government shows "no shame or guilt" over the abuse which dates from 1887 and has been well known for decades, she will say.

Ms. Cobell is talking about the United States government's continuing abuse of individual Indian Trust beneficiaries and its misappropriation of trust funds and millions of acres of oil and timber rich lands that belong to 500,000 individual Indians.

During the 10-year-old lawsuit in the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia – and several opinions ordering the accounting of all revenue generated from trust lands, the government and its attorneys have stonewalled, systemically destroyed documents, intimidated witnesses, and repeatedly lied to the trial judge.

Further, the government has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in its bad faith litigation and has yet to provide a single individual Indian trust beneficiary an accounting of his funds, funds that are desperately needed by some of the most vulnerable people in this country, including Indian children, the elderly and the infirm. These funds are the property of individual Indians; they are not the property of the government.

Billions of dollars that should have gone to some of American's poorest citizens have gone instead to helping balance the federal budget and to pay for wars, Ms. Cobell will tell the conference on "INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ RESISTANCE TO ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION:
A CELEBRATION OF VICTORIES, RIGHTS AND CULTURES."

"When I accepted your invitation to speak, I had some hope that I could come here with a success story," Ms. Cobell will say. She said he had hoped that Congress would approve legislation that would have settled the dispute fairly.

"Sadly, I cannot tell you that this story of Indian abuse is over," she will say, citing outrageous demands that the Bush administration placed on the settlement bill drafted by leaders of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

" What the administration has done is to load up our settlement bill with so many unreasonable demands and so many qualifications that have nothing to do with our litigation that it is no deal at all," she will say. "In fact, I think it underscores that bad faith of the Administration in its dealings with Native people."

" No one in this administration has the courage to correct the deplorable record of abuse, a deplorable record that is exacerbated by continuing bad faith the most senior administration officials," she said.

Citing what Senate Indian Affairs Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said years ago, Ms. Cobell will tell the teach-in that had the trust case abuse happened to any other group of Americans, this issue would have been resolved many years ago.

It is not just a Republican problem, she will say. The Clinton administration also resisted efforts to settlement lawsuit.

As usual, the severe problems faced by Native Americans are unimportant to the political leadership of our country, she will say. And, she will implore leaders of the new Congress do what is right and for the first time resist the efforts of the administration to kill a fair and equitable resolution of the litigation.

Ms. Cobell will say the only effective solution to the century-old trust debacle is to place the trust assets into receivership under management of an honest and able court appointed receiver. That would remove control of the trust from the incompetent and corrupt officials in the Interior Department and ensure that the trust would be managed prudently and solely in the best interest of the individual Indian trust beneficiaries. Until such action is taken to protect trust assets that have not been plundered, history will continue to repeat itself, she will warn the conference.



Information on the conference is available at www.ifg.org/events.htm