WANT TO KNOW WHY NATIVE HAWAIIANS ARE OPPOSED TO FEDERAL RECOGNITION FOR HAWAIIANS BY 11 TO 1 ?
WASHINGTON, DC – Citing damaging provisions that would effectively stay the recent Cobell v. Norton decision and the omission of additional funding for the Indian Health Service, Senator Tom Daschle today criticized the FY 2004 Interior Department appropriations bill.
While Daschle supported significant portions of the bill, he voted against adoption of the conference report to register his opposition to trust reform language and inadequate funding for the Indian Health Service in the final legislation.
In a recent decision in the Cobell v. Norton case, the United States District Court ordered the Department of the Interior to undertake a comprehensive review of assets held in trust by the Department for the more than 300,000 individual American Indian account holders. The ruling is part of a long-overdue attempt to adequately compensate account holders and would be severely undermined by provisions inserted by the conference committee that would effectively nullify the District Court’s decision.
Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Daschle also noted the failure to adequately fund the Indian Health Service, which currently faces a $2.9 billion shortfall in funds for clinical services to Native Americans. Daschle has authored amendments to cover the shortfall. Rejecting Daschle’s amendment to the FY 2004 budget resolution to add $2.9 billion to IHS clinical services, Senate Republicans agreed to add $292 million for that purpose. On the Interior appropriations bill, however, they defeated a Daschle amendment to make good on that promise.
Here is an abridged text of Senator Daschle’s statement.
“I come to the floor to express my objection to a provision in the conference report the Senate just passed regarding management and accounting of the American Indian trust fund.
Just over a month ago, on September 25, U.S. District Court Royce Lamberth ordered the U.S. Department of the Interior to conduct a full and accurate historical accounting of the assets held in trust by the Department for hundreds of thousands of individual American Indian account holders. In his ruling, Judge Lamberth charged that the Interior Department’s handling of the Indian trust funds “has served as a gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century.”
The trust fund language inserted into this conference report -- behind closed doors -- would stay Judge Lamberth’s decision. It would effectively halt the Cobell v. Norton lawsuit and further delay justice for 300,000 to as many as a half-million Indian trust fund account holders. This provision is unconstitutional and, I believe, unconscionable.
Partly because so many Americans Indians live on remote reservations, not many Americans understand what the Indian trust fund dispute is about. This dispute stretches back to the 1880s, when the U.S. government broke up large tracts of Indian land into small parcels of 80 and 160 acres, which it allotted to individual Indians. The government, acting as a “trustee,” then took control of these lands and established individual accounts for the land owners. The government was supposed to manage the lands. Any revenues generated from oil drilling, mining, grazing, timber harvesting or any other use of the land was to be distributed to the account holders and their heirs.
The government has never -- never -- lived up to its trust fund responsibilities. The Indian trust fund has been so badly mismanaged, for so long, by administrations of both political parties, that today, no one knows how much money the trust fund should contain. Estimates of how much is owed to individual account holders range from a low of $10 billion to more than $100 billion. As Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians has said, “this is the Enron of Indian Country.” In fact, it may well be bigger than Enron.
The people who are being denied justice in this case include some of the most impoverished people in all of America. More than 68,000 are enrolled members of South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska tribes. Some live in
homes that are little more than shacks, with no electricity and no running water. They are being denied money that is rightfully theirs – money they need, in many cases, to pay for basic necessities.
What other group of Americans would we dare to treat this way? I don’t know of one, Mr. President. Why target American Indians? Many account holders are older people, “elders” who have suffered extreme economic deprivation their entire lives. If this rider staying Judge Lamberth’s ruling becomes law, as I expect it will, many of them may not live long enough to see justice. This is shameful.
The mismanagement of the Indian trust fund is a national disgrace. It stretches back generations and, as I have said on numerous occasions, administrations of both parties share the blame. We spend twice as much on health care for federal prisoners as we spend for American Indians. The Indian Health Service has to ration care because of lack of funding. That is inexcusable."
