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[article provided by Pat Morris. Thanks!]

http://www.missoulian.com/display/inn_montana_life/life1.txt
02/28/2000

Reclaiming destiny

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

Elouise Cobell's tireless fight over Indian trust fund is just one
example of her commitment to building a better future for tribes
throughout the country

Growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Elouise Cobell shared
with her parents and eight siblings a small, isolated homestead she
describes as little more than a shack. It had no power, phone or running
water.

But it abounded in tales of her rich cultural heritage - stories as old
as time. "You never forget the stories," she says. "They never leave
you. Everything I do now is the result of hearing those stories."

Today, she not only collects old stories; she also weaves new ones. In
fact, she's at the center of what could be the most important modern
story to emerge from Indian Country - one involving vast sums of money
and having tremendous social and governmental implications.

Cobell, 54, former treasurer for the Blackfeet Tribe, is leading a
remarkable battle against the U.S. government that could well redefine
the most fundamental relationships between it and American Indian
tribes. The government - as part of what Cobell describes as a
century-old war on her people - has squandered, misplaced and stolen
billions of dollars belonging to Indians, she says. She's the lead
plaintiff in a massive class-action lawsuit filed in 1996 to recover the
lost money.

Central to the matter is this fact: Indians often don't own the land
beneath their feet. The government owns it and holds proceeds from it in
a trust account for tribes and individual Indians. That's the theory,
anyway. But by Cobell's reckoning, the government owes some 500,000
Indians more than $10 billion, and it seems a federal judge agrees that
much tribal money has vanished amid government mismanagement.

"It would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal
program than the Individual Indian Money Trust," U.S. District Judge
Royce Lamberth declared in December. "The court knows of no other
program in American government in which federal officials are allowed to
write checks - some of which are known to be written in erroneous
amounts from - unreconciled accounts - some of which are known to have
incorrect balances. Such behavior certainly would not be tolerated from private
sector trustees. It is fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its
purest form."

The case remains unresolved, but Cobell appears well on her way to
forcing the government to atone for more than a century of fiscal
mismanagement.

For some Indians, her struggle brings to mind battles fought by other
women warriors - ones like Weasel Woman, a Blackfeet who long ago earned
the honored name Running Eagle for leading her people in mighty battles.

Like Running Eagle, Cobell has earned an honored name for her work as a
woman warrior for the 21st century: She's sometimes called Wolverine
Woman by those who have seen her determined tenacity.

"Wolverines are not big animals," says Jim Scott, vice chair of First
Interstate Bank and president of the bank foundation, on which Cobell
serves. "But they are some of the toughest pound for pound. When a
wolverine gets its teeth into something, it won't let go. That's why she
succeeds: She doesn't let go."

Such determination is necessary to accomplishing the daunting task
Cobell has set for herself. "In this issue, you have to be like a
wolverine," she says. "You have to sink your teeth in and be in their
face all the time. You have to know exactly what you're talking about.

"It's not easy," she continues. "You have to stay involved. You can't
walk away, no matter how tired you are. If you're a wimp or a chicken
and all you think about is how if you make waves you won't get a nice
government job, then you don't belong in this fight."

Outside Cobell's office in Browning, a raw wind threatens to peel away
the thin roofing of the government houses. Bald tires are heaped across
shingles in an attempt to keep the roofing in place, but the ceaseless
wind lifts the edges with unrelenting fingers. The wind scours an
isolated landscape that resembles a slice of the Third World wedged fast
into America's heartland.

For centuries, this harsh and unforgiving landscape has forged the
Blackfeet Nation, eroding and sculpting its ancient culture. Here, where
survival means battle, the Blackfeet learned to survive. Growing up near
Browning, Cobell learned the stories that guide her.

There are traditional stories, the stories of warriors like Running
Eagle and of a proud and unbending people called Blackfeet. And there
are stories of the government man, quietly whispered warnings,
essentially, not to cross the all-powerful Indian agent.

"I heard all these stories," Cobell says, "and I wondered, Why do we
have to be afraid of the government agent? Why do we have to do this or
that? Just because the agent says so? Why do we listen to the agent if
he is not Blackfeet?

"My elders were beat if they asked why. My generation was not. So I
asked why. I'm still asking why."

The traditional stories gave her the courage to fight, she says; the
stories of the government agent gave her something to fight against.

Cobell began to understand the white world - began to understand why -
as a schoolchild. At age 4, she sat down at a desk in a one-room
schoolhouse and refused to leave until her parents and the teacher
agreed to allow her to attend, despite her young age.

Over the years, her teachers changed often; it was hard to keep
qualified teachers working on the isolated reservation. Most of those
who came to teach were eccentric. "Who else would come and teach here?"
she asks.

When she was about 9, the eccentric teacher of the moment subscribed to
the Sunday New York Times.

"That's when it happened," she says. "That's when I started really
learning about the outside world. Until then, I didn't have a clue."

She graduated from high school early, completed business college in
Great Falls, and went to work crunching numbers in places like Denver
and Seattle. She attended Montana State University through her junior
year, then returned to the reservation to care for her mother, who was
dying of cancer. She never returned to school.

Instead, she went to work for the National Park Service and eventually
moved to Seattle. There she met her husband, Turk, a Blackfeet Indian
who had grown up on the reservation and was a commercial fisherman on
the coast.

They moved home, just in time to save her family's ranch from the
creditors. Her aging father was about $18,000 in debt, and because he
didn't own the land in the common sense, he couldn't mortgage his ranch
or use it as collateral against a loan.

If Cobell and her husband hadn't returned home in time, she says, her
father would have become just the latest in a long line of Indians
who've lost hundreds of acres because of a relatively small debt. Some
have lost vast ranches because of overdue grocery bills, she says.

While Turk ran the ranch, Cobell took a job as tribal treasurer, and it
was that job, combined with her education and experiences, that put her
on the path of what is proving to be the fight of her life.

"That's when I stumbled onto the trust fund accounts," she says.

The federal-tribal trust relationship involves more than money. The
arrangement keeps Indians at arm's length from their land, Cobell says.
It also deprives many Indians of what she calls the "financial literacy"
that comes with owning land.

If a company wants to lease an Indian's land for oil drilling or
exploring for natural gas, harvesting timber or grazing livestock, he
won't be paid directly for those uses. Instead, the money is paid to the
local Indian agent, who sends it to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office
in Billings, which sends it to Washington, D.C., which sends it - well,
that's the problem. No one seems to know where it goes once it gets to
Washington.

"As treasurer, I kept trying to make sense of the trust accounts, to
figure out who was owed what. But I couldn't make any sense of it," she
says. "So I asked why."

What she discovered was, just as Judge Lamberth declares,
"irresponsibility in its purest form." An extreme example is the Indian,
identity unknown, who's owed $1 million according to government records
but who can't be found because no name is attached to the account.

"He's probably living under a bridge somewhere," Cobell says.

"You watch these elders living in utter poverty and many die," she says.
"And when they die, you cry. You cry because you weren't able to deliver
justice in time. It is the ancestors that we're really fighting for, and
it's the ancestors who gave me the tools to fight."

Cobell began her battle as a way to help her neighbors - not out of some
abstract sense of justice, says John Echohawk, a lawyer and the
executive director of the Native American Rights Fund. Based in
Colorado, the organization provides legal services for Indians.

The fact that Cobell's struggle has spilled across Indian Country and
into the nation's capitol is incidental, Echohawk says.

He first met Cobell in 1996, when she called asking why no one had
pressed the issue of trust accounts before, why her neighbors couldn't
get an account balance statement.

"We knew about the problem, of course, but it was so enormous," Echohawk
says. "No one ever got serious about pursuing it."

Now, four years later, it's the largest and most expensive case his
group has ever handled.

Cobell has singlehandedly raised most of the $2 million a year required
to keep the case alive, courting her connections with some of the
nation's largest and most influential philanthropic groups, Echohawk
says.

Cobell's work with philanthropists - like her work on the lawsuit itself
- grew from local roots.

It began with her concern over closure, in 1983, of the reservation's
only bank, which was owned and operated by non-Indians. In response, she
launched an effort to create the tribally-owned Blackfeet National Bank.
She now chairs the board of directors for that bank, and created a
nonprofit arm of the bank to generate money for local economic
development.

Her success at banking led her to a post on the First Interstate Bank
board of directors as well as a seat on the First Interstate Bank
Foundation board. She also began work with the Montana Community
Foundation, which snowballed into dealings with national philanthropic
foundations such as Women in Philanthropy.

She chairs the Special Trustees Advisory Board and the Rural Development
Finance Corp. and is a trustee of the National Museum of Native
Americans, in Washington, D.C.

She's also on the Nature Conservancy Board and is a founder of the
Intertribal Monitoring Association of Trust Funds. She sits on the board
of the Tides Foundation and has won a $310,000 "genius grant" from the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In awarding the
no-strings-attached grant, the MacArthur Foundation hailed her success
at inspiring Native American women to seek "influence and leadership
within their communities."

The woman born in the shack 30 miles south of Browning is now rubbing
elbows with millionaires at the Ford Foundation. She's "trying to make
the philanthropic world see the native world," she says. "I want them to
see my world through my eyes."

"Without her ties in the philanthropy arena," Echohawk says, "this
lawsuit would be dead. She is providing the lion's share of the money
needed to keep it alive and has even recruited some rather expensive
private attorneys who she convinced to work pro bono."

So, how did she get from the ranch to the boardroom?

"It's dedication," Echohawk says. "She saw a wrong that needed to be
fixed. Everyone knew it needed to be fixed, but we all grew up thinking
it was too big a problem. Elouise decided that wasn't acceptable for her
neighbors, and she set her mind to changing things."

And she's succeeding.

"Every project I've started has been a success," she says. "If I ever
hit a project that's not successful, I don't know how I'll handle that."

Her projects are varied, but all have one thing in common: They are
focused on giving direct help to her local community, where unemployment
hovers at about 70 percent and society seems often on the verge of
blowing apart in the wind.

She's started a series of "mini banks," for instance, using the schools
to teach money matters. Junior high school students run the banks,
offering everything from savings and checking accounts to small loans.
The idea, she says, grew from the same seed that sparked the lawsuit;
without "financial literacy" no one knows why to ask why, she says, and
any cultural literacy begins with the children. Her idea has spread to other Indian communities, including Lame Deer and Hardin.

"What we're really lacking," she says, "is financial literacy. We're
really like a Third World country when it comes to banking and money."

But perhaps not for long.

Cobell has embarked on yet another journey toward bringing financial
literacy to America's reservations. She's formed a coalition of tribes,
each of which has given at least $1 million, to create a "wholesale"
bank for all Indians.

The wholesale bank would be fully insured and have enough capital
backing to provide large loans to reservation towns interested in
economic development, she says. It will be run by Indians for Indians.

"It's time we started taking control of our own destiny," she says, "and
the first step is to take control of the financial resources."

The second step is to take control of the natural resources. For
centuries, she says, the landscape helped shape Indian culture; now it's
time for Indian culture to help shape the landscape.

Cobell is working with others to develop a land trust aimed at
protecting wildlands along the Rocky Mountain Front. Much of that land
now is in the hands of non-Indians - some traded for those unpaid
grocery bills - and is in danger of being subdivided.

Her plan is to buy the lands back and then place them under the
protection of conservation easements. Working with the Nature
Conservancy, she hopes to set up a "conservation school," where young
Indians can go to learn about their land legacy and cultural ties to
that land.

"The children are where we need to begin," she says. "We need to teach
them and leave them with enough knowledge so that they always ask why.
If I do one thing in my life, it's to provide our children the tools to
carry on. I don't want to be the richest person in the world. I just
want to make a difference."

She's already made a difference, says First Interstate's Jim Scott.

"Elouise Cobell is absolutely the most credible voice anywhere on the
issue of Native American finance and financial policy," he says. "She
has changed things forever. Coming up with a good idea is one thing;
making a good idea happen is quite another. Elouise is one of those
people who knows how to make things happen. She has left her mark on
everything she touched, but her biggest mark is right there in
Browning."

She makes things happen, he says, by remaining a visible member of her
community while at the same time reaching beyond that community to find
allies elsewhere.

"That's the Native American dilemma," says Darrell Kipp. "If you have
skills to become a leader, do you stay at home to work in the trenches
or do you go to Washington and tackle national issues in the hope your
work there will trickle back home?"

Kipp, a Browning native, left home to attend Harvard University before
returning to start a local native-language school.

"The problem is there's not enough Native Americans to go around, and
those who can lead tend to get spread pretty thin," he says.

The trick, he says, is to listen carefully, no matter where you work.
"If you listen hard enough, you'll hear the truth - the truth of the
community," he says. "Then you can be effective in translating the truth
into community programs."

Kipp says Cobell is able to bridge the best of both worlds, bringing
Browning to the nation and the nation to Browning. Others agree.

"Everybody here on the reservation has the utmost respect for her, and
everyone in Indian Country has the utmost respect for her," says Jackie
Parsons, an appeals court judge in Blackfeet Tribal Court. "She's
acknowledged from coast to coast as a great leader. The government
officials she's suing might not like her, but you can bet they respect
her."

Parsons says Cobell is able to work so well in both worlds because of
her reservation upbringing. In Browning, Parsons says, everyone is
equal. No one looks at you strangely if you're rich - or if you're
homeless. Everyone understands the common condition.

As a result, she says, Cobell's experiences in New York City or
Washington, D.C., or on the Senate floor don't particularly impress her
neighbors, nor do they necessarily impress Cobell herself.

"People don't respect her because she's running around to see
congressmen and lawyers about this lawsuit," Parsons says. "They respect
her because she's a good person. That's how she's able to find friends
here in Browning and out there in the big cities. She grew up in
Browning, so she doesn't judge people because of how they dress or how
much money they make. She just sees them as people no better and no
worse than the people she grew up with."

Cobell's efforts are grounded in home and history, but her sights are
set toward a far-off future.

"Maybe we have to go all the way back to the beginning of time and start
all over," she says. "Maybe it's time we do. Maybe it's time we make the
government accountable for all the treaties and deals they signed way
back when. Maybe it's time we took control of our future again, and
found some pride in who we are. To build, to really build our people, we
need pride and strong beliefs that go back to the beginning."
 

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