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ongoing american indian lawsuit against gov't.
In 1887 the U.S. Congress passed the Dawes Act, which took the
remaining land possessed by American Indians and divided it up into
individual plots. The plots ranged in size from 40 to 160 acres.
The idea was to force American Indians to become Western style small
farmers.
The effect however was devastating, and making the matter worse the
U.S. government ended up allotting a large amount of the de-
collectivized land to mining, grazing, timber and irrigation
interests. Ostensible the money made by the sale or lease of such
lands would be held "in trust" by the government, and the given back
in the form of services and individual payments.
In 1996 a group of American Indians, along with the Native American
Rights Fund and the Intertribal Monitoring Association, filed the
largest class action lawsuit in history that involves the U.S.
government. The suit is demanding restitution for $100 billion from
American Indian trust funds that the government has either lost, paid
to the wrong people or simply withheld.
In the six years since the suit was first filed it has dragged on
through the federal courts, with numerous government officials,
including two consecutive Secretaries of the Interior, being found in
contempt of court for blocking investigations and refusing to carry
out reforms ordered by the courts.
The lawsuit has revealed an outrageous long history of corruption,
arrogance, paternalism, ineptness and downright theft of the part of
the government, and in particular on the part of the Department of
the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For example, it has
been revealed that the BIA has paid out some $700 million in tribal
funds to the wrong people! It has also come out that it has been
paying money into the accounts of 21,000 people who are deceased, and
is withholding $50 million owed to individual American Indians
because it has no address for them on file!
And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg considering the great
lengths the government has been going to cover up what it has been
doing. In the course of the lawsuit so far, the BIA has been forced
to admit that it has already illegally shredded numerous documents,
and that relevant documentation on BIA financial transactions have
been "comprised" at at least 29 of the 37 Federal Reserve branches
where such materials are stored.
American Indians are the impoverished sector of this continent, and
are a people who have had to endure one tragedy and injustice after
another at the hands of the U.S. government. These recent shocking
revelations of abuse of power and funds by the Bureau of Indian
affairs is salt in wounds that are already very deep. That a
government agency would facilitate the loss of millions of acres of
American Indian land to business interests, and then not even have
the decency to make the promised payments from these transactions is
outrageous. It highlights the desperate need that exists for
meaningful reparations for American Indians, as well as for a genuine
right to self-determination.
by Adam Ritscher
