MIXED-BLOODS-L Archives

From: Patricia Gunter <>
Subject: [MIXED-BLOODS] Indian Trust
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 15:39:14 -0700 (PDT)

>From the Indian Trust Site. mpmc


WASHINGTON, June 9 -- A Yale University law professor has told a federal
judge that Congress is the reason why thousands of American Indians
cannot
get a proper accounting of their government-run trust accounts.
John H. Langbein, the government's first witness in the latest trial
over the accounts, made the statement as he defended his novel legal
theory
that the government does not have the same responsibilities to the
Indians
that other trustees face.
The professor said that Congress had effectively modified those
trust
obligations by acts passed since the trust was established in 1887.
Langbein's comments surprised lawyers representing a group of
American
Indians seeking to force the government to give the beneficiaries of
Individual Indian Trust Accounts a full accounting of their money. "The
government has spent more than $750 million trying to reform these
accounts
and the government's witness is effectively telling us that wasn't
enough,"
said Keith Harper, a lawyer for the Native American Rights Fund.
"This is an amazing statement, given how much effort the government
has
made during the seven years of this lawsuit to say that it was doing
everything possible to resolve the many problems with the trust accounts,"
Harper added.
The Yale professor acknowledged during two days of testimony before
U.S.
District Judge Royce Lamberth that the private sector would have closed
down
a trust operation as badly run as the Interior Department's Indian trust.
"Not only would the OCC (the bank regulating Office of the Comptroller
of
the Currency) shut down the trust, so would the shareholders," Langbein
said.
Under cross examination last week, the professor said those problems
should be laid on Congress, not the Interior Department.
"My sense is that I have had that view way, way back that there is a
terrible problem here, which is that Interior is delivering the bad news,
but Congress is, in my view, the source of the problem," he told
Lamberth.
As Langbein saw it, the problem was that Congress had not adequately
funded the operations of the trust, which he described as "this very
troubled situation."
The professor said he was unable to say how much money should have
been
spent on the Indian trust operations, but he did say that he had gotten
the
clear impression from talks with government lawyers about the trust case
that it had "been hampered across time by shortages of resources."
Langbein also testified that when Congress failed to appropriate
funds
for the trust they were effectively modifying the trust.
Lawyers for the Indian plaintiffs challenged that view. They quoted
from
a 2001 decision by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in
the
Indian trust case which held "that Congress intended to impose in
trustees
traditional fiduciary duties unless Congress has unequivocally expressed
an
intent to the contrary."
"There is no statement any where that says the government's
responsibility to American Indians is anything other that the
traditional
trust responsibility," said Harper.
Separately, a senior Interior Department official acknowledged last
week
that not all Indian Trust accounts will be given a "full accounting"
under
the reform plan that the government has submitted to a federal judge
here.
James Cason, an associate deputy secretary of Interior, made the
statements as he testified in support of the department's plan for
dealing
with the many problems that have resulted from the department's
admittedly
poor administration of the trust.
Under questioning by lawyers seeking a "full accounting" of all
trust
accounts, Cason said that the government's plan called for making an
accounting of the approximately 300,000 accounts that existed as of Oct.
25,
1994. Any accounts closed before that date won't be checked, he said.
And Cason, who has been the point man for trust reform at the
department, said the accounting will go back only to June 24, 1938.
Interior officials picked the 1994 date because that's when a
Congress,
unhappy with the Interior Department's management of the accounts,
enacted a
law calling for an accounting of all trust funds.
The 1938 date was picked for the end of the accounting because that's
when another law concerning the management of the accounts was enacted.


~~~~~
To view the latest information concerning this case, go to
http://www.indiantrust.com

_____________________________________________________________
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http://www.southern-cherokee.com

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• [MIXED-BLOODS] Indian Trust by Patricia Gunter <>