Pulling the Plug on Trust Payments

The Interior Department has a long history of broken promises to Indian trust fund account holders. Review after review over the past seven decades has found that Interior mismanages the money generated from grazing, oil, gas and mineral extraction and other uses of Indian land. Interior officials continually promise they're going to do a better job. But the trust funds still are in disarray.

It's no surprise that many Indians see dark intentions in the way Interior has handled the trust funds during the Internet shutdown that started in December. Interior officials decided in December that they couldn't make regular payments to Indian trust fund account holders until court-appointed Special Master Alan Balaran said each of the computer systems that runs them could be brought back onto the Internet. As of early April, the bureau still was off line.

As a result, an estimated 43,000 Indians did not receive checks for the use of their lands-or to alleviate their poverty-during December and January. Many missed payments into February and March. And without their checks, Indian cattle operators could not secure much-needed loans to weather the harsh winters of the Northern Plains, according to Tex Hall, chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of North Dakota. Hall testified before U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth on Feb. 20 during a hearing on pending contempt charges against Interior Secretary Gale Norton.

Because her checks didn't come, Hall said, an elderly diabetic woman whose leg was amputated in November couldn't buy a van with a lift so that she could get around. Instead, she relied on friends and relatives for rides to the grocery store or clinic. "Her only income is the [trust fund] account check, and she is basically going without right now," Hall said.

About 16,000 Navajo Nation members saw their checks dry up during the winter. Their trust fund income ranges from 14 cents a month to $1,500 a month. With no help for needy members coming from the federal government, the Navajo Nation in late January appropriated $534,276 to "help the neediest of the needy," Navajo spokesman Merle Pete says. "People do depend on the royalty payments from those accounts. [The shutdown] set a lot of people back $500 to $1,500 a month. That's significant."

The Interior Department's ability to get out its own payroll checks while failing to make trust fund payments irks some Indians. "There's a very strong feeling in Indian country that the department had other options than shutting down the payments," says David Lester, executive director of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, a Denver-based confederation of tribes. "It smells like a punitive action." The department did not respond to repeated requests for an explanation of the decision to suspend trust fund payments.

Even Judge Lamberth raised the possibility that the department intentionally shut down some systems and stopped some services. "There is in this town something we know as the Washington Monument syndrome," Lamberth said at a Jan. 9 hearing. "That is, every time Interior loses their appropriation, the first thing they do is close the Washington Monument so that all the tourists who wanted to go to the Washington Monument can go up to the Hill and lobby," Lamberth said.