More news from Indian Trust
Mother Jones Magazine is the latest national publication to call attention to the government's mishandling of individual Indian Money Accounts.
In its September/October issue, Mother Jones magazine details the history of the Cobell versus Norton lawsuit, saying the U.S. may owe Indian landowners as much as $176 billion. The article, titled "Accounting Coup," describes the fight led by Elouise Cobell to force the government to account for its 118 years of mismanagement of Individual Indian Money Accounts.
The lead plaintiff in the nearly 10-year-old lawsuit, Mrs. Cobell will discuss the case on the Mother Jones radio program this Sunday (1:00 p.m. EST) on 50 stations around the country. People can find the names of those stations or listen on the air or online at:
http://shows.airamericaradio.com/motherjones/
The magazine will go on sale Sept. 6. It will publish the entire article at the Mother Jones website on Monday. The site for the magazine is: www.motherjones.com. To read the article online you must use code: MJ9ASW.
Here is what the magazine is saying about the article:
According to Elouise Cobell's forensic accountants, the government owes a staggering $176 billion to Native American landowners like James Mad Dog Kennerly. Kennerly, a Blackfeet Indian, owns one allotment with at least five working oil wells and another the government leases to a large farming community, but he lives in a house smaller than a modern walk-in closet and receives roughly $30 a month from the government, which oversees his land.
Writer Julia Whitty profiles Cobell, the 59-year-old Blackfeet woman who has devoted her life to revealing the mismanagement and fraud that have marked the government's handling of the trust fund set up to collect revenues for the commercial use of Indian land and disburse them to the Indian landowners.
As U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth sees it, the government's handling of Indian monies is a saga of "scandals, deception, dirty tricks and outright villainy." The case has been going on for nine years and the government has engaged 35 law firms in its defense. Still, "Bit by bit, piece by piece," writes Whitty, "the Department of the Interior is losing this case." Senators John McCain and Byron Dorgan recently began a bipartisan process that could resolve the dispute, but much work remains to be done, especially around resolving the historical accounting back to 1887. Meanwhile, on August 16 the Justice Department took the unusual step of asking that Judge Lamberth be removed from the case.