the Elouise Cobell story

Posted on Sunday, July 07 @ 21:30:52 PDT 

 Truth and consequences on the reservation--the Elouise Cobell story

AUTHOR: J. MICHAEL KENNEDY, Times Staff Writer
Reprinted under Fair Use

Elouise Cobell heard the stories for years: the government was cheating Native Americans on payments for land rights. She took up the cause, and now the Blackfoot Indians are poised to reap billions.

  In Blackfoot country, passing down stories from one generation to the next is an intricate part of tribal culture. The people who live here at the foot of the Montana Rockies pride themselves on the accuracy of this oral tradition.

In the spring, when the geese have returned and the first rumble of thunder has rolled over the land, the Blackfeet begin a series of sacred ceremonies in which the stories they tell must never be embroidered, lest they be colored over time. Truth, they say, is the core of their history.

On the days when Elouise Cobell drives to the dilapidated Blackfoot reservation town of Browning, she passes a weathered historical marker that tells part of a story. The wooden sign marks the site of the U.S. government's first Indian office for the Blackfoot Nation.

The marker also describes the devastating winter of 1884, when more than 500 Blackfeet died of starvation on the treeless, wind-swept plains where the government buildings once stood.

That account bears little resemblance to the Indian version of this grim tale, which has it that the U.S. Indian agent, John Young, hoarded food that would have saved the Blackfeet. The Indians who perished were buried in a mass grave atop what the Blackfeet reverently call Ghost Ridge.

Cobell can see the ridge, too, each time she makes the 30-mile trip into Browning from her modest ranch south of town.

Cobell is a Blackfoot who for nearly three decades has overseen the financial fortunes of her people, once a feared warrior tribe that roamed the plains before starvation, disease and the slaughter of the buffalo reduced them to the humbling status of government wards. Now 56, this short, slightly plump woman has lived on the reservation most of her life.

In Browning, she spends much of her time schooling Native Americans in the basics of starting their own businesses. On the ranch, she shares chores with her husband, Alvin, including spreading hay for cattle in winter when the ground is blanketed with snow.

Last spring, during a bitter cold snap, she saved two newborn calves from freezing by warming them in the shower. Then she took a blow dryer to them for good measure.

As she goes about this isolated existence just a few miles south of the Canadian border, Cobell also lives a second life--one arising from another story handed down by generations of Blackfeet that also is at odds with official versions of the truth.

The tale is still being written, with Cobell emerging as the patient warrior whose labors over the last quarter century have brought the U.S. Interior Department to its knees. She has poised her tribe, along with countless other Native Americans, to reap billions of dollars in payments owed them by the government.

Cobell's office is on the top floor of a tired two-story building painted a sickly shade of drab olive. Many other buildings in town are worse, including a number of boarded-up trailers on cluttered, overgrown lots.

Sidewalks and paved roads are a recent addition to Browning. Unemployment hovers at around 70% in winter, when construction jobs dry up and the Blackfeet hunker down against the cold. In winter, dirty snow adds to the forlorn scene, and it is well into May before the wildflowers bloom and the plains turn green. On most days, a strong wind howls through town.

But its backdrop is the soaring, snow-capped Rockies at the gateway to Glacier National Park. It is here thatCobell first began sorting out the mystery of the missing money.

One of eight children in a home with no electricity, running water or telephone, she grew up listening to stories of Baker's Massacre, in which American soldiers slaughtered 200 Blackfeet, most of them women and children, after ambushing them on the banks of Montana's Marias River.

She heard other tales about how Indian children were sent off to distant boarding schools for years at a time, where speaking their native Piegans was cause for punishment. And, too, she heard stories of government checks. She heard her parents wonder why those payments never made sense.

The talk of the checks in Cobell's house was similar to those in thousands of other homes on reservations throughout the American West. The checks arrived sporadically and they were for amounts no one understood.

They knew the money was payment for land allotted to them but leased out by the government to timber, mineral or ranching interests, but they had no luck persuading the Interior Department or its Bureau of Indian Affairs to explain or account for the amounts. This haphazard way of doing business is called the Indian trust system. It is at the heart of the story.

In 1887, Congress passed a law intended to "civilize" the Indians and dilute the tribal structure. Known as the Dawes Act, each Indian head of household was given as much as 320 acres. But because the government didn't believe Indians capable of managing their own affairs, they were barred from actual ownership. The land was put in trusts, with the U.S. government as the overseer.

The law also contained a loophole allowing the sale of "surplus" land. Vast tracts were sold to white settlers under that provision. By 1932, Indians had sold off 90 million acres--about 65% of their holdings. The Interior Department supervised the leasing of the remaining Indian land. Theoretically, the government paid all leasing fees into Indian accounts.

But the accounting system was sloppy and unworkable from the start and only got worse as time went on. Checks would go unclaimed because people moved away, leaving no forwarding address. In other cases, the land would be divided among heirs, further complicating the bookkeeping. Also, thousands of records were lost or destroyed, making a fair accounting virtually impossible.

The Indians had only limited knowledge of these government inner workings. Certainly Cobell did not. All she knew were the stories. She tucked them away as part of the Blackfoot lore, never imagining they would consume much of her life.

Though her family had limited resources, Cobell's parents stressed the value of education. When she was 4, Cobell's father took her with him when he visited the small reservation school. She found a desk and refused to leave until her father promised she could return the following day to begin her formal education.

After high school, she headed for Great Falls Commercial College and then spent two years at Montana State University in Bozeman.

College was cut short when Cobell returned to the reservation to care for her dying mother. Then came her decision in 1968 to leave the reservation behind her, to move to Seattle and begin a career. There she met Alvin, also a Blackfoot, who made his living fishing the waters off the Alaska coast. She got a job in the accounting department of a Seattle television station.

They had a son, Turk. Life was promising and the pay was good. She thought she was through with reservation life forever.

Funny how things can change, though, how a chance incident can set a new course for a life or, in this case, an entire people. On a return visit to Montana in 1970, Alvin realized he wanted to come home. He had grown up hunting and fishing in the mountains, and the lure of the majestic peaks pulled him back. So the three Cobells moved back to her family's ranch. Six years after they returned, Elouise Cobell was offered the job as treasurer of the Blackfoot Nation. She was 30 years old.

It was like being handed a migraine. The slipshod tribal accounting system was, as she puts it, "in total chaos." She began slogging through the books, such as they were, finding more questions than answers. Why, for instance, was the Blackfoot tribal trust drawing negative interest? How could this be when, by law, trust money must be invested by the government in the safest securities? Why was she seeing money leaving the tribal account when she was the only one authorized to write the checks?

When she raised the questions with the local BIA, from which much of the money flowed, the withering response was that she should learn to read a financial statement.

Humiliated, Cobell plodded on. When financial discrepancies arose--and that was often--she would write to the Interior Department. "I'd write and write and write," she says. "One guy hadn't paid in a year" for land he used. "He'd gotten away with all the oil on a lease for free."

But it wasn't as if the trusts ran her life. The ranch and the treasurer's work added up to more than a full-time job, and as Turk grew older, Cobell tried to be on hand to watch her son compete for his high school's football, basketball and track teams. Turk Cobell recalls his mother driving hundreds of miles to watch him play. "I think I can count the number of events she missed on one hand," says Turk, now a manager at Sunset Station Hotel and Casino in Henderson, Nev.

Though it took years to accomplish, Cobell began making headway with the Blackfoot tribal finances. In 1987, she was the prime mover in founding the first tribal-owned bank in the nation, opening the door for her people to finance their own businesses. Browning in those days was a boarded-up disaster--far worse than today. Its residents had almost no hope of making a living on their own.

These days, although Browning is hardly thriving, Cobell can point to various businesses, from the Glacier Restaurant to the Browning Video store to the Dollar Store, that are Indian-owned. It's a start.

On the larger issue of accounting for the individual lease money, however, Cobell was making almost no progress. Washington virtually ignored her, even as her people kept asking for help. Josephine Wild Gun, for instance, asked why she was receiving less than $1,000 a year even though 7,000 acres of family land were being leased out for grazing, oil, minerals and timber. Cobell had no answer.

After more than a decade of frustration, she finally found a sympathetic ear. David Matheson, deputy commissioner for Indian affairs under the first Bush administration, was a member of Idaho's Coeur d'Alene tribe.

Unlike other officials she had approached over the years, Matheson understood. He remembered how his own parents and grandparents on the reservation believed they had been ripped off in timber sales and leased land. He also remembered how they had been warned by the BIA not to make trouble.

"The BIA had a very prominent role in generations gone by in taking resources from the tribes and giving them to other people," Matheson says. "But then a generation would pass and the problems never got resolved. We all heard it over and over again."

While Cobell had a willing ear in Matheson, he did not have much time left at the BIA. George Bush was ousted by Bill Clinton just a year later and Matheson was out of a job. But before he left office, he arranged for Cobell to meet in Washington with a group of high-ranking government officials and banking experts.

It was a fortunate stroke, for among those present was prominent Washington, D.C., banking lawyer Dennis Gingold, known for his slashing take-no-prisoners style, who was there as a favor to a friend. Gingold says he went to the session thinking he was to meet with East Indians. "From my experience, American Indians were not involved in banking," he recalls. "I was looking for a bunch of people with turbans."

What he heard that day from Cobell and others left him astonished. "I had never known this type of problem existed," says the tough-talking Seton Hall law graduate. The status of the Indian trusts were "a disaster," he says. "Regulators would never allow this to go on at a bank. A bank would be shut down."

Gingold recommended filing a lawsuit against the government. but Cobell and others were reluctant. The cost would be enormous. Besides, Matheson's ouster aside, the election of Clinton was cause for hope, Cobell thought. She assumed the new president's administration would be sympathetic.

Congress also was getting involved. In 1992, the House Committee on Government Operations issued a scathing report titled "Misplaced Trust: The Bureau of Indian Affairs' Mismanagement of the Indian Trust Fund." William Clinger, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the report, says the intractability of the BIA was nothing short of stunning.

"Every six months or so we'd haul them in again and then nothing ever happened," he recalls. "They had the chutzpah to say 'Well, we're working on it.' There was total incompetence in the BIA. They didn't have the wherewithal to deal with this sort of thing."

Two years after the report, Congress passed the landmark Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act, appointing a trustee to oversee straightening out the financial mess. That trustee was veteran banker Paul Homan, known for his ability to clean up troubled financial institutions. He had been the CEO of four problem banks and the executive vice president of another before coming to Washington as the president and CEO of Riggs Bank.

Homan soon discovered the job was a nightmare. Records were in such disarray that it was impossible to tell how many people were due money. Of the 238,000 individual trusts Homan's crew located, 50,000 had no addresses, which meant the money never left the Treasury. Some 16,000 accounts had no documents at all, and 118,000 were missing crucial papers.

Given those sorry conditions, it was reasonable to assume funds were skimmed from the trusts over the years, Homan says. "It's akin to leaving the vault door open," he says. "You leave it open and sooner or later it's going to tempt somebody. If you don't have records and you don't have management, you don't have much." Homan later resigned his post, saying Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt refused to give him the kind of support he needed for reforms.

Still uncertain about filing a lawsuit, Cobell bumped into Atty. Gen. Janet Reno at a conference. After a brief conversation, Cobell says Reno promised to take a personal interest in the trust issue and invited her to Washington, D.C.

As Cobell planned her trip, Gingold, long experienced in the ways of the capital, tried to warn her that officials can mean well, but getting results is another matter. "I told her not to expect anything," Gingold recalls.

He was right. When Cobell arrived in Washington, Reno handed the case to a deputy without so much as a brief audience.

"It was the straw that broke the camel's back," Cobell says.

Massive lawsuits are massively expensive, and this was one of the largest class-action suits ever filed. To press this one would cost millions of dollars for lawyers and court fees and expenses and, just as important, for an army of accountants to try to sort out 100 years of sloppiness. It was money the Blackfeet simply did not have. It was also a step some Native Americans opposed, largely because they believe the BIA is a friend as well as a link between two nations.