Tribes to Bush: Listen up

Tribes to Bush: Listen up

Monday, February 25, 2002

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

To be sure, the Bush administration inherited a problem not of its making: decades of mismanagement by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that resulted in the loss of billions of dollars belonging to individual American Indians.

But as it seeks a remedy, the administration must take care not to make matters worse. That could easily happen if it continues on its present course.

This administration, like so many before it, has taken a typically high-handed approach to dealing with Indian affairs: imposing a solution upon the tribes that was concocted without consulting them. Now that they are belatedly being consulted, they oppose it.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton has proposed that the BIA be stripped of its authority to handle the individual trust funds. This money came from royalties on leases to non-Indians of timber, oil, mining and grazing lands owned not by tribes but by individual Indians who were awarded their own land allotments when some tribal holdings were broken up. But much of the money has vanished or was never collected.

Whether or not it removes authority for the trust funds from the BIA, the administration -- with the tribes -- should take a hard look at what it would take to make this inept agency functional and accountable. It won't do to simply give up on it. After all, there must a competent federal agency to oversee the discharge of the government's trust responsibility toward the tribes.

Tribal leaders say they worry that Norton's proposal to remove the trust from the BIA signals the start of yet another effort to terminate the tribes by weakening the only agency that is dedicated to Indian affairs. Termination may be the worst fear of those who live in Indian County, and that fear is a major reason they have put up with the BIA's flaws for so long.

But the BIA's flaws are unacceptable. It's not good government, yet the tribes deserve no less than good government.

Tribal leaders are not without their own responsibility in this matter. They would be well advised to unite behind their own proposal to reform the BIA.

And the Bush administration would be very well advised to take any tribal proposal seriously.

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