This time last year, as Bush administration officials were busy digging their graves on Wall Street, out on the western edge of the high plains a circus of a different kind was in full swing at the Minerals Management Services (MMS) division of the U.S. Department of Interior, in Lakewood, Colorado. At any other time, the scandal that emerged from a year-long federal investigation of MMS (soon to be an HBO mini-series) was quickly overwhelmed by the death-rattle of east coast banks. So – in case you missed it – exactly a year ago Inspector General Earl Devaney released a three-part report to Congress that documented (complete with vivid and embarrassing detail) the wide-spread use of sex, bribes, drugs, and rock ‘n roll by MMS employees to lubricate their professional relationships with officials of the oil and minerals industries. And vice versa. Great work if you can get it.
After the first titillating blush has faded from my cheeks, I wondered, ‘What, pray tell, is the Minerals Management Service?’ It turns out that this is the office responsible for collecting royalties from energy companies that drill for oil and gas on land owned by you and me – the public domain. Our land. Our gas and oil. Money that is supposed to flow back into the U.S. Treasury. Devaney’s report didn’t pull any punches. Last year, MMS (mis)managed more than $14 billion in royalties owed to the American citizens for resources mined from our lands. Coincidentally, the MMS is also responsible for collecting royalties for resources taken from more than 11 million acres of Indian land. (You might have read about the Indian’s lawsuit to recover what Price Waterhouse has estimated to be a $50 billion fleecing of the tribes over the last hundred years for minerals taken from their lands. Every time a federal judge ruled in favor of the tribes, the Bush administration moved to have the judge replaced.)
It’s a shame the Devaney report didn’t stop right there with bribes, cocaine, and orgies. In a normal news cycle, such juicy fare might have been enough to turn even the Fox News bunch into responsible journalists. After all, the taxpayers deserve something in return for footing the bill for this agency. Alas, the sex, drugs and bribes part of the story made a properly sensationalized splash in the national media, then quickly went away.
No surprise there. The story’s nascent entertainment value was swamped by real world gravitas of a Wall Street meltdown. Nevertheless, for the residents of towns like Lodgegrass, Shiprock, and Whiteshield, not one crumb of this story was missed. It’s out there in that other America, the one you’ll probably never know, where 400,000+ plaintiffs in Cobell v. Interior have been patiently waiting for decades to be paid billions of dollars in phantom royalties stolen from Indian trust lands. For those of you who have not been following the epic American saga of Elouise Cobell, a community organization expert for the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, allow me a moment to recap some of the highlights of her journey.
- In 1996, Ms. Cobell filed a lawsuit against the federal government for failing to account for tens of billions of dollars in mineral royalties that were never credited to Indian trust accounts. The suit quickly grew into the largest class-action lawsuit in American history.
- Federal District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, a conservative Bush Sr. appointee from west Texas, oversaw the case until 2006. During that decade, Lamberth three times cited secretaries of the interior for contempt of court for administrative foot-dragging.
- In 2006, Lamberth had heard enough from the feds. “Alas,” he declared, “our modern Interior Department has time and again demonstrated that it is a dinosaur – the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago…For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few.”
- A month after throwing down that gauntlet, Lamberth was removed from the case at the request of the Bush Jr. administration.
On August 7, 2008, Lamberth’s replacement, Judge James Robertson, awarded the Indians $455.6 million in an attempt to satisfy their claim. Cobell scoffed at the figure and declared that Robertson’s decision would not stand. “It’s factually wrong and legally wrong, so we have to challenge it.” Her attorneys appealed on the grounds that the judge did not have jurisdiction to determine a just award. The appeal was granted in September, with the MMS scandal unraveling in the background. Likewise, attorneys for the Interior department filed their own appeal, arguing that Judge Robertson had no right to award the Indian landowners any money at all.
If you look hard enough, eventually you’ll find a cool head who can make sense of this sordid madness. One such observer is Craig Miner, author of The Corporation and the Indian, who tells us: “The significance of Indian trust funds as a source of capital for American industrialization cannot be overemphasized.” Why? Because irony of ironies, it turns out that Indian trust funds were one of the principle sources of capitalization for emerging industries in the extractive sector during the 20th century.
The chronic long-term abuse of those funds, says Miner, raises the question of whether money held in trust for the protection of the Indians ought to have ever been used to support the instrument of their doom. It raises that question and many more.
Last week, Barak Obama’s Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, told Congress that he is phasing out the “royalty-in-kind” program that was administered by the Minerals Management Service. “Clearly, the department’s energy leasing and royalty programs have not been working as they should.” That’s a nicely worded understatement. Last year alone, the MMS let the oil industry off the hook for a cool $21 million. For their part, the Indians are wondering, “What’s the big deal? $21 million. That’s chump change. Where’s our $47 billion?”
For Cobell and her fellow plaintiffs, the beat goes on.
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Paul VanDevelder is the author of Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation (Little Brown & Co.), and Savages and Scoundrels: the Untold Story of Americas Road to Empire Through Indian Country, (Yale University Press).
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