Have we grown immune to corruption?

    Although it's a tough call these days, the consensus winner of the most corrupt governmental agency award still goes to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In a two-part series in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in March of 1996, Rep. Mike Synar, Democrat from Oklahoma and chairman of a House committee on government operations, was quoted as saying, "It is certifiably the worst agency in the federal government."
    From 1984 to 1994 the Bureau of Indian Affairs lost $17 million in trust fund investments of Indian money. Bookkeeping was so sloppy the agency couldn't account for $3 billion in federal property & shy; about half of BIA assets. Remember the $4 billion scandal to bail out the S&L's? Remember the outrage? Remember the press? Remember how the media told us how much that would cost every American family? Why is it that this ongoing BIA scandal has had little of the same publicity? It's simple: Because it is "racist" to question any of the activities of the BIA.
    A couple of years ago someone did an analysis of Minnesota charitable institutions, and documented just how much of each dollar we gave went to "administrative expenses" and how much went to the people the organization professed to serve. When we saw the numbers for some groups, we were outraged! We started to do a lot more checking before we wrote our checks. But to pose the same questions about where our BIA tax dollars are going? Racist. Bigoted. Un-American.

Name an agency, solve a problem? Maybe not.

    There is a persistent, naive political belief in America that if we identify a problem, create, fund and staff an agency named after it, and throw money after it, the problem will be solved. Even if the problem is not solved, at least our national guilt will be assuaged. Perhaps the belief first took root with President Johnson's "Great Society". But from "Health Education and Welfare" to "Energy" and "Transportation" to the "Bureau of Indian Affairs," that simplistic political logic is under serious scrutiny in the '90's. And it should be.
    A few facts about the BIA and the constituency it was formed to serve may be in order here. There are just under 2 million Indians in the United States, including Eskimos and Aleuts. As of the 1990 census, just 437,000 of them lived on reservations.
    The BIA has 14,000 employees, (nearly 90% are Indian). The 1996 BIA operating budget was estimated to be $1,575,000. But the budget for all Indian reservation programs is an estimated $4.7 billion, which includes proceeds from leasing the Indian land that is "held in trust" by the Department of Interior.
    That all works out to about one BIA employee for every 30 Indians who reside on reservations, and about $10,000 for each man, woman and child--$40,000 for a family of four. (And we haven't even factored in the $4.5 billion or more each year in revenues from Indian gaming, or the countless charities and foundations who continue to try to solve the problems by pouring money on them.)

Everyone documents the symptoms, nobody deals with the disease.

    Investigative journalists continue to document the tragic drama of Indian poverty. The expose's make for award-winning journalism, but reporting on the symptoms of a disease does little to effect a cure. For the most part, legislators want no part of Indian policy reform, because any apparent attempt to change the system can easily be construed as taking benefits away, and worse, being branded "racist" by opponents.

Where does the money go?

    You have only to visit a reservation to see that it doesn't seem to be getting to the right places. Even the BIA Director estimates that only one dollar of every 10 the government spends on Indian programs actually reaches the people who need it.

Some of the more flagrant abuses:

    A decade ago the ARIZONA REPUBLIC ran a special 36 page expose' which documented, among other things, that in the period from 1979 to 1986, the federal government allowed oil companies to pump millions of barrels of oil from federal and Indian lands through an "honor system" that cost U. S. taxpayers and Indians an estimated $5.8 billion. Senator John McCain of Arizona was quoted in the article. "If [the American people] were aware of what happens in the BIA, they would think that the Department of Defense is one of the most efficient organizations in America..."

Q. What's worse than a corrupt government agency?

A. Two or more of them working together.

    In a 20 page SEATTLE TIMES special report last December, titled Tribal Housing...From deregulation to disgrace, the paper took on the Department of Housing and Urban Development and its relationship with the Indian housing program. HUD's new policies, they claim, not only opened the door to corruption, they invited it.
    On the Tulalip reservation, part of the $3 billion HUD has distributed to the tribal housing authorities over the past five years went to build a 5300 sq. ft. home for a couple making $92,000 a year. The HUD program called "Mutual Help" was designed to give low income Indian families a chance to own decent, affordable housing. It was a good program, and during its life it built over 50,000 homes nationwide, with an average size of 1200 square feet. But it went very wrong on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, where the Executive Director of the Tribe's Housing Authority and her husband, the agency's contracting officer, built a $400,000 plus palace for themselves thanks to HUD's liberalized rules and lack of oversight. It was one of 18 homes built for reservation residents with $2.5 million earmarked for the low-income housing program, including one for the Executive Director's daughter, another for one of her best friends, and one for another member of the housing authority!
    In Minnesota, the same kind of thing went on at the White Earth Reservation, where a $4.4 million project that was to produce 50 houses resulted in eight completed dwellings, most of them for friends and relatives of convicted tribal leader and Tribal Chairman Chip Wadena.

Cisneros calls for investigation, gets one of his own.

The SEATTLE TIMES article ends with Housing Secretary, Henry Cisneros, calling for an investigation. This year, the Justice Department has done some investigating of Cisneros himself, and in December indicted him on 18 felony counts, including lying to the FBI about payments to his ex-mistress. If there's any good news here, it is that we have a new Secretary of HUD, Andrew Quomo.
    Then, there's the latest "I don't recall" incident with Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior. (Head of the agency charged with protecting our Native Americans and their lands.) Babbitt denied an application from three Chippewa tribes to open a casino near Hudson, Wisconsin. The application was recommended by his own BIA regional bureau. There are those who are wondering whether Babitt's denial had anything to do with the $500,000 donation to the Democratic Party by rival tribes who didn't want the competition. The three Chippewa tribes' lawyer whose application was denied, Paul Eckstein, testified that Mr. Babbitt told him in July 1995 that the rival tribes were prepared to donate $500,000, and that Mr. Ickes had ordered him to issue the decision.

So what's new about graft and bureaucratic incompetence?

    Nothing. And no ethnic group has a monopoly on them, either. Nor is there anything new about the Indian victims living in substandard housing, with substandard nutrition, sending children to substandard schools because the money never reaches them.
    Wisconsin's own Ada Deer took over the top BIA job in August of 1994. She was well-educated, well-intentioned, tough and angry. She wanted more than anything to cut through the red tape and do the right things for Indian peoples, but she was admittedly frustrated by the bureaucracy. She wanted to get rid of the dead wood and make the agency work, but Congress and the government employment system wouldn't let her fire unproductive workers. Ada Deer lost her job when an audit showed $2,300,000,000 was missing from BIA trust accounts. The money disappeared before she got the job, but she took the blame which should have been put on the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs.
    So the latest trend in our failed Indian policy is an attempt to bypass some of the BIA bureaucracy and give more money directly to tribal leadership to administer. The second point in the Department of Interior's Mission Statement is "work to transfer federal program operations to tribal governments through Indian self-determination and self-government agreements..." But that often turns out to be a little like giving all tax revenues to the Mayor of your community to use in any way he/she sees fit. It doesn't work any better in the Indian community than it would in our government, as Skip Finn of the Leech Lake Band of Chippewa, and Chip Wadena of the White Earth Band have recently demonstrated. Finn was found guilty of 12 felony counts of theft, fraud and conspiracy, and was sentenced to nearly 5 years in prison. The Chairman of the Band and Secretary Treasurer also got prison time.
    Wadena is serving a four year sentence for, among other things, a casino construction kickback scheme. He is appealing his conviction saying the U. S. Attorney's office maliciously prosecuted him and two of his tribal council members last year. His attorney says the federal case was illegally designed to overthrow a sovereign government. Meanwhile the Band has a new council, including Wadena's son, Tony.

So, what's the answer?

    The first thing to remember is that it is not racist to condemn a system that does not work, any more than it is unfair to point out that a charity only gets ten cents on the dollar to the people it is supposed to serve. Fix it, change it, or eliminate it. Do something so the agency does what it should do, what it claims to do...help its constituency. Help the Indians. And help them more than 10 cents on the dollar. You'd demand it of a charity, demand it of your government. And here's a key difference to help motivate you. Your contributions to a charity are voluntary, your BIA tax dollars aren't.

Sovereignty; a cruel hoax.

    As a nation, we must get over this Indian sovereignty myth. Indian band members are not sovereign, they are dependent wards of the federal government, as Judge R.A. Randall pointed out in his 69 page dissent to a Mystic Lake Casino decision handed down in a Minnesota Court of Appeals case in which the casino said they were not subject to state laws.
    Tribal sovereignty is used to deny everyone ­ Indians and non-Indians alike; their Constitutional rights. It creates American apartheid. It gives us two sets of laws, two separate court systems, and offers Indians no bill of rights or court system to guarantee them. In 1924, Indians were officially made full-fledged citizens of the United States. As such, they should have the same rights to life, liberty and property guaranteed the rest of us. And a real court system to enforce them. Indians on reservations can't own land. (That is, individuals can't buy and sell it, it is held "in trust" for them collectively.) And, from election fraud to kangaroo court justice, Indians are being denied their civil rights under the cruel guise of sovereignty.

Don't develop an immunity.

    Finally, do not become immune to corruption ­ no small task when it seems to begin at White House coffee parties. Get angry. Point it out. Expose it. Make noise. When public opinion gets loud and embarrassing for politicians, they do something. But not if you're quiet. Remember the news guy from the movie NETWORK who persuaded Americans to say, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more." Write letters. Make calls. They do work. As Edmund Burke, 18th Century political essayist said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."