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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2002

"Elouise Cobell lost not a dime on Enron stock. She’s never owned a share of WorldCom or Tyco.

And, yet, she has good reason to suspect that some of her inheritance has been lost by those entrusted to manage it. Unlike an Enron shareholder, she can’t be sure what she’s lost because her trustee’s accounting is so abysmal it’s not clear what she ever owned.

Thousands of American Indians like her have the same complaint against the same trustee. Don’t look for the feds to swoop down on wrongdoers in this case. The feds are the wrongdoers.

The mishandling of billions of dollars belonging to Indians sets “the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century,” US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in an opinion last week.

That’s quite a standard. . ."

Get the Story:
Opinion: US govt mishandled American Indian trust funds (The Manila Times 9/30)

Relevant Links:
Indian Trust: Cobell v. Norton - http://www.indiantrust.com
Cobell v. Norton, Department of Justice - http://www.usdoj.gov/civil/cases/cobell/index.htm
Indian Trust, Department of Interior - http://www.doi.gov/indiantrust
Trust Reform, NCAI - http://www.ncai.org/main/pages/
issues/other_issues/trust_reform.asp

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