FROM THE ARCHIVE

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In The Hoop
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2002

Welcome to In The Hoop, Indianz.Com's occasional column about assorted Indian issues.

Stop Bothering Me!
When pressed by Narragansett council member Randy Noka (a serious up-and-comer in case you don't know) last week about the Bush administration's reversal of so many pro-tribal policies, Assistant Secretary Neal McCaleb said that hasn't always been the case.

"Let the record show it hasn't all been one way," he told a gathering of the United South and Eastern Tribes (USET). He said he had approved the land-into-trust request by the United Auburn Indian Community of California, but aides couldn't find an actual decision document.

Well, it turns out he wasn't lying. Yesterday, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced McCaleb had indeed agreed to restore 40 acres of land for the tribe, which had been terminated in 1967.

But due to "considerable, local political opposition" the tribe has to comply with certain "conditions," according to the BIA's press release. It turns out the tribe -- in the spirit of consultation, cooperation, communication and conservation -- has to bow to local interests and provide financial and other incentives to the local governments.

What a price to pay for having the federal government take away your land. We can think of a lot of "C" words to describe this setup but this is a family (sort of) publication.

Give Us Your Records!
Do you have any documents related to the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust in your possession? Well then, the Department of Interior wants them.

More than four years after a federal judge ordered the government to produce records relevant to the IIM class action, and more than two years after his ruling underscored the need to preserve and protect them, it seems the Interior is finally listening. In a Federal Register notice published today, the Office of Historical Trust Accounting (OHTA) asks the public to help Secretary Gale Norton fulfill her trust responsibilities, because, well she's having trouble meeting them on her own.

"The Department is in the process of developing written policies and procedures for the collection of such records," states the notice, which was signed by Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles. "However, the Department recognizes that it is important to reach out to non-Interior sources of these records to encourage them to preserve and maintain them so that they are available to support the accounting of IIM funds."

So will this work? Doubtful. According to federal law and Principal Deputy Special Trustee Tommy "Phoenix Rising" Thompson, outside sources have been allowed to destroy IIM documents for years because the department has never made an effort to find them.

But what In The Hoop wants to know is, if we help the department, will we share in the $16.5 million the OHTA will get in fiscal year 2003?

And you thought Kieffer was tough...
In one of the most hissing documents written to date, David C. Harrison of the Inter-Tribal Monitoring Association, one of the organizations testifying before Congress today, slams Secretary Norton's eighth quarterly report.

"One of the ways this report is different is that parts of it are exciting, parts of it are promising, and parts of it are troubling," Harrison writes in the document made public yesterday. "The previous reports were mostly just boring, were never troubling on their face, and almost never very straightforward if you could read between the lines."

Harrison continues: "Despite its promising and exciting aspects, the Report does not pass a smell test of honesty. . . [Secretary Norton] tells the judge in this report that her proposal is the result of careful and principled deliberations that arose in the context of the 2003 budget formulation process. The Secretary is telling each of us wildly different stories about the genesis, development, and rationale for her reorganization proposal."

"What will be interesting is to see what she tells the House Resources Committee on February 6."

And on Norton's praise of Ross Swimmer: "It is hard to tell whether she thinks Ross is brilliant because he agrees with her, or whether he agrees with her because she is the Secretary, or whether these two equally brilliant minds came to the same idea at the same time. In either event, this entire portion of the report is less a report than a sales pitch."

Ouch.

In Your Hoop
Do you have an IIM documents? And have you trashed them yet? Email In the Hoop and let us know.