There’s been quite a bit of press lately on the issue of reparations for Black Americans and soon I’ll focus on some of that debate. But there’s another issue, which is getting almost no national media attention.

Another lens to look at our past—and our present. It’s the situation of the U.S. Indian Trust Fund.

It’s a fund unknown to most Americans, but it is an example of why there’s little trust of our government (no matter which century or which political party) in the Native American community. In order to understand this legal mess and this moral lapse, a little history is in order.

In the 1820s, the federal government created the Indian Department, which later became the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). One of its duties was to manage a trust fund which would collect funds due to Native Americans from a variety of sources, including oil and gas production on Indian lands, grazing leases, coal production and timber sales on the allotted land of Native Americans. Some of these funds are held in tribal accounts which are then used to finance essential tribal government services. But there are nearly 400,000 individual Indian accounts also held by the BIA.

For more than a century, Congress has asked for accountability and changes in the way BIA manages these funds. Many congressional hearings have been held, including one in 1987 in which the director of one federal agency charged with collecting mineral royalties for Indians told the committee that he was aware that hundreds of millions of dollars that belong to Indians were going uncollected from oil companies each year, even though the agency had been made aware of this six years previously.  A 1992 report entitled, "Misplaced Trust: The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Mismanagement of the Indian Trust Fund" was prepared by a congressional committee.  In 1994, Congress had even enacted the Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act and appointed a special trustee to straighten out the century-old mess.

As a result, the BIA agreed to contract with Arthur Andersen & Co. to audit and reconcile both the tribal accounts and a random sampling of some 17,000 individual accounts. After years of work and millions of dollars in fees, Arthur Andersen was only able to reconcile the tribal accounts from 1973 to 1992. It noted that for this 20-year period alone, at least $2.4 billion in the tribal trust accounts was unaccounted for and billions more were untraceable. Moreover, when it looked at the individual accounts, Arthur Andersen said that it would cost between $100-200 million just to do the auditing work and it appeared that government records had been lost, destroyed, not maintained, or never created for most of these accounts.

In fact, as of 1996 little had actually changed in the management of these funds for some of our nation’s neediest citizens. As a last resort, the Native American Rights Fund filed a class action lawsuit in federal court that year on behalf of 300,000 Indians. It charged the Secretary of the Interior, the Assistant Secretary of Interior for Indian Affairs and the Secretary of the Treasury with illegal conduct. Now, six years and a new administration later, little seems to have changed.

Earlier this year now, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton was taken to task by a federal judge after the current special trustee of the Indian Trust Fund proved to the courts that the Interior Department’s computer system was not safely guarding Indian trust records from computer hackers.

The Interior Department’s response was to shut down the whole system, thus preventing tens of thousands of Native Americans and Indian tribes from receiving any checks for more than a month.  Moreover, the judge offered his impressions that not only was the Secretary of Interior in contempt of court relating to the Indian Trust Fund, but that the Interior Department had seemed to mislead the court and Indian beneficiaries concerning their accounts.

There are many deeply troubling aspects to this whole story.

 First, this is one more evidence of our nation’s inability and unwillingness to honor its treaties and agreements with Native Americans, whose lands we now occupy. Little wonder that there is little trust by Native people when it comes to the Indian Trust Fund. That 1992 report stated that, " ... while mismanagement of the Indian Trust Fund has been reported for more than a century, there is no evidence that either the Bureau or the Department of Interior has undertaken any sustained or comprehensive effort to resolve glaring deficiencies."

Secondly, there must be recognition at some point that there is something more at work than bureaucratic inefficiency and mismanagement of funds by the BIA. In the words of John Echohawk of the Native American Rights Fund, "When obvious and admitted abuses of a small minority of people by a government are allowed to continue unchecked for over a century, with little or no outcry from the citizenry, it most likely means that the majority of the citizens condone the government’s behavior."

Thirdly, and sadly there is the race factor. Native Americans have suffered from racism from the earliest days of our nation. Whether it was the racism of government and church which led to the development of Indian schools, where children were taken away from their families and forced to disown their languages, their culture, their music and their worship; or whether it was racism, closely connected with our desire to get Indian land by any means necessary, which led to such incidents as the Trail of Tears; or whether it was the racism which is still a part of the negative stereotyping of Native American mascots and sports team logos; racism is part of the problem.