Re: [A-List] [Fwd: Re: Anna Mae & John Boy]

[Omahkohkiaayo_ipoyi <omahkohkiaayo@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 


(Again, with the bcc: if you want to add anything to Jeffrey, please feel
free to do so with the above address... this conversation will go public
regardless) 

Jeffrey St Clair wrote: 

You're an asshole and a liar, Stainsby. And probably a thug, like most of
those in Graham's posse. I've known Leonard for 25 years. I've built houses
on Pine Ridge. I go there every year. There aren't two sides to this story
and we're not the MacNeill-Lehrer Report. 


Response Jim C/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi 

Well Jeffrey, that is certainly "mighty white" of you to drop in on the
Natives periodically to build a house or two--did you turn them into photo
ops? But Jeffrey, you are playing in sandboxes you have no business playing
in and you are a fucking dilettante who has no idea what damage you do when
you run your fingers on the ol keyboard without checking on the ground
close to the subjects you write about. The good news is that Counterpunch
is so fucking irrelevent and is not read by anyone who matters that you
cannot do much damage. 

What am I speaking about? I am talking about Eloise Cobell whom you
described as "The Rosa Parks of the Blackeet"[poor Rosa Parks]. Ever been
to Browning Jeffrey? Ever met Eloise Cobell? Ever talked with any
"Blackfeet" (actually a misnomer Jeffrey because we are actually
"Niitsitapi" or "Siksika" or in the case of Browning we are
"Amskaapipiikani" Blackfoot, but the sellouts at Browning, Eloise high on
the list among them are so out of touch with the history and language they
still use "Blackfeet" instead of Blackfoot as the whites in 1934 at the
time of the Indian Reorganization Act figured they have two feet not two
foots so a bunch of Blackfoot must be "Blackfeet") about Eloise and her
husband Turk Cobell? 

This was posted on A-list after your bullshit article in Counterpunch on
Eloise which was then quoted by other traitors as an endorsement of her.
Jeffrey, stay the fuck out of Indian Country; we have an ample supply of
dilettantes, white saviors and parlor "internet radicals" already using us
and our misery to notch their CVs, promote their internet journals and/or
make it look like they actually know/care something about Indian Country. 

As for MacDonald, I believe he has seen more of Blackfoot Country and other
Indigenous lands than you could hope to have seen based on the bullshit you
wrote and your callous indifference in writing about someone you clearly no
nothing about and did not bother to check on before writing and endorsing
her and without considering what trouble for us your bullshit endorsement
might cause. Eloise had a small falling out with BIA but she has always
been a darling of the "officials". 

Jim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi Member, Blackfoot Nation 


The following, entitled "There is a lesson here", was submitted to a-list
in Nov. of 2002. Counterpunch might not use sources with the apparent
pedigree of rense.com, but in their case, and this is the problem with
cyber[class]warfare, even using more "respectable" sources, one is still
sitting on one's ass detached from often the best sources that are as yet
unpublished: on the ground at the place and close to the issues being
discussed. If you want to know the taste of a pear, no amount of reading,
even from the "best" sources will give it to you; you must bite into an
actual pear..." 


The following was forwarded to me from another list; there is a lesson
here. 

While Jeffrey St. Clair has managed to gather and collate some basic facts,
he leaps into areas he does not know about and could not know about unless
he were doing was real radicals are supposed to be doing: get in contact
with the grassrooots about which they are writing, and go beyond the
surface to the essence. 

As a Blackfoot who knows Blackfoot country and the "Blackfeet"
personalities mentioned in this article well, with family relations at
Browning and other Rezes, St. Clair is meddling where he shouldn't be.
Eloise Cobell is and has been a part of the "Blackfeet Aristocracy" that
has been instrumental in creating and perpetuating the conditions of misery
and exploitation at Browning in the opinion of the most trusted Elders who
live at Browning. She helped to run the Blackfeet National Bank into severe
deficits, where whites got easy loans on favorable conditions while
Blackfeet rarely got needed loans. She was a former Tribal Treasurer and
has been a staunch ally of former Tribal Chairman Earl Old Person, recently
removed as Tribal Chair, who by many accounts is simply most often
described by those at Browing as "a corrupt White Man's Indian." When I
just read this article on the phone to someone at Browning, a very trusted
activist and full-blood Blackfeet Elder, she laughed at the mention of
Eloise Cobell as the "Rosa Parks" of the Blackfeet at laughed even more at
the suggestion that Eloise is some kind of "leader" of the Blackfeet. But
just as one cannot know the taste of a pear without biting into it, so one
cannot know the reality about which St. Clark is writing without having
been to Browning and talked with the most respected Elders and activists
there. 

There are all sorts of wannabes, ersatz Indians, those on the fringe and
some who are outright traitors on the internet; non-Indians can and do
easily get taken in by them. They have web sites, do sun dances for
non-Indians for big bucks, often they even sound quite radical or trade on
supposed radical pasts in AIM etc. But the bottom line is that activism and
standing in Indian Country of Indians is very difficult for non-Indians
outside of Indian Country to know. If the non-Indian "radicals" promote
pseudo-activist and traitor Indians who "sound" radical from the outside,
not knowing what they are really promoting, perhaps just to appear tuned
into Indian issues, the non-Indians wind up doing a lot of damage inside
Indian Country; they wind up giving publicity and standing to some corrupt
and traitor Indians actually part of the crimes they are decrying for their
own motives and interests. 

So the lesson is simple: Beware of outsiders and many supposed "insiders"
of any cause, not just Indian issues, when commenting on or promoting
various personalities and supposed "insiders" or spokesperson of a group or
nation. It can do a lot of damage. 

Jim Craven 


http://www.counterpunch.org/ 


Stolen Trust Gale Norton, Native Americans and the Case of the Missing $10
Billion by Jeffrey St. Clair 

Elouise Cobell comes right to the point. "Gale Norton should be thrown in
jail." Cobell is a leader of the Blackfeet tribe, and lives along the Rocky
Mountain Front in northwestern Montana. Norton, of course, is secretary of
the interior and, as such, oversees the US government's relationship with
Indian tribes. 

Norton also controls the purse strings on federal trust funds holding more
than $40 billion dollars owed to Indians across the nation. For her role in
the mismanagement of the trust fund, Norton is facing a contempt court
citation from federal judge Royce Lamberth. If she gets slapped, she'll be
in bi-partisan company. In 2000, Lamberth hit Bruce Babbitt and Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin with contempt citations for failing to halt the
destruction of Indian trust account documents. 

The case begin in 1996 when Cobell, who has been called the Rosa Parks of
Indian Country, filed a federal class action suit against the Interior
Department, seeking both money that's been owed to Indian people and a
radical change in how the trust fund is managed. Six years later, the case
now stands as the largest class action suit in history, with more than 
500,000 claimants. And, as it wound its way through the courts, it has
tarnished two administrations and exposed the continuing war on Indian
people by the federal government. 

"We're not after money from the government," Cobell says. "The government
has taken money that belongs to us." 

Of course, stealing from Indians goes back to the origins of the republic.
Mismanagement of Indian trust accounts was first noted by congress in 1823.
But the Cobell suit is targeted at the notorious Dawes Act of 1887, which
was a attempt to shatter Indian solidarity and culture by privatizing the
reservations into 140 acre allotments put in the names of individual
Indians. It was a set up, naturally. Indians were soon swindled out of more
than two-thirds of their land, about 135,000 square miles in all. The
remaining 57 million acres was put into a trust held by the Department of
Interior. This too was a scam. With little or no input from the tribes, the
land was leased out to white ranchers, oil companies, mining firms and
timber companies. The land was stripped of its resources, often left in a
ravaged condition. 

The revenues from these leases (often sold at bargain-basement rates) goes
into a trust fund administered by the Department of Interior. These days
the fund receives about $500 million a year. Since 1887, more than $100
billion has gone into the accounts. Although the ranchers and oil companies
have made a killing, little of that money has ever reached the tribes,
where the per capita income hovers at less than $10,000 a year and
unemployment rates hover near 70 percent. A new study shows that more than 
90 percent of elderly Indians across the country are without access to
long-term health care. 

Lots of people have made money in futile and half-hearted attempts to
straighten out the mess. In the early 1990s, Enron's favorite bookkeepers,
Arthur Anderson was hired to make sense of the trust fund accounts. After
two years, they retreated in failure, but collected $20 million for their
time. 

"This scandal makes Enron look like a pimple," Cobell says. "It's worse
than Enron, because it's the government that is lying, covering up and
breaching its trust. They stole people's entire life savings. They robbed
an entire race of people. If banks had ripped off white people, they'd be
shut down in a New York second and everybody responsible would go to jail."



Before filing suit, Cobell tried to meet with Bruce Babbitt, then Clinton's
Interior Secretary. Despite his high-minded rhetoric about environmental
justice, Babbitt slammed the door in Cobol's face. She then sought out
Janet Reno. Reno too brushed her aside. Cobell was disgusted at the
hypocrisy and cowardice of the Clinton crowd. "They ought to have been
ashamed," Cobell told one of Reno's deputies. "People are dying in all
Indian communities. They don't have access to their own money." 

In 1999, Lamberth ruled that the Interior Department had grossly mismanaged
the accounts. "This case reveals a shocking pattern of deception," Lamberth
wrote in his ruling. "I've never seen more egregious misconduct by the
federal government." It was a huge victory for Cobell, who heard the news
as she was driving across the wind-swept Blackfeet reservation. "I pulled
over to the side of the road and I cried and cried," Cobell recalled. 

But victory didn't prove that simple. Three years later, not a single
Indian account has been straightened out and the government has done its
best to defy the court and subvert its ruling. Incriminating emails were
deleted. Subpoenaed documents were trashed, burned and shredded. The
recalcitrance and malfeasance were so pervasive that Lamberth cited both
Babbitt and Rubin with contempt of court. 

Cobell thinks that the Clinton team was simply running out the clock,
waiting to hand the mess off to the next administration. "It was crystal
clear to me what the Clinton administration was up to," Cobell says.
"Stalling, stalling and stalling." 

When Norton took over, things got worse. Norton is a protege of James Watt,
who once described Indian reservations as "the last bastions of socialism
in the western world". Watts desperately wanted to revive the malicious
spirit of the Dawes Act and sell off the rest of Indian country to the
highest bidder. He was driven from office before he could realize this
ambition, but Norton holds many of the same ideas and prejudices. 

A few weeks after taking office, Norton told Judge Lamberth that she was
intent on developing a plan that would restructure the Indian trust account
system. In the year it took to develop, Norton and her team didn't consult
once with the tribes. When the plan was unveiled nearly every tribe in the
country denounced it. 

Meanwhile, a string of special masters appointed to oversee the Interior
Department's implementation of the rulings of the court have denounced
Norton and her colleagues for tardiness, incompetence and "government
malfeasance". 

Norton claimed that the Department's new computer system would provide a
quick fix to the problem. But last year a computer hacker successfully
penetrated the site to demonstrate how easily the trust fund's records
could be manipulated. Lamberth ordered the department to shut down all of
its computer systems until the security problem could be fixed. 

Norton's flacks used the ruling as a pretext to withhold dispatch of the
year-end trust fund checks to 40,000 Indians. It was a move designed to
punish the tribes and to try to undermine Cobell and her cohorts. Denied
their money during Christmastime, several Indians called Cobell, blaming
her for the bleak circumstances. "It was an act of retaliation", says
Cobell. "They knew that Indians were starving, because they had no checks.
Yet they did nothing." 

Only a couple of members of congress were angered by these strong-arm
tactics. "These people were subject to losing their car or their house,"
said Rep. Tom Udall, the Democrat from Colorado. "If this happened to
security, all of Congress would be in an uproar." 

But Lamberth was less tolerant. He has threatened to hold Norton and Bureau
of Indian Affairs head Neal McCaleb in contempt. They could face jail and
fines. Lamberth has already warned that the fines will be paid from their
personal accounts and not government funds. 

But Norton remains undeterred. In late July she engineered the forced
resignation of Thomas Slonaker from his position as the special trustee for
the Indian trust fund system. Slonaker, a Republican banking executive from
Phoenix, had recently reported that the Interior Department had done little
to make corrections to the trust account system. Slonaker had been called
to testify before a senate hearing on the mismanagement of the trust fund
and Norton instructed him not to submit his prepared testimony. When
Slonaker refused, he was handed a letter of resignation by Steven Griles,
Deputy Interior Secretary. 

"It was like telling the emperor that she has no clothes," said Slonaker.
"Sometimes, criticism is not welcome." 

Cobell won't be so easy to get rid of. In the past, government officials
have always counted on the poverty of Indian people as they trample over
their rights with near impunity. But Cobell is a creative businesswoman and
a master fundraiser. So far she has raised $9 million for the trust lawsuit
from private sources and foundations, notably the Lannan Fund of New
Mexico, which contributed $2 million to the cause. 

She'll probably need every penny, because there's no indication that the
Bush administration is backing down. "The government is going to fight this
no matter what, even if it's morally, legally or ethically in the wrong,"
Cobell says. "That's a real country in itself." That's just the way things
go in Indian country. 

But Cobell also sees the litigation has having served to unite the tribes
in a common front. "I actually see it as a miracle," Cobell says. "I've
never seen tribes come together and work so hard." 

Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at: counterpunch at counterpunch.org 

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