American Indian Programs Cut to Pay Lawyers in Trust Case
WASHINGTON
Interior Department officials, ordered to pay $7 million to lawyers for American Indians suing the government over lost royalties, cut Indian programs to find most of the money.
Jim Cason, associate deputy interior secretary, said the cuts will include $2 million from a fund for lawyers performing tribal work and $1 million from Bureau of Indian Affairs’ central and regional offices and some tribal programs. The decision won’t affect schools or public safety.
Cason said he tried to spread the cuts so they would have the least impact on Indians. But he said the court order gave him no option but to take the money from BIA, one of several agencies the department oversees. “This was not a Park Service or a Fish and Wildlife problem, it’s an Indian problem,” he said.
The Indian plaintiffs called the decision a “devious and deceptive” attempt to punish Indians for winning in court.
“This is totally unreal,” Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet Indian from Browning, Mont., and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the government, told The Associated Press. “Sometimes I think the department’s behavior has deteriorated to the bottom of the basement, and things like this happen, and I think it’s gone to the fiery bowels of the earth.”
