The bar is set...
Cobell proposes a number. From Indianz:
Cobell plaintiffs seek $58B for Indian trust beneficiaries Friday, March 21, 2008 Filed Under: CobellIn papers filed on Wednesday, the Cobell plaintiffs asked a federal judge to put $58 billion in the Indian trust.
Citing more than a hundred years of mismanagement, attorneys said hundreds of thousands of Indian beneficiaries are owed the money for misuse of their land and assets. The 80-page filing accused the federal government of enriching itself by failing to disburse trust payments to tribal members across the country.
...
Based on data provided by the Interior Department and the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, the plaintiffs added up the money they say should have been in the Individual Indian Money (IIM) from 1887 to 2007. The numbers show IIM beneficiaries and Osage "headright" owners are owed $58 billion for the 120-year period.
The figure is more than twice the amount that the Cobell plaintiffs and other Indian organizations said they would accept to resolve the case. In June 2005, the plaintiffs proposed a $27.5 billion settlement for the historical accounting of the IIM trust.
Key members of Congress responded with an $8 billion proposal, which the plaintiffs gave serious consideration. But the Bush administration waited until March 2007 to offer $3.5 billion to resolve the accounting, pay for future damages claims and terminate its liability for the trust.
Despite the diverging views, lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation of Montana, said $58 billion was low. Prior calculations by her lawyers put the accounting as high as $176 billion, but that figure included interest, which the plaintiffs are not seeking as part of the litigation.
In addition, Indianz has John McCain's Native American policy position paper - 817 words, two days after his Senate colleague expended two on the subject in a seven-page speech on race. McCain is also running ads on Indianz, seeking to make inroads into a demographic which has traditionally gone overwhelmingly Democratic for decades.
Comments
Hey friends,
I am pretty close to the Wampum line on the remaining Democratic candidates, but I read a long statement from Obama in News from Indian Country recently, and there's a fairly extensive set of his comments on Native issues on his campaign website (http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/firstamissues). Hillary, of course, has the establishment of the Indian world lined up with her. Barack has some interesting Native young people I have met over the years at the Ivies working hard for him. Also, last I heard Keith Harper (NARF and the Cobell case) is a leading adviser to Obama on Native issues.
I have been amazed at the traction McCain has in the Native world. I hear comments on discussion boards about how his coming from Arizona makes him an old ally!
Later
Robert
Posted by: Robert | March 22, 2008 05:42 PM
Hey, Robert! Has spring sprung in Okie yet? We've a riot of wildflowers all over the place here.
I thought that I'd posted on Obama's picking up Harper a few months back, but it's possible that I saw it, meant to, and ADD struck. And I agree that Clinton's support from cronies like Mankiller is pretty disappointing, but expected. I'm still disappointed in Obama's speech - it was an opportunity to move the bar in the discussion of "race" in America, and he played the same old binary chessboard (perhaps he's not listening to Keith as much as we all hoped he would.) I don't know, it's all so discouraging, neh?
I honestly don't get McCain's traction with NDNs - his actions as chair of the Abramoff hearings should have dispelled any belief that he was on our side, despite his pronouncement to the contrary. He's really just a mean shell of a man. Indianz calls him the Great White Father these days (and not in a complimentary way.) Heh.
Posted by: MB | March 22, 2008 06:15 PM
Hi MB,
"The Speech" and the media event it has become has been rattling around my brain and bothering me, too, but not so much because of the double whammy of the binary Obama used and the really unfortunate (though still standard) slavery as original sin line. Instead, it seems to me that what he could have said but didn't is that people of color encounter radical critiques in the regular course of life with a frequency that white people don't. Could one go so far as to say Obama is pandering to white privilege to claim to be appalled at Jeremiah Wright's ideas? In other words, would it be more truthful to say that radical critique is part and parcel of being black, Latina, Native, or Asian, and to pretend that Jeremiah Wright is not representative of a major, ongoing stream of black intellectual tradition is disingenuous?
Wright is clearly a student of Black Theology of Liberation, which was the brainchild of James Cone at Union Seminary in New York. Cone has defended Wright, which is not surprising. Wikipedia, btw, has a nice pic of Wright and Bill Clinton together at a prayer breakfast at the White House in 1998.
Meanwhile, McCain is actively seeking out the endorsement of Christian Zionist homophobes with impunity. So maybe the sin of "The Speech" is that Obama didn't name white privilege but chose instead to maintain some basic lies, including the binary chessboard.
PS--Spring keeps trying to spring here in Oklahoma, but can't seem to get a real foothold.
Posted by: Robert | March 23, 2008 12:43 AM