Podcast

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Speaker:  On Wednesday, March 10th, Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Hayes testified before the House Natural Resources Committee on the proposed settlement of the Cobell versus Salazar litigation that was announced last December.  Here are Deputy Secretary Hayes' opening remarks to the Committee.

Deputy Secretary David Hayes:  I want to first at the outset let all of you know that this has been from day one an incredibly high priority for this administration to see if we could resolve this long-running Cobell lawsuit.  It's taken 13 years, hundreds of millions of dollars in litigation on both sides, 20 appellate opinions, dozens literally of hearings and trials, scores in fact of hearings and trials.  And it has been a corrosive case that has hurt the relationship between the United States and Indian country.

From day one, Hilary Tompkins to my left, the first ever American Indian solicitor at the Department of the Interior, and I on behalf of the Secretary took this on personally to see if we could, through our personal involvement at the highest levels, break through what had been 13 years of failure basically to try to reach closure on this.  We were joined at the hip by Attorney General Eric Holder and his top associate deputy, Attorney General Tom Perelli.

We were personally engaged in these discussions.  And we worked with a team that represents the class affected by this settlement.  The 300 to 500,000 individual Indians are represented through the class action by the team of lawyers and they're, I can't say the word, relentless and impressive Elouise Cobell whom you'll hear about, hear from in the next panel.

We feel that this settlement is a fair settlement and an appropriate settlement.  And I'm going to defer to Tom to talk about some of the legal aspects that have been raised in this hearing.
Let me just mention a couple issues of special importance to the Department of the Interior and our trust responsibility to the individual Indians who have trust accounts and to tribes who have trust accounts.  

It is our view that we need to resolve these historical issues and set the course and turn the page and look ahead and repair our management of trust assets with the tribes and look ahead and not behind.

Toward that end it was very important to the United States, and we think it's very important for this Congress, that this chapter be closed, that the backward looking of historical accounting be fully accounted for and resolved.

And that means not just the question of whether the accounting has been done.  But also woven into the issue is the question of; in addition to the accounting, the green eyeshade work, have the assets themselves been mismanaged?  That was all an important element.  We thought if we just resolved the question of the accounting and didn't deal with the question of mismanagement, we'd be back here spending literally $50 million a year as far as the eye could see.  

So we went to the class and the class will work with the judge, as Tom will explain, to work through that element of the settlement.  We wanted to close the book and look ahead.
And toward that end, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, as explained in my written testimony, as soon as this settlement goes forward, we are impaneling a new commission to ensure that as we move forward with our trust management, we are taking the best of what we have learned over the last 13 years.

We will hire folks.  We are going to have a five-member panel, well represented by Indian country.  We are going to look at what worked and what didn't.  And we're going to see how we reorganize the department in terms of the trust management issues.

We have an office special trustee.  We have a Bureau of Indian Affairs with different responsibilities and some conflicts in terms of customer service at the least.  We want to do it right.  This was a very important point by Elouise Cobell and her colleagues here.  And we accept it.  We want to move forward and do this right going forward.

One aspect of doing it right going forward that we were very insistent on is that part of the problem that led to Cobell is the fractionation of Indian lands and the fact that over time we now have 4 million individual interests in highly fractionated tracks of land that do nobody any good.  And the expense is enormous and the opportunity for error and mismanagement is enormous.

So we worked with the plaintiffs to have as part of this settlement a resolution of that root cause problem of fractionation.  That's why the $2 billion associated with getting money back into the pockets of these individual Indians and at the same time freeing up those lands and taking away the root cause of these errors, of these individual accounts, is so important and why we're so excited about the settlement.

Let me say finally that in terms of how we implement that settlement, we are looking forward to vigorous government-to-government consultations with all of the tribes on how we implement to your point, Congressman Heinrich, the land consolidation program because this is going to be a benefit to the tribes as well as to the individual Indians who are settling in this matter.  And we want their help in terms of prioritizing lands that should be acquired through this program and working with them every step of the way.

And as we can talk about in the Q&A, we're anxious to make sure the word and understanding about this settlement gets out in Indian country.  We've done a number of outreach efforts already.  We're ready to do more.  We frankly thought it presumptuous to go out and assume that this settlement would be approved by the Court and by the Congress without getting your approval first.  And we look forward to getting that in the near future.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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