Cobell funds delay cuts deep

It was bound to come down to this, is the way I look at things. The recently announced delay of monies from the Cobell Indian Trust Settlement felt as natural as rain. In the broadest terms, the sheer calculation of recipients, either living or dead, was way off since the $3.4 billion landmark decision was set in 2010.

That is to say, preliminary calculations on just who was going to receive monies seem to be based on vastly inaccurate and incomplete information. I cringe at the thought. If it were not so, then the pro rata distribution (second round of payouts) would have flowed into Native hands before the first quarter of 2014.

It must be for the sake of nostalgia that American Indians are once again involved in a waiting game with the federal government over things that are administrated to them by straight-faced officials. A logical evolution is in order, I offer. An alternative thought is similarly disconcerting: If recipient estimates were so weak, then how much so were the calculations on the final settlement sum?

Nevertheless, across actual Indian Country, the reverberations cut deep. The holidays approacheth and many who had been earlier notified of their pro-rata payment suddenly had to scramble for their yuletide funds. And woe to those who actually believed what they had been told.

In my hometown, so outraged were its Indian residents and Individual Indian Money (IIM) account holders that they set to protesting outside of the local Bureau office. This speaks volumes.

For one, it points to the sheer frustration Native folks are feeling over the Cobell settlement. Secondly, it reiterates just how out-of-touch federal officials appear to be with common Indians who dwell outside of the Capitol Beltway in Washington, D.C.

Sad to say, there seems to be a disconnect from the bureaucracy of being Indian to actually being Indian. That is a loaded statement, I know.  But on one info site, it proclaims that payment to more than 80 percent of the historical accounting class was completed and checks sent out.

Then there are the issues of estates and whereabouts unknown claims, a trust website said. I believe that. But it became clear that so many people sought claims confirmation after the set deadline that it was rumored settlement funds might have to re-distributed from the $1.4 billion earmarked for account holder payments. I don’t want to believe that.

Things in Indian Country are complicated, even on a sunny day. With this in mind, contradictions in Cobell information (real or imagined) make the delay no less consequential. Grandparents are still raising children, babies are being born and heating bills continue to accumulate.

From a map’s eye view, the 63-mile Beltway in D.C. oddly resembles an axe head (Google at will). No small coincidence when taken into account that this literal boundary separates just as cleanly as its figurative boundary. I’m struggling to be fair here. But any tie-up in Cobell monies feels like an overkill of redundancy by the same hands.

Therefore, all I want for Christmas is trust reform.

 

S.E. Ruckman is a citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes in Anadarko, Okla. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma’s School of Journalism and has written for the Tulsa World and is currently a special contributor to the Native Times. She is a freelance writer based in Oklahoma.