Article by Gwen Florio
May 10, 2009
Sixteen years ago, Congress apologized for the "grave injustice" of overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii a century earlier.
Last year, the House - though not the Senate - apologized for "the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow" segregation.
Ten days ago, Congress began - again - considering a resolution apologizing to Indian people for the injustices perpetrated upon them in the two centuries since a fledgling United States adopted a policy that stated, “The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indian.”
Similar resolutions apologizing to Indians were put forward in 2005 and 2007. But while this year's Senate version is nearly identical to its 2007 wording, a difference in the House resolution caught the eye of some of those involved in one of the most significant court cases involving Indian Country.
The resolution, introduced April 30 in both chambers, aims “to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.”
But the body of the House version has a seven-word difference from its earlier language. Those words - “and the mismanagement of tribal trust lands” - were there in 2007, gone in 2009.
During the two years between the resolutions, a federal court judge awarded $455.6 million in restitution to the Indian plaintiffs in the case now known as Cobell vs. Salazar.
The case, filed 13 years ago by Blackfeet activist Elouise Cobell of Browning, claimed that the Interior Department mismanaged, to the tune of billions of dollars, earnings from Indian-owned lands whose resources were handled by the U.S. government. (Both the plaintiffs, who said the award fell far short of reality, and the government immediately appealed the decision.)
The trust fund debacle is generally viewed as one of the most grave injustices perpetrated against Indian people, on par with the others detailed in the congressional resolution's lengthy list of “whereases” - broken treaties, massacres, forced removal of people from their land, the theft of tribal resources and assets and so on. It's a long list.
The trust issue's omission from the House resolution (none of the Senate resolutions ever contained it) is indicative of a general watering down of an already-anemic apology, said Tim Coulter, director of the Indian Law Resource Center in Helena and Washington, D.C.
“The problem with the apology is that it does nothing wrong to actually acknowledge or do something about the present-day wrongs,” he said. Most of the resolution, he said, is worded so it appears that wrongs against Indian people were a thing of the past.
The apology, he said, “probably seems to the sponsors to be a harmless and possibly benign gesture, but the failures in it are too great for that. The fact is that much more needs to be done, and Congress needs to face up to that.”
Both Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester signed on as co-sponsors to this year's Senate resolution. Even though it doesn't contain wording about trust lands, Tester's spokesman, Aaron Murphy, said Montana's junior senator feels that: “The resolution is one thing, but it is just words. Obviously, it makes sense because an apology is in order. But more important is trying to fix the issues at hand” - specifically, the trust fund issue.
“An apology in writing is appropriate,” Murphy said, “but it is time to also do the work.”
Montana Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg, a member of the House Native American Caucus, was traveling Friday. His spokesman, Jed Link, said he does not know where Rehberg stands on the resolution. Rehberg did not sign on as a co-sponsor to any of the three apology resolutions.
Dennis Gingold, lead attorney in Cobell vs. Salazar, said the deletion of the trust fund issue from the resolution really doesn't make much difference.
“Apologies aren't meaningful anything,” he said. “It's not whether or not you apologize for doing something terrible, it's whether you do something about it. If you don't do anything, it probably is insulting.”
Both resolutions were referred to committee.