"Many tribes have massive land and associated resources, but since the 19th century, the U.S. government has mismanaged these resources. Tribes have filed lawsuits to obtain proper accounting or money for losses suffered from fund mis-management...

"In 1986, David Henry, then an accountant for the BIA, blew the whistle on fraudulent accounting practices within the Bureau [and was fired]... Yet the mainstream media, watchdog organizations, even governmental agencies and lawyers ignored the story...

"An independent accounting firm hired by Interior found at least $2.4 billion unaccounted for by trust records... Interior has made repeated attempts to calculate the trust debt as though it reached back only a handful of years, but Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that insufficient. Just as banks are responsible for every penny since an account is opened, so Interior is obliged to do historical accounting. Yet, Congress just approved legislation that puts that accounting on hold and delays justice to people trying to retrieve their own money..." ("Cultural Extermination Then, Extermination of Fiscal Responsibility Now." FCNL Indian Report, Winter 2004, 1).

"The BIA, originally part of the War Department because of the decades of armed combat with warrior tribes, is a notoriously blundering branch of the Interior Department. As we have noted before, its bureaucratic bungles have contributed to its parent agency's on-the-street Washington title: the "Inferior Department"...

"In 1887, as Indian reservations were being broken up and the federal government began leasing or selling the oil, mineral, grazing and timber resources on the Indians' land to private developers, Congress passed an act allotting modest paybacks to the Indians who were the former occupants.

"An ongoing, decade-long tribal lawsuit centers on the BIA, which doles out in small amounts about $500 million a year of the money owed to the Indians. The BIA's so-called "trust fund," now loaded with an undistributed $3 billion, has cheated hundreds of thousands of Indians for decades of $137 billion in royalties from the natural resource leases.

"In 1994 Congress finally passed the American Indian Trust Reform Management Act, and in court in Washington since 1996 the BIA has been forced to concede that it has mislaid thousands of files and lost track of unpaid beneficiaries. The frequently exasterated federal judge hearing the case, Royce Lamberth, has called the agency's incompetent conduct "the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century."

"Now comes another astonishing rip-off of Indians -- again not widely covered by the media. It involves the shredding of millions of dollars from a few tribes with gambling casino incomes by two operatives of a non-government Washington institution, the lobbying industry.

"Two Washington lobbyists, Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the latter a former aide of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), have come under belated public attack for chiseling more than $80 million in lobbying fees from six casino-operating tribes...

"The Indian tribes paying the lobbyists expected the two men to protect their casino operations. Instead, they were not only bilked, but as disclosed last month in the first of a series of public hearings by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the hired influence-peddlers sent each other a racially denigrating exchange of e-mails referring to their tribal clients as "monkeys" and "troglodytes."

"The lobbyists extended their contempt of their clients before the investigating Senate committee. Although both men were subpoenaed to be there, Scanlon did not show up, and Abramoff rejected questions, invoking the Fifth Amendment" ("American Indians Open a Massive New Musem in Washington." Washington Spectator, Oct. 15, 2004: 3).