Editorial: Gridlock perpetuates decades-old broken trust

American history abounds with instances of the federal government breaking its promises to Indian tribes. History isn’t over. One example of federal faithlessness has roots that date back to Grover Cleveland’s first administration, and it will fester on unless Congress works out its differences on unemployment compensation.

The contentious jobless-pay issue has nothing to do with mismanagement of Indian trust accounts, but that’s where Congress inserted a landmark settlement that the Obama administration announced last December after 14 years of complicated class-action litigation.

The reasonable approach would have been to put the settlement in a bill of its own, pass it and begin rectifying confessed errors. But Congress doesn’t always act reasonably, and now, because the unemployment bill is bogged down over a filibuster threat, so is the healing.

In 1887, Congress enacted the General Allotment Act, under which the government began carving up Indian reservations, then owned by the tribes, and distributed some 54 million acres to individual tribal members. Nearly half a century later the allotment process was halted, but the federal government held the lands in trust, managing them for the income that could be derived from grazing, logging, mining, and oil and gas production.

Authorities never gave the half million affected tribal members any accounting of how their property was doing, however, and frustrated members – including Blackfeet Tribe member Elouise Cobell of Browning, Mont. – finally sued, claiming they’d been cheated out of their rightful income.

That was 14 years ago. That was two administrations and three interior secretaries ago. That was millions of pages of legal documents ago. That was 80 published opinions and 11 appellate decisions ago.

Finally, last December, parties announced they’d reached an agreement worth more than $3.4 billion. Plaintiffs would say that’s less than they deserved, but it’s said to be the largest settlement ever against the U.S. government and larger than all previous Indian settlements in the nation’s history.

Still, even though federal officials have admitted errors for more than a decade, Congress is hamstrung over an unrelated dispute, and the injustice persists.

Tens of thousands of Indian elders already have died off, many in poverty, waiting for their compensation. Some 300,000 more are still waiting, more than 32,000 of them in Idaho and Washington.

“We expect,” said attorney Keith Harper when the settlement was announced, “the federal government will follow through on each of the commitments it has made, which will reverse the historical pattern that has characterized past U.S.-Indian agreements.”

Or not.