Why is the Interior Department litigating so hard to dilute its responsibilities to Indians?
Interior is not fighting hard to dilute its responsibilities but to fulfill them. The purpose of the lawsuit was to compel the Department of the Interior to do an accounting of Indian trust funds. Interior has made substantial progress in this area. Soon after Secretary Norton assumed her position, she created the Office of Historical Trust Accounting to complete the historic accounting required. Since then, Interior has gathered, indexed and imaged millions of trust records, and has established a state-of-the-art storage facility in Lenexa, Kansas. The facility now houses over 250 million pages of records. With the help of several of the nation’s top accounting firms, Interior is preparing account statements going back (in some cases) as far as 1938 for Individual Indian Money account holders. We have already completed statements for more than 30,000 beneficiaries. So far, more than $100 million has been spent toward accomplishing the accounting. (By the time Interior’s accounting pla
