Indian trust difficulties overstated.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Ross Swimmer For The Register-Guard

Editorials about the ongoing Cobell vs. Norton Indian trust litigation that include so many incorrect facts, such as the one that appeared in The Register-Guard on March 17, do no favors to the people of Indian Country. Rather, they perpetuate the already deep mistrust of the Bureau of Indian Affairs staff members at the Department of the Interior who are working to improve the Indian trust for all trust beneficiaries.

To set the record straight: The Cobell litigation has brought a lot of necessary attention to an important issue. Since the passage of the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act of 1994, and the filing of the litigation two years later, the Department of the Interior has made great strides in reforming the Indian trust.

We also have built one of the best archival records centers in the world. Today, we have more than 300 million pages of Indian records stored at the American Indian Records Repository in Kansas, and more boxes are arriving each week. We have a lot of work left to do on a number of issues, but things are entirely different today from how they were 10 years ago.

The Register-Guard's editorial said that the past two administrations have frustrated efforts to resolve this case. If the editors look at public court records, they will understand that this lawsuit is not about mismanagement, or even reparations.

It was filed simply to find out how the funds that came into the trust were disbursed to the beneficiaries, and to provide those beneficiaries with statements of their accounts. Reports to the court, available online, will show that for a number of years we have been working on this accounting. It is a massive process and simply cannot be done quickly.

Before the Department of the Interior began collecting Indian trust documents from across the nation and working to reconcile accounts, we did not know if - or to what extent - allegations that the Indian trust might have been mishandled were credible. Obviously, we know much more today.

Results from accounting work (done by contractors from the nation's largest accounting firms and studied by a national organization for research at the University of Chicago) are showing that the liability may be in the millions of dollars, not the billions that the plaintiffs claim. Most mistakes - including both overpayments and underpayments - appear to be because of miscalculations in interest payments on trust funds.

The editorial also said the Department of Interior has refused to seriously discuss settlement. In fact, we have made serious attempts to discuss settlement with the plaintiffs' lawyers. The two parties are simply too far apart on a settlement figure.

History, and the federal government, have not been kind to the American Indian. Today, poverty, disease, crime and subpar education exist throughout Indian Country. All of these issues need more attention from the people, Congress and tribal, state and federal governments.

But it is not appropriate to lump the Indian trust situation into those. It turns out that the good people who worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs - the majority of whom were American Indian - did their best to distribute funds to individual Indian account holders, and did, in good faith, retain records.

I'm proud of all those employees, and proud to work with the Interior staff members who are hard at work improving the Indian trust for today's beneficiaries.

Ross Swimmer, the U.S. Department of the Interior's special trustee for American Indians, was elected to three terms as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. He served one term as the Interior Department's assistant secretary for Indian affairs.