WASHINGTON – When the trust funds litigation in Cobell and other cases are finally resolved, people like lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, her fellow plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, a cast of Native American Rights Fund attorneys and other members of the legal team, as well as an honor roll of others will no doubt all wear every feather Native culture can bestow.
Congressional intervention would emphasize the mediation of adversarial differences that have dominated the case so far. By its very nature, and no doubt because of its historic importance, the hearing drew out a distilled record of essential information in the case as the ground beneath it begins to shift. This shift and the information it throws out, the new perspective it generates, leaves some reputations on higher public ground in this regard, and some not.
This multi-part series will take a look at a few who have found higher ground, followed by a look at one whose reputation as a former Interior Secretary may be settling into lower ground, at least on the subject of the trust funds: Bruce Babbitt.
Neal McCaleb:
Standing tall
In his first months in Washington, Neal McCaleb used to note (with customary good humor) that the worst thing about the nation’s capitol is that he couldn’t get his wife to move there with him.
She may have been onto something.
The former assistant secretary for Indian affairs resigned, not in disgrace exactly but certainly after a brief embattled tenure at the BIA’s top post. His only fault on the job was to have inherited a role in the mammoth task of cleaning up the bureau’s trust funds management procedures.
The court in the Cobell litigation leveled the grave charge of “fraud upon the court” against both McCaleb and Gale Norton, Secretary of Interior (the BIA’s parent department), and held them both in contempt of court.
With that as an invitation, further insults followed from other quarters. The court-ordered shutdown of BIA computers on McCaleb’s watch made even the ordinary duties of the bureau an ordeal – to say nothing of trying to reform trust management systems while regularly responding to court requirements.
McCaleb had been nominated to the BIA post as the person whose character and abilities seemed most equal to the burden of trust funds reform in the George W. Bush administration. But to paraphrase a longtime Native operator in Washington’s legislative realms – they weren’t going to let him do the job.
After his resignation, a higher court threw out the contempt charges against both McCaleb and Norton. The latter could not be held accountable for contemptuous actions of her predecessors in office, the appeals court found. As for McCaleb, his clearance was emphatic: the court denied that there was “any specific act or omission whatsoever on his part” to sustain the contempt charge.
No stranger to the concept of personal honor, McCaleb has spoken out since on his vindication. But few words have been so eloquent on the subject as those uttered at the July 30 hearing by Donald Gray, an attorney specializing in financial “hardship” cases. Citing a high moral cost to the trust funds debacle (on top of those financial costs), and describing McCaleb as “a moral casualty,” he warmed to the theme in his written statement:
“One of my saddest days in the last four years [since Gray began voluntarily monitoring the Indian trust funds management reform process] was the day I learned that Neal McCaleb, a man of impeccable honesty and integrity, and a man of Indian blood who forewent lucrative opportunities in the private sector to do something meaningful for American Indians by becoming Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, resigned in exhaustion and dismay under the relentless, and extremely personal invective of the plaintiffs. Knowingly or not, the plaintiffs lost a powerful ally, and one, I believe, who would have fought hard for the type of reform program outlined in this testimony.”
McCaleb’s many friends and admirers speak of him now just exactly as they did before the contempt charge came down. J.D. Colbert, with the Chickasaw Nation’s thriving Bank2 in Oklahoma, called him a man of “extreme integrity and honesty.”
“What I admire about him most,” he added, “is his strong dose of humility with a dash of humor ? He can make fun of himself, and often does.”
McCaleb never has seemed like a man who could remain a moral casualty for long.
