Chapter 15: Senate Investigation

Before the ink was dry on the letter that I received from BIA’s Bill Benjamin that fired me, I began a lengthy series of correspondence with Montana’s two Senators and the Congressman for the district in which Billings is located. Of those three, Montana’s Senator Max Baucus was most helpful. He asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to respond to a list of questions from me. There was a six months delay before BIA responded, but there was finally a written answer from BIA’s chief career employee, Director of Operations William Ragsdale.
Montana’s Congressman Marlenee asked the Office of Inspector General (OIG) to perform an audit of the Billings Area Office. It was two years before OIG would accomplish that, but the audit did take place. Both the audit and the answer from BIA’s William Ragsdale are referred to in this book, and they verify the reports I issued (and for which I had been fired) while employed by BIA. Still, being “correct” wasn’t good enough.
During 1988 my continuing letters (I was fired from BIA in late 1986) to various Senators led to contacts with the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. My letters, my story in the Arizona Republic, that newspaper’s series “Fraud in Indian Country,” and other complaints put enough pressure on the Senate to lead to an investigation. I claim part of the credit for causing this Senate investigation to happen.
The Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs formed (within itself) a Special Committee on Investigation, and hired a staff to look into BIA and Indian problems. The Committee was formed in February, 1988, and issued it’s final report in November, 1989, three years after I was fired by BIA.
All my complaints to the politicians about BIA were put on hold during this almost two year period. First, I was told to wait for the investigation to begin, then after the investigation started I was told to wait for the investigation to finish. During this time I believed that at last the problems at BIA would receive serious attention from these powerful people, and that BIA would be held accountable for its actions. A solution seemed to be at hand.
During much of our national history, the Senate has taken an active role in Indian matters. This started with the treaty process, because the Senate confirmed treaties that the President (or executive branch) negotiated with Indian tribes. That tradition of Senate involvement continues, through the Senate Select Committee.
Many Indians have felt hopeful about Senator Daniel Inouye, who most often serves as Chairman of the Committee. Inouye has frequent meetings with Indians and hears their complaints. Other members of the Committee at the time were Arizona’s DeConcini and McCain, and Senator Daschle of South Dakota. You may recognize some of these names as having been identified with corruption in the Savings and Loan scandal. These are men of doubtful quality with disturbing ethical standards.
The Senators that Indians depend on all receive large contributions from special interests. I see that fact (and the Senators personally) as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. It appeared to me that Congress has sold the Indian lands (and or minerals, cheap grazing rights, etc.) for cash in advance paid into their political campaign funds.
The two year investigation of BIA was underway, and I provided the investigators with copies of most of my evidence. They told me that my papers were among the most useful documents the Committee had. This led to several phone conversations with the committee staff, and it seemed that I was developing a close and trusting relationship with them. I understood that I would be called to testify during the public hearings that would be broadcast on CSPAN TV.
I was filled with hope that something good would come from this, and that at last my story would be heard. My pride grew and my head swelled with self-importance as I day-dreamed about having my say about BIA in front of a national television audience. This overblown ego would led me to do something really stupid.
Here was my thought process at that time. After finding the problems in BIA, I had seen their degrading effect on the lives of Indians. The motive for all of this was greed for money and power. For the system to operate, political cooperation was essential because of the government’s control over BIA and the lives of Indians. At that moment I had found a way to put these thoughts and feelings together in a logical way and to express them. I had written a poem, thought I was pretty smart, and wanted to share the poem with anyone who might understand the thoughts revealed by it.
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CASH IN ADVANCE
Indian Land is for sale, it’s all very legal
We deliver it wrapped, what a deal.
Right after dinner, with help from Ross Swimmer
Congress will write a new law with a seal.
So it’s Cash in Advance to see Indians dance
while we pull land from under their feet.
It’s hard work to unravel laws during jet travel,
and who knows, there could be some heat.
You know you can trust us, the FBI won’t bust us,
it’s very legal, and sure can’t be beat.
We need cash for election, parties and defection,
and our love for PAC donors is sweet.
Energy companies get praise, stockholders a raise,
and that makes the whole deal complete.
So it’s Cash in Advance while the Indians dance,
there’s nothing in writing, it’s so neat.
© Copyright 1988 David L. Henry
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Ross Swimmer was the appointed head of BIA at that time. Although I didn’t say “Senator” or “Representative” in the poem, it obviously points a finger at federal politicians. I wanted to share my poem, and since my relationship with the Committee staff at that time was intimate, I enclosed a copy along with some documents I was sending to them. I thought they’d have a good laugh and understand the problems better. I wasn’t thinking about the source of their paychecks or where their loyalties might lie.
Prior to sending in the poem, I was told that it was almost certain I would be called as a witness during the hearings. Senator Inouye was coming to Billings, and he would want to see me. A few days after the poem was mailed, I was phoned and told that an investigator was coming to see me in Billings with a message from the Senators.
On October 17, 1988, Jack Kerns, a General Accounting Office investigator working with the Senate Investigative Committee, came from Washington to meet with me at the Ramada Inn in Billings.
He used good and careful language, but the meaning of what he said amounted to this:
Just be quiet. Don’t say you are a primary witness, or that your evidence and complaints helped cause this investigation to take place. The Senators will take full credit for deciding to investigate BIA. They don’t want it to look like they were just responding to complaints; the Senators want to look good.
To make certain that we can dispense with you as a witness, I’m going to visit the Billings Area Office this afternoon. Then if any testimony about Billings is wanted, it can come from me instead of from you. We don’t want your testimony.
The meeting was brief, he did not literally tell me to shut my mouth, but the message was clear. The purpose of the hearings was to make the Senators look good, and I was too outspoken to be trusted as a witness. It appeared to me that my poem had been read, and that neither it nor I was very popular with the Senators. I would be squashed like road-kill on a busy highway.
If you’d like to read the report issued by the Senate committee, you can get a copy by contacting your own Senator. Ask for Senate Report 101-216. Here are some of the highlights of that report:
From Part One, Summary:
“In exchange for the vast lands that now comprise most of the United States, the federal government promised the tribes permanent, self-governing reservations ...
“Paternalistic federal control ... has created a federal bureaucracy ... riddled with fraud, mismanagement and waste. Worse, ... officials in every agency knew of the abuses but did little or nothing to stop them.
“For instance, federal officials in Oklahoma admitted that Indian land was wide open to oil theft, yet for the past three years they uncovered none. They even ignored specific allegations against the nation’s largest purchaser of Indian oil, which [our] investigators caught repeatedly stealing from Indians.
“In every area it touches, BIA is plagued by mismanagement.
“BIA... was not surprised by the waste and fraud. ... Yet the Bureau made little effort to avert this massive fraud and financial scandal. BIA also permitted a pattern of child-abuse by its teachers ... not a single official was ever disciplined for tolerating the abuse of countless students ...
“BIA’s mismanagement is manifest in almost every area the Committee examined [including] financial management of Indian Trust funds ...
“... the Committee found a pattern of callously ignoring known problems, defending and promoting incompetent staff, and ostracizing the few capable employees who dared to speak out against the institutional incompetence that surrounded them.
“ ... Koch Oil, the largest purchaser of Indian oil in the country, was engaged in a widespread and sophisticated scheme to steal crude oil from Indians ... stealing millions in Oklahoma alone.
Concerning oil, the report also mentioned the Sun Oil Co., Conoco, Kerr-McGee, and Phillips. Moving on to the subject of tribal government, the report recommended that:
“Federal assets and annual appropriations must be transferred in toto to the tribes ...
“Indian governments will be empowered to manage their internal affairs in the same sense as state governments.
In a review of history, the report stated:
“Between 1887 and 1934 the amount of land in Indian hands had shrunk from 136 million acres to 34 million acres.
The report contained a dozen pages detailing sexual abuse by known pedophiles who were hired as teachers in BIA operated schools, and told how BIA kept them on after repeated reports about their activities. They quoted BIA’s acting Assistant Secretary William Ragsdale (BIA’s chief career employee) who said that is was inexcusable that BIA had allowed a certain pedophile to thrive in [BIA] schools for 14 years. The report also said that :
“teachers who know of allegations may be frightened and intimidated into not reporting their information,” that “BIA officials ... intimidated anyone who chose to report allegations,” and “negligent BIA officials were never disciplined ... and many were even promoted within BIA.”
The committee report contains 238 pages, so I can’t describe it all here. In addition to problems within BIA, it lists radical failures within the Bureau of Land Management, the Indian Health Service, the Minerals Management Service, and other federal agencies. In an appendix on page 225, it states that Senator Inouye and his colleagues decided to investigate fraud, corruption and mismanagement in American Indian affairs “no matter where or to whom it led.”
Right at that point I suggest that the investigation and report dips sharply and becomes phony. To whom does it lead? In my opinion it leads directly to our Senators and other politicians, indirectly to our system of selling political favors to special interests, and finally to ourselves who have allowed such things to happen.
It would have been most gratifying if I could have asked the Senators a few questions at this point. How about:
1.) Senator, how much money has your campaign fund collected from the oil companies [repeat the names from above] which grew rich stealing oil from Indians?
2.) Senator, how many years ago did you first hear complaints about pedophiles teaching in BIA schools, and what did you do about the complaints at that time?
3.) Senator, you did not follow up on reports that hundreds of millions of dollars are missing from BIA’s trust funds.
Do you have any plan to stop these shortages from continuing, or to find out who took the money? Will you work to see that the missing funds are restored?
You can manufacture your own list of questions from the data presented here. From a personal standpoint, I’d like to ask what they have done to support BIA’s “few capable employees who dared to speak out,” as quoted above. At this point in time, the Senators and their staff members were fully informed about my case and had copies of my documentation, and had done nothing about it. That process is called stonewalling.
Rather than accepting any responsibility for the situation at BIA, or looking further in that direction, the good Senators diverted the investigation to search for any problems caused by the victims. This is about the equivalent of a lawyer who is defending a rapist asking whether or not the woman was pretty.
The final chapter in the Senate report is titled “Corruption Among Tribal Government Officials.” This chapter starts out with:
“... the existence of Indian tribal governance predates by centuries the Constitution itself.
“... “Indian citizens ... have fallen prey to the actions of certain corrupt [Indian] officials.”
The chapter details the misdeeds of Navajo Chairman Pete McDonald, and covers problems found among tribes in Oklahoma and a few other locations. I have no special knowledge about these problems, and assume that the report is reasonably accurate. In one footnote, it accused Chairman Real Bird (Crow Tribe) of corruption or potential corruption, and states that federal charges were filed against several Crow tribal officials.
Concerning the Crow officials, the great bulk of the accusations were dropped later for lack of evidence, so it appears that most of the charges were based on unsupported rumors or hearsay. Some trials were held, and that is described elsewhere in this book.
So, what did the investigation accomplish? First, it stopped all pending action on all complaints in this area. It made a permanent record of some of the problems, and gave them a place in history.
The investigation proposed some reforms, but none were accomplished. Not a single BIA employee was fired or demoted, except (perhaps) one or two pedophiles. None of the complainants (whistleblowers) were rehired or rewarded. None of the BIA systems or structures were made better.
The hearings provided a platform where the Senators could prance around for the voters back home, and express with eloquent words their belief in honesty (at least for others), and their support for Motherhood and the American Flag. BIA was not reformed, and the politicians did not halt the stealing from Indians.