A Trust Betrayed?

Ruby Withrow remembers the happy days she spent as a young child on her grandfather Moses Bruno's 80-acre homestead near Shawnee, Okla. There the extended Bruno family, members of the Potawatomi tribe, tended large gardens of vegetables and fruits and raised chickens, hogs and cows. On Sundays the whole family attended the Sacred Heart Catholic Mission just down the road. But all that changed soon after oil was discovered on the Bruno property.

Lease agreements were arranged with oil producers, wells were dug, and pumping began in 1939. But family members say Grandpa Bruno never knew how much oil and gas were being taken out of his land or how much money he was due from their sale. All his royalty payments went into a trust fund managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). If Bruno needed to buy something, he had to appeal to the local BIA agent, and he was rarely given cash. When he wanted to buy a cow, the price was deducted from his account and given directly to the seller. When he bought groceries, he paid for them with a BIA voucher.

LATEST COVER STORY
Mind & Body Happiness
Jan. 17, 2004

SPECIAL REPORTS

Coolest Video Games 2004

Coolest Inventions

Wireless Society

Cool Tech 2004

PHOTOS AND GRAPHICS

At The Epicenter

Paths to Pleasure

Quotes of the Week

This Week's Gadget

Cartoons of the Week

More graphics >>
More photos >>

MORE STORIES
Advisor: Rove Warrior
The Bushes: Family Dynasty
Klein: Benneton Ad Presidency

More Stories >>

CNN.com: Latest News

The wells were plugged just 28 months later Bruno family members say the wells' operator never gave a reason for ending production but in that short time, they say, the soil was ruined, and the Brunos were able to grow hardly anything on it. Younger family members moved away to find jobs, and the old folks limped along on public assistance until 1960, when Bruno and his wife Frances died within a month of each other. Their heirs decided to sell what remained of the land the next year.

Such stories are common among Native Americans. Like legions of others, Bruno acquired his holdings under the Dawes Act of 1887. Its allotment program was an effort by Congress to break up the tribal structure by encouraging self-sufficiency among the Indians. The Dawes Act mandated that the land given to Natives be managed by the Department of the Interior's local BIA agent and promised that any profits from the property would be held in trust for its owners. The problem, say hundreds of families like the Brunos, is that the owners received relatively little of the money coming to them.

Over the past decade, many of the families have begun actively pursuing what they say is their rightful legacy. In 1996 Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, filed a $135 billion class action against the U.S. government, claiming that billions of dollars belonging to some 500,000 Native Americans and their heirs had been mismanaged or stolen from accounts held in trust since the late 19th century. Through document discovery and courtroom testimony, the Cobell case revealed mismanagement, ineptness, dishonesty and delay by federal officials, leading U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to declare their conduct "fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form."

The BIA holds 11 million acres in trust for individual Native Americans. Money from timber sales and agricultural and oil leases of this property is distributed under the same program that dealt with Moses Bruno. Five years ago, his descendants began tracking their patrimony. Their experience shows how difficult it can be to prove past wrongs and have them redressed.

Family members say Moses Bruno was never allowed to see his oil and gas account ledgers. It might not have done him much good if he had been, given that, like many Indians of his generation, he had never learned to read and could write only his name. When his eldest son Johnnie argued that the government was robbing him blind, the older man insisted that the Indian-agency people would never cheat him.

After World War II, Bruno's children tried to sue the oil company for saltwater damage to their soil caused by the pumping from the wells. "But even though my dad Johnnie took photos," says Ruby Withrow, 69, "we couldn't prove Moses had not allowed the salty runoff. There was no paper trail at that time." Nor was there money to pay for a lawyer. Over the years, family members looked for documents that could prove the bureau had treated Moses Bruno badly. They went to the National Archives in Washington, visited historical societies in Oklahoma and requested records from BIA offices in Shawnee and nearby Anadarko, Okla. Always they were told that few records were available.

The Cobell case reassured the Brunos that others had had similarly unhappy experiences with their BIA trust funds and motivated them to dig deeper for documents to support their complaints. Finally, after a 16-hour marathon on the Internet in the fall of 1998, Dana Dickson, Ruby Withrow's daughter, discovered on an obscure Indian arts-and-crafts site a link to Oklahoma Indian agency files located at the regional National Archives in Fort Worth, Texas. A family delegation immediately made the trip. "I'll never forget the first time we went down there," says Dickson's cousin Johnnie Flynn. "Dana and I were pulling file after file. One of them was Moses Bruno's. It was three inches thick. I stopped and looked over at my mother and my Aunt Ruby. There were tears streaming down their faces."