Reconciling conflict: The role of accounting in the American Indian Trust Fund debacle

In 1887, the United States Congress broke American Indian Tribal lands into allotments which it held and controlled “on behalf” of individual American Indians in trust funds. The following century has been marked by allegations of fraud, mismanagement and accounting failures prompting repeated calls for reform, none very successful. As a result, neither the federal government nor trust holders themselves are sure whether the account balances are $7 or $100 billion currently.In 1994, Congress passed yet another attempt to reconcile the American Indian Trusts. This time, legislation spelled out the responsibility of the Secretary of the Interior (the department in charge of the trust accounts) to provide a complete “historical” accounting including accurate reports of balances, and to ensure that future payments of principal and interest were accurate and timely. More than 10 years later, the Interior reported its progress in a 24-page brochure that defended the Interior's narrowed definition of “historical” and its decision to limit its reconciliation to accounts that were open on 1994 or later. In the brochure, the Interior argued that its limited definition of historical and any other shortcoming in the Interior's efforts were acceptable given the cost of a more complete accounting. Finally, the brochure argued that the Interior Department had fulfilled its role as trustee and, as such, is the good guy in the conflict over these accounts. It is the Interior's American Indian Trust holders who are unreasonable troublemakers.In this paper, we examine the Interior's brochure and locate it within the larger conflicted relations between American Indians and the federal government. We are interested in the Interior's narrow vision of historical accounting, and the role this narrowness might play in deepening or resolving centuries long conflicts. We argue that the brochure provides an example of how parties in dispute over economic resources may attempt to frame or control the accounting process itself as a way to control those conflicts and limit the possible meanings that could be accorded to accountability within a particular set of relations. This episode illustrates how the ability to frame accounting definitions, formulations, and boundaries becomes a powerful means of controlling the final allocation of both dollars and political privilege. We conclude by accentuating the limitations of accounting in restoring a sense of justice and “balance” to relationships that embody uneven access to power and long-standing conflicts over economic claims.