A Trust Betrayed?

By Marguerite Michaels/Shawnee

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.

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."

They found grocery receipts and bills from JCPenney for socks at 15-c- a pair and a coat for $14.66. The purchase order from the Indian agency for Moses' first car was there, as were numerous voucher slips endorsed with his tentative, spidery signature. Most important, there were pages of ledger sheets detailing his individual BIA money account.

More than half a dozen visits later, Moses' grandson Leon Bruno has accumulated enough photocopies of documents to fill 19 loose-leaf notebooks. Papers show that Moses' entire 80-acre allotment first came under an oil lease in 1923. Six years later, according to BIA documents, 20 of those acres were sold to two local white men for $1,311, or $65.55 an acre. The family has found contradicting government estimates of the land's royalty value at the time, ranging from $50 to $400 an acre. And documents are unclear about whether Moses Bruno understood before the transaction was completed that the land was being sold. A well was drilled on these 20 acres in 1933 and still pumps to this day.

In 1931 Bruno got permission from the BIA to withdraw 20 separate acres of his allotment from the trust, and he began selling percentages of his oil and gas royalty interest. Four wells were eventually drilled on the remaining BIA-controlled 40 acres and pumped from March 1939 to the end of 1941. It was the practice then for oil companies to send royalty-payment checks for Indian-owned property directly to the superintendent of the local BIA office. Each day the Shawnee office made a deposit via certified mail to the Federal Reserve Bank in Oklahoma City, Okla. The deposit sheet listed the source of each check, its amount and the day's total deposits. Daily entries were also made in the office's cash-receipts journal, registering the payment to each individual Indian account on a ledger card.

Sorting through those old documents, with the lingering resentments the families have toward the BIA, can be confusing. When Dana Dickson began comparing the amounts posted to her great grandfather's ledger card with the sums on the deposit sheets for the same days, she discovered that 10% was routinely funneled from the oil check to a special-deposit account. Dickson and her relatives suspected that corrupt agents were taking the money for themselves. But Ross Swimmer, a Department of the Interior ombudsman working on behalf of Indian-trust beneficiaries, told TIME that the deduction, which was not exclusive to Moses Bruno's account, was simply a fee that the BIA charged for managing the oil and gas properties held by the trust funds.

Nearly two years after the elder Brunos died in 1960, a Shawnee bureau agent suggested that the family sell its remaining 40 acres, along with the property's mineral rights. "[The minerals have only a] nominal value," the agent wrote in a letter to the regional BIA office in Anadarko. The family signed off on the sale, netting $3,022.50. In 1982 a new oil well was drilled on that land and is still pumping.

The Bruno family acknowledges the pressure the BIA was under during the oil-boom years. In the 1935 annual report of the Shawnee agency, the superintendent called his office "woefully undermanned," handling 1,500 Indian money accounts with only one clerk, who had no modern accounting machines. "Maybe there were some mistakes made," says Leon Bruno. "[But] a lot of what went on was deliberate." The family estimates that Moses Bruno earned a total of $35,000 from his oil and gas leases. The production figures the descendants unearthed, on just one well on the land that was sold in 1933, amount to almost $70 million.

It is not clear whether the family will ever receive compensation for any miscalculations that may have been made on their land sales and oil leases. Elouise Cobell's class action has stalled in the face of the Department of the Interior's estimate that it would take five years and $335 million just to account for the money from land and mineral leases covering a period of more than 100 years. And Congress is balking at the expense--even though its committees have issued more than one report over the years about gross mismanagement of Native American trust funds. In December the Bruno descendants decided to withdraw from the Cobell suit and hired a lawyer to pursue their own.

"It's not about the money," says Moses' granddaughter Ruby Withrow, a nurse who administers a diabetes program for the Absentee Shawnee tribe. "I want some justice for a man who trusted the United States and was betrayed." The BIA has looked into the family's claims and says that while the records for Moses Bruno's account may not be complete, "no instance of malfeasance was found in the records that we examined." In a fax to TIME, the agency stated that "understandably, the family did not review these files with a historian's commitment to objectivity."

Still, the search for what happened to Moses Bruno's land has produced a new sense of equanimity for his family. There have been several meetings to bring all the descendants--some 200 plus--up to date on the stories the documents tell. Leon Bruno has started a nonprofit corporation, funded by garage sales, raffles and donations from family and friends, that he hopes will eventually allow the family to pay for an organized study of its Potawatomi culture and language. He and his wife Veta attend the annual gatherings of the nine Potawatomi bands, now scattered over several states. Leon has gone through the training and fasting that are required of those chosen as the tribe's honored fire keepers. And he has built a roundhouse on his property in Tecumseh, Okla., where family members gather four times a year to light a sacred fire and pray for the memory of their ancestor Moses Bruno.