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Senate Democrats are charging taxpayers for a trip to Hawaii, The Daily Caller has learned. The entire press staff of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is in Maui, even though a field hearing there won’t happen until next Wednesday. The committee’s oversight field hearing, scheduled for August 17 at 9:00 a.m. at the Maui Beach Hotel, will focus on “Strengthening Self-Sufficiency: Overcoming Barriers to Economic Development in Native Communities.” Rick Manning from Americans for Limited Government, which first discovered the hearing, told TheDC it’s unbelievable that Hill staffers talking about fiscal responsibility would waste money on a trip to Maui....

HARDIN — Calling for new tribal leadership and a break from the federal government, founders of the first Crow Indian Tea Party movement rallied Monday in Hardin. Leading the new Crow Nation Tea Party was Adrian Bird Sr., a former tribal chairman candidate who recently filed a civil complaint against the Crow executive branch alleging malfeasance for mismanaging tribal funds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmAs_wCjx8"

Several of California's largest gaming tribes have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a little-known body to successfully speed up their land applications - a necessary step for casino expansion, Capitol Weekly has learned. The California Fee to Trust Consortium was established under the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs Pacific Regional office in 2000 in order to expedite land claims, many of which have languished for years. The consortium arrangement allows tribes to pay into a fund that pays the salaries of the BIA employees who evaluate these claims. Documents about the little-known governmental organization came to light following...

WASHINGTON - American Indians suing the government over billions of dollars in lost royalties say they are contemplating an offer by members of Congress to resolve their lawsuit for $8 billion. The offer is considerably lower than the $27.5 billion plaintiffs offered to settle for a year ago. But plaintiffs say they are considering it seriously, bringing them closer than ever to ending the lawsuit, which has bogged down the Interior and Justice departments for 10 years. "Eight billion dollars is something I wish was higher, but I'm glad they were able to bring something forward that was equitable," the...

WASHINGTON - A Washington lobbyist and his partner twice insinuated themselves into the tribal elections of an Inland tribe, which paved the way for them to receive lucrative contracts worth more than $7.2 million which the two split in a secret deal, according to a nearly 400-page report released by a congressional committee Thursday. The report by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is the most detailed account so far of how the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in Palm Springs came to hire Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his partner, public relations specialist Michael S. Scanlon. Abramoff, who...

By all accounts, there are a herd of additional shoes yet to drop in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. The question is whether or not this public scrutiny will be limited to just the low-lying fruit, or if some serious investigations will take place - including an investigation of one of the chief investigators: St. John McCain, Arizona Republican. When stories of Jack Abramoff taking various Indian tribes to the cleaners first hit the press, McCain - Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and author of the un-American, anti-free speech McCain-Feingold campaign censorship law - decided this would be...

WASHINGTON - Just pick a number, lawmakers were told Wednesday by both sides looking to Congress to resolve a lawsuit over billions of dollars in federal royalties that American Indians claim they are owed. Estimates of the money owed for unpaid royalties on oil, gas, timber and other resources from Indian lands range from half a billion dollars to $27.5 billion, a panel of negotiators and tribal leaders told Senate and House members. Many people with a stake in the bitter class-action lawsuit against the Interior Department are now convinced that only Congress can settle it equitably. And many now...

WASHINGTON - New evidence is emerging that the top Democrat on the Senate committee currently investigating Jack Abramoff got political money arranged by the lobbyist back in 2002 shortly after the lawmaker took action favorable to Abramoff's tribal clients. A lawyer for the Louisiana Coushatta Indians told The Associated Press that Abramoff instructed the tribe to send $5,000 to Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record)'s political group just three weeks after the North Dakota Democrat urged fellow senators to fund a tribal school program Abramoff's clients wanted to use.The check was one of about five dozen the Coushattas listed...

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court decided Tuesday that it was unreasonable to require a historical accounting of money the government has been managing for Indian tribes, saying the bookkeeping chore would "take 200 years." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the government and the tribes in their effort to block a lower court order for a detailed tally of money owed the tribes going back to 1887. The accounting had been ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing a class-action lawsuit in which thousands of Indians claim they were cheated...

WASHINGTON (AP) A hearing will be held in Washington next week on the Hawaiian recognition bill introduced in the U-S Congress late last month. Governor Lingle is among those who will testify before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on March 1st. Lingle will be in Washington for a meeting of the National Governors Association, which starts Saturday. The bill, also known as the Akaka bill, would formally recognize Native Hawaiians as an indigenous people in the same way that the U-S recognizes American Indians and Native Alaskans. The legislation passed the House last year, but ran into roadblocks in the...

WASHINGTON - A federal judge has given Interior Secretary Gale Norton an ultimatum: Either appear in his court or face the prospect that he'll rule against her on an accusation that she retaliated against American Indians suing her agency for lost royalties. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth gave Norton the choice in an order he issued late Monday. The judge has frequently battled with the Interior Department since a class-action suit was filed in 1996 on behalf of more than 300,000 Indians seeking an accounting of trust funds set up in their behalf more than a century ago. The government...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The second-in-command at the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs is recusing herself from Indian gambling and recognition decisions so she can resign and join the private sector - just four months after the head of the department also recused himself from those issues. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Aurene Martin will resign effective Sept. 10, Interior Department spokesman Dan DuBray said Tuesday. Effective immediately, responsibility for tribal gambling and recognition decisions is being given to Mike Olsen, currently the counselor to the assistant secretary. Olsen will become the third official in less than a year...

WASHINGTON (SH) - No matter who is running the Interior Department - Republicans, Democrats or a hybrid of both - they can't seem to get it right with Native Americans, leaving one to believe that the nation's integrity got buried at Wounded Knee alongside Crazy Horse's heart. Ever since the U.S. 7th Calvary of Custer fame (or infamy, whichever side one is on) massacred a harmless bunch of Ghost Dancers and their women and children at that now-sacred site, officially ending 30 years of armed hostility toward the Indians, the government has maintained a policy of corruption that even the...

A century of mismanagement, malfeasance and mistrust won't be reversed or rectified quickly or cheaply, according to a new report from the Department of the Interior (DOI) indicating that making sense of badly jumbled Indian trust accounts dating to the late 1800s will take at least a decade and cost $2.4 billion [see "DOI Speaks With Forked Tongue," June 10; "Bureaucrats Circle Their Wagons," Dec. 31, 2001; and "Total Lack of Trust," Sept. 17, 2001]. And even then that probably won't fully account for all the royalties and fees that American Indians were supposed to have paid to them for...