Lower Brule Sioux Tribe

OIG Audit Questions More than $1.4M in Expenditures by Lower Brule Sioux Tribe under Bureau of Reclamation Contract

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is the audit page, and the audit itself.

From the description:

We audited the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s (LBST) interim incurred costs on Cooperative Agreement No. R95AV60020 with the Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). The agreement was issued by USBR for operation, maintenance, and administrative activities associated with the Lower Brule Rural Water System, which serves tribal and nontribal customers in southwestern South Dakota.
 
Our audit identified a total of $1,440,748 in questioned costs, as well as the need for increased oversight by USBR. We offer six recommendations to help USBR resolve the questioned costs and improve its operations with LBST. USBR agreed with all six recommendations and will begin negotiations with LBST to recoup the unallowable costs.
The audit was conduction after Human Rights Watch published a report on corruption at Lower Brule.

Friday Job Announcements

Sarah M Donnelly

Job vacancies are posted on Friday. Some announcements might still appear throughout the week. If you would like your Indian law job posted on Turtle Talk, please email indigenous@law.msu.edu.

National Indian Gaming Commission

Financial Analyst, Washington D.C.  Closes 10/13/2016.

Lower Brule Sioux Tribe

Public Defender, Tribal Court.  Open until filled.

Gila River Indian Community

Supervising Protective Services Attorney, Office of General Counsel (originally posted 9/16/2016). New closing date 10/18/2016.

Protective Services Attorney, Office of General Counsel (originally posted 9/16/2016). Now two positions available with new closing date of 10/18/2016.

Hualapai Tribe

Judge, Wellness Court. Open until filled.

Clerk Coordinator, Wellness Court. Open until filled.

Probation Officer, Wellness Court. Open until filled.

Public Defender Vacancy with Lower Brule Sioux Tribe

Sarah M Donnelly

The chosen applicant will:

  • Have a law degree from an ABA accredited law school and be a member in good standing of the bar of any state (South Dakota licensure preferred)
  • Must never have been convicted of a felony
  • Must be physically able to perform the duties of the office
  • Provides legal counsel and representation to adults accused of criminal offenses and juveniles accused of delinquent acts
  • Examines evidence and prepares and presents cases for the defense in criminal actions / delinquency actions
  • Review police reports
  • Draft motions, legal memorandums, and other pleadings
  • Conducts client and witness interviews
  • File pretrial motions
  • Identifies appropriate sentencing alternatives for clients and assists with getting clients into treatment
  • Appear in court on a daily basis
  • Knowledge of federal Indian law, criminal law, criminal procedure, juvenile law and procedure; and drug court or alternative courts process and procedures
  • Ability to argue legal positions effectively and persuasively, recognize, formulate and implement viable case defense theories, investigations and litigation strategies
  • Ability to communicate effectively both orally and in writing, multi-task, prioritize assignments, and remain organized.
  • Work effectively with others
  • Code writing (such as updating or amending tribal laws)
  • Assist with grant writing
  • Be a contributing asset to the office and welcome the opportunity to promote justice on the reservation
  • Other duties as may be assigned by Chief Judge

Salary: Negotiable,  depending on experience.
Closing Date: Until filled

Applications shall be in writing, to include a professional resume, legal qualifications, and any other submissions at the option of the applicant. Native American preference applies. Applications may be obtained from the LBST Personnel Office, Lower Brule, South Dakota (phone:  605-473-5561) or contacting Marlys Langdeau, Court Administrator at 605-473-5535.

Vulture Fund Files to Hold U.S. Liable for Lower Brule Sioux’s Debt

Sarah M Donnelly1 Comment

Here are materials in Great American Life Ins. Co. v. U.S. DOI, 16-cv-00699 ( S.D. Ohio):

Doc. 1 – Complaint for Declaratory, Injunctive, and Other Relief

Interior Board of Indian Appeals Order Affirming Decision

Updated Materials:

10 US Motion to Dismiss

Federal Court Rejects Jurisdiction over Lower Brule Sioux Tribe Internal Disputes

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here are the materials in Wright v. Langdeau (D.S.D.):

12 Motion for TRO

15 Langdeau Motion to Dismiss

15-4 Tribal Court Order

19 US Motion to Dismiss

20 DCT Order

Split Eighth Circuit Affirms Drug Conviction of Lower Brule Sioux Tribe Member

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is the opinion in United States v. Long.

News Coverage of Controversies at Lower Brule

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is “Delegation being sent to inspect Lower Brule financial records.”

Lower Brule Tribal Govt Response to HRW Report

Matthew L.M. Fletcher5 Comments

LOWER BRULE SIOUX TRIBE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Marshall Matz, mmatz@ofwlaw.com

THE LOWER BRULE SIOUX TRIBE CONDEMNS
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH’S BIASED AND INACCURATE REPORT

Lower Brule, South Dakota

“The report of Human Rights Watch attacking the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and its leaders is totally baseless and simply republishes misstatements of the past” said Lower Brule Sioux Tribal Chairman Mike Jandreau.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), an organization that claims to be “committed to maintaining high standards of accuracy and fairness” and maintaining high ethical standards, has released a remarkably inaccurate report that attacks Lower Brule Sioux .. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is constantly monitoring all Tribes under its trust responsibilities. In fact, Lower Brule has the lowest unemployment rate of any Tribe in South Dakota because of excellent and consistent Tribal management.
The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe condemns the biased, error-ridden, defamatory attack on the Lower Brule Sioux leadership, Lower Brule Sioux sovereignty, and the Lower Brule Sioux people.

Said Chairman Michael Jandreau: “This report is absolutely baseless. It’s shocking that any credible organization would put its name on it. It’s full of factual errors, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods. We’re exploring our legal options.”

The factual errors run from the ignorant (“The Lower Brule Sioux Reservation . . . is among the smallest . . . in the United States.”) to irresponsible and reckless inaccuracies. The report infers falsely that the stability of the tribal government is due to corrupt elections even though the current tribal council has new members critical of the previous council. The report wrongly concludes that the development of private sector businesses for sustainable future income involves the use of tribal funds. The report denigrates the long-established independent tribal justice system without any evidence that the tribal government prohibits, inhibits or discriminates against critics from reasonable and equitable access. The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe has advocated and supported, through resolution, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The report relies heavily on the false statements from political dissenters within the Tribe and treats the sovereignty of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe as simply a “problematic” and inconvenient barrier to its preconceived conclusions.

The report claims that Lower Brule Sioux tribal members have no way to hold Lower Brule Sioux leaders accountable for their decisions as leaders. To these claims, Chairman Jandreau says: “The attack entirely ignores the fact that every two years the Lower Brule Sioux people decide through their votes in open elections who will serve as leaders of the Tribe. Our government is completely transparent and open to Members of the Tribe.”

The report ignores the fact that any Lower Brule Sioux tribal member could bring an action in Tribal Court if Lower Brule Sioux leaders did not provide information they are entitled to receive.

The inconsistent and contradictory Human Rights Watch report, on one hand, portrays an oppressive tribal government while acknowledging that the government holds fair and open elections at which critics of the incumbents are elected and seated. The report does not allege that freedom of speech is suppressed, or freedom of assembly, or that there is no recourse to tribal and federal courts, or that the tribal government uses physically oppressive tactics of any kind. In spite of its allegations, the report omits he illegal conduct of the three elected tribal council members upon whom the report relies for much of its information. These three individuals attempted to physically take over the tribal government on December 12, 2014. Their wholly illegal and outrageous actions were enjoined in tribal court. While these three dissident tribal council members failed, their actions succeeded in revealing their complete lack of commitment to the rule of law and the thinly veiled and inappropriate political agenda at the root of the Human Rights Watch report. The Human Rights Watch Report is political pamphleteering of the worst sort. ###

Human Rights Watch Publishes Report on Lower Brule

Matthew L.M. Fletcher3 Comments

Here is the press release:

US: Tribal Council Mismanagement
Millions of Dollars Missing; Services Undercut

(Sioux Falls, January 12, 2015) – Millions of dollars in public funds are missing in the impoverished Lower Brule Sioux reservation, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Lower Brule Tribal Government should account for the missing public funds and abide by its own rules on openness.

The 90-page report, “Secret and Unaccountable: The Tribal Council at Brule and Its Impact on Human Rights,” documents many of the problems with tribal governance at Lower Brule for the first time. It details how the Tribal Council has diverted millions of dollars in federal funds away from key social programs without explaining how those funds were spent. Human Rights Watch has obtained hundreds of pages of government documents detailing financial mismanagement and possible corruption and is making that information public for the first time.

“Since 2007, Lower Brule’s Tribal Council has lost tens of millions of dollars to mismanagement and possible corruption,” said Arvind Ganesan, director of business and human rights at Human Rights Watch. “This has severely undercut efforts to provide basic services that people across the reservation desperately need.”

The report is being released during a crisis in tribal governance with a split between newly elected Tribal Council members who have clashed with longstanding council members over government transparency and accountability.

The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe is located on a small, extremely poor reservation in central South Dakota on the shore of the Missouri River. Some 40 percent of the local population requires food assistance, and the reservation’s poverty level is almost three times the national average.

The Tribal Council at Lower Brule serves as the legislative and executive branch of the government and is extraordinarily powerful on the reservation. Since 1980, the council chairman has been Michael Jandreau. Neither the local courts nor any other public institution exercise meaningful oversight over the council’s prerogatives.

Over the last two years, the Tribal Council is perhaps best known for its partnership with the Washington Redskins, the National Football League team.

Human Rights Watch found that the Tribal Government’s mismanagement of scarce financial resources has directly impacted basic services many tribal members rely on. For example, US$1.2 million was diverted between 2005 and 2007 from a federally funded program to supply potable water on the reservation. How the money was used has not been explained.

In another instance $2.6 million in federal funds meant for the school system and other programs for the poor were diverted from 2010-2011 for unexplained purposes. Since then the Lower Brule school system has effectively collapsed.

In perhaps the most brazen case of mismanagement, in 2009 members of the Tribal Council set up a series of shell companies to purchase the Westrock Group, a troubled Wall Street brokerage firm. By the time of the sale, the firm had been repeatedly sanctioned and fined by regulators for unethical business practices. Within two years of that purchase, Westrock was bankrupt.

The tribe made this dubious investment with the help of a $22.5 million federal loan guarantee, which the tribe subsequently sold for about $20 million in cash. That money is equivalent to nearly two-thirds of the Tribal Government’s entire annual budget and has since disappeared.

“The Tribal Council has consistently thwarted public efforts to secure information about government finances,” Ganesan said. “Council members’ secretive approach to governance has fostered mismanagement, abuse, and serious allegations of corruption.”

In 2007, tribal members began to openly protest the Tribal Council’s secrecy and mismanagement. In response, the council has withheld virtually all information and documentation about its activities from the public, in violation of the open records provisions of the tribe’s constitution and basic standards of good governance and human rights.

This information blockade has even extended to some elected Tribal Council members who wanted to look into the council’s financial practices, including three new council members that were elected on a reform platform in September 2014.

Indian reservations in the United States are sovereign entities with considerable authority to manage their own affairs. Sovereignty itself is not the cause of Lower Brule’s problems since many other tribal governments have robust mechanisms to hold themselves accountable and protect the rights of tribal members. The lack of any such mechanisms at Lower Brule, coupled with the Tribal Council’s refusal to abide by its own rules and constitutional norms, is the primary cause of the problems documented, Human Rights Watch said.

Even though Lower Brule has a sovereign government, US federal officials have an important role to play in securing accountability on the reservation. Federal officials were aware that the tribal government diverted federal funds earmarked for social programs, but has not done enough to address it. The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General has, however, has begun to examine why the Bureau of Indian Affairs extended a loan guarantee to the tribe to buy Westrock.

“The federal government can play an important role by helping to investigate and account for the millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that have gone missing at Lower Brule,” Ganesan said. “As a key source of tribal government revenue, federal authorities have the authority – and indeed the responsibility – to demand greater transparency.”

When the three reform council members were elected in September 2014, Chairman Jandreau and two other longstanding council members were reelected. Since the new council was sworn into office on October 1, the new council members have been denied access to government information by Jandreau and the incumbent council members.

The new council has not met to conduct official business since October. At the same time, the previous council secured the resignation of a newly elected chief justice of the tribal court just before the new council took office, and reappointed the incumbent judge who had come in third place in the September election.

On December 12, the new council members held a largely symbolic vote of no confidence against the chair and the other two council members, and voted to remove them from office and appoint the runners-up in tribal elections to their positions. Jandreau’s representative responded by petitioning the tribal court to remove the three new council members from office. The first hearing in that case takes place on January 12, 2015. These events have led to an increasingly tense environment on the reservation.

Human Rights Watch repeatedly contacted Tribal Council members in office during the period these events occurred, and other Tribal Government officials. They refused our requests for information, would not meet with us, and did not comment on these allegations.

“The people of Lower Brule have been deprived for years of information, desperately needed public services, and government accountability,” Ganesan said. “It’s time to end the stonewalling and secrecy and let the truth come out about where their money has gone.”

Upon release, it will be available at:
http://www.hrw.org/node/131578

For more Human Rights Watch reporting on business and human rights, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/topic/business

For more information, please contact:
In Sioux Falls, Arvind Ganesan (English): +1-202-612-4329; or ganesaa@hrw.org

Existing Indian Family Case out of the Kentucky Court of Appeals

Kate Fort

Here, from the state that gave us Rye v. Weasel.

In the present case, the testimony of Ms. C[] indicates that the mother and father abandoned the child, with the mother ceasing all contact with the child after a short period of sporadic visitation following the child’s removal from her custody on May 1, 2012, by emergency contact order, only days after the child’s birth on April 28, 2012. The record further reflects that The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe had communicated to Cabinet officials that it was unable to provide any placement or assistance to the child in this case and thus would not intervene in the termination proceedings.
We agree that in the instant case, the child was not in any way raised in an Indian home or environment and then removed, which is what Congress intended to prevent with the creation of the ICWA. Thus, under the Existing Indian Family Doctrine, which the highest court in this state adopted in Rye, the ICWA is not triggered and the beyond a reasonable doubt standard was not appropriate.