Ada Deer is receiving rave reviews these days following her nomination as the first native American woman to head Indian Affairs at the Interior Department.
The favorable reception is understandable for more reasons than just her impressive credentials or her sensible set of priorities. A lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in its School of Social Work and American Indian Studies, Deer is the first of her Menominee tribe to graduate from college, the first woman to be elected a tribal leader, and the first of her tribe to run for Congress.Wisely, she wants to wean Washington from federal paternalism in its treatment of Indians and move the tribes toward greater independence.
Also on target is Deer's pointed criticism of the very agency she would head - the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, with its 12,000 employees and $2.4 billion annual budget.
Even though 90 percent of those employees are Indians, Deer scorches the BIA for falling down on the job. This criticism echoes accusations long made by Indians themselves and amply supported by investigations by Congress and the Interior Department that have documented the BIA's mismanagement of Indian schools, trust funds and other programs.
Consider just a few of the more recent findings about the BIA's many shortcomings:
- In 1991 auditors disclosed that $95 million of the BIA's $1.3 billion budget for 1990 had been misspent or erroneously recorded. So slipshod were procedures that just about every employee at the agency could access the BIA's accounting system and alter records.
- A few months later, a separate investigation found the BIA's Marijuana Eradication and Reconnaissance Team and Special Investiga-tions Unit were "vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse."
- Last year the BIA was found to have done virtually nothing to comply with a 1986 law directing it to create a comprehensive nationwide program including counseling in bureau-financed schools, construction and operation of juvenile detention centers and emergency shelters, and narcotics investigation.
No wonder the investigative subcommittee of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs once recommended that the BIA be dismantled and replaced with direct grants to Indian tribes.
Clearly, the legitimate needs of American Indians cannot be met without a major shake-up at the BIA. Ada Deer sounds like just the person to do the job.