NESPELEM - Michael Finley, chairman of the Colville Business Council, has been elected to chairman of board of the Intertribal Monitoring Association on Indian Trust Funds.
     The organization represents 65 tribes nationwide.
     He was elected at the group's annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nev., last week.
     He previously had served on the ITMA board of directors, according to an association announcement.
     "I'm honored to be selected chairman of ITMA, and will continue its work to hold the federal government accountable for its historic mismanagement of tribal trust resources," Finley said.
     "The number and extent of failures, by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal agencies, to fulfill their fiduciary duties to tribes is almost overwhelming," he said. "But we can't let the huge scope of this problem deter us from demanding that these issues be resolved."
     The U.S. government is responsible for tribal and individual tribal members' trust land holdings, and their natural resources such as timber, coal and grasslands, the association said. It also administers funds generated from trust resources.
     The government is obliged to manage the resources for the benefit of the tribes and individual Indians, according to the group.
     "The federal government has simply failed to perform its trust duties at the most basic level," Finley said. "Mismanagement of these enormously valuable natural resources is well-documented.
     "Payments for land leases and mineral resources are below fair market value, or not made at all," he continued. "Every tribe in this country has a story about not being adequately compensated for the use of its land, water and other natural resources. No other fiduciary would be allowed to get away with this institutionalized mismanagement for so long."
     Besides monitoring trust reform activities of the federal government, ITMA will take the lead on a national effort to gather input from Indian beneficiaries and make recommendations to improve the process for obtaining appraisals of Indian trust lands, Finley said.
     ITMA will continue its land consolidation and estate planning project, expanding from the Rocky Mountain region to include other regions.
     ITMA, based in Albuquerque, N.M., was organized in 1990 to monitor the federal government's management of tribal and individual Indian trust resources and trust funds, and to advocate for meaningful trust reform. It also has been developing a process for the resolution of tribal trust mismanagement claims.
     Other newly elected ITMA board members include Scott Russell, Crow Tribe, vice chairman; William Martin, Tlingit and Haida, secretary, and Sam Penney, Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho, treasurer.