Professor Picked for Indian Affairs

A Native American who served as the attorney general of Idaho was nominated yesterday to become the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

President Obama nominated Larry EchoHawk, a law professor at Brigham Young University in Utah and a member of the Pawnee tribe, to the post. As well as being a former attorney general, EchoHawk ran for Idaho governor in 1994, losing to Republican Phil Batt by fewer than 35,000 votes. Had he been elected, he would have been the nation's first Native American governor.

He became the first American Indian elected to a constitutional statewide office when he assumed the post of attorney general in the early 1990s, the White House said.

The embattled bureau has been without a leader since the resignation of Carl Artman last year. Artman took the post in 2007, and before that it had been vacant for two years.

The agency, which manages 66 million acres of land and oversees American Indian schools and other programs, and its parent, the Interior Department, have been embroiled in a lawsuit over trust land since 1996. The suit claims that Native Americans have been swindled out of billions of dollars in oil, gas, timber and other royalties since 1887.

Obama nominated Yvette Roubideaux last month as director of the Indian Health Service, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.