And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Report claims field offices mishandle Indian
records
BY KEVIN ABOUREZK Lincoln Journal Star
http://www.journalstar.com/stories/loc/sto1
A U.S. District Court appointee in Washington, D.C., issued a
report
Monday describing the deplorable conditions in which the
Department of Interior keeps Indian trust records.
The report was released four days before the opening of a trial in
what has become the largest lawsuit ever filed by American Indians
against the federal government. The class-action lawsuit, which
includes 350,000 individual and about 1,500 tribal accounts, was
filed to force federal officials to account for $2.5 billion
in misplaced
Indian trust fund records. The records include mineral and other
rights to 55 million acres managed by Bureau of Indian Affairs for
Indians.
"What baffles me in reading a report like this is ... why you
have to
fight the government to make them adhere to the law," said Elouise
Cobell of Browning, Mont., a Blackfoot Indian and lead
plaintiff in
the lawsuit. "It's amazing that this is happening in America."
Special
Master Alan Balaran, who was appointed by the court earlier this
year, described the conditions of bureau field offices he
visited last
month, including:
Anadarko Agency in Oklahoma, where he found "storage areas
consisted of unprotected wooden sheds exposed to the elements.
Loose documents were either spilled loosely about or maintained in
unmarked open boxes strewn between truck tires and other discarded
matter." Zuni Agency in New Mexico, where he found "the storage
warehouse consisted of a building, which has been condemned due
to rodent infestation for 13 years." The 12th Street Warehouse in
Albuquerque, N.M., where he found that "hundreds of boxes were
piled on pallets -- having recently been decontaminated from
hantavirus infestation." The Department of Interior also
continues to
destroy court-ordered documents despite a Feb. 22 contempt ruling
against such action, Balaran added in his report.
Kevin Gover, assistant secretary of Indian Affairs at the
Department
of Interior, could not be reached for comment. Last week, he
condemned a Washington Post article on the trust records as
"inaccurate and incomplete." The Post reporter, Gover said, made
the "common mistake of hearing the story of a sympathetic victim
and automatically blaming the Department of the Interior and the
Bureau of Indian Affairs." Said Cobell: "Kevin Gover has a lot to
learn about imposing trust law principles. They (the Department of
Interior) can get by adhering to a lower standard."
Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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