Transfer of 32,000 boxes of Native land records disputed
Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star
By: Jodi Rave Lee
March 8, 2002
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An Interior Department plan to move 32,000 boxes of Native land records is “potentially devastating” and raises serious questions about future access to the records, said a court-appointed special master.
The department’s Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians hired a contractor to send 32,000 boxes of records from New Mexico to a federal records center in Missouri in the next two months.
“Given the potentially devastating impact of OST’s proposal may have on hundreds of thousands of trust documents…I am concerned that all adequate safeguards are not in place,” Alan Balaran said in a Feb. 20 letter to the U.S. Justice Department.
The boxes contain trust fund records for tribes and individuals, including documents related to a federal lawsuit against the Interior Department filed on behalf of 300,000 Native landowners. Balaran was appointed by the judge in that case to oversee the department’s Native trust fund reform efforts. Among the questions Balaran raised: Who will know what the records contain? How will tribes and BIA agencies and regional offices continue to access records for research? And will the move hamper the effort to create a uniform database?
In his letter, Balaran said he assumed the Office of Trust Records had “implemented written procedures and provided for the uninterrupted access to the trust data.”
Not yet, the Interior Department said this week. “We’re just getting started with all the details we have to cover,” said Jean Tuggle, director of the Division of Research, Litigation and Settlement. “We have so many things to do.”
Last year, the research division received an estimated 1,100 research requests. Some 10,000 research pages were sent to BIA agency and regional offices. About 15 workers who will lose their jobs or be reassigned learned of the proposed records transfer in a Feb. 15 memo.
The transfer exasperated Ramona Wolfe, Councilwoman for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.
“They should send them back to the tribes,” she said. “We could keep just as good as track as they can. We could provide jobs for our own people.” Wolfe said she always regretted the order to hand over Winnebago Agency trust records to the Albuquerque office. When BIA workers arrived for records about five years ago, they were escorted off the Winnebago Reservation by tribal police.
The tribe later gave up the records. They did so reluctantly because they contained information that showed Winnebago and Omaha landowners were made to pay taxes on trust land for about two decades — something they shouldn’t have done, Wolfe said.
Some tribal members paid up to $15,000 in taxes. Others who couldn’t pay lost their land, she said. “Some of those people are dead and gone, but the money could be paid back to the heirs.”
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