by Timothy Egan
The New York Times
After a 10-week court-ordered shutdown of nearly all its computer
communications, the Interior Department said yesterday that it had restored
some of them, bringing e- mail back to government scientists, Web service to
national parks – and payments to nearly 40,000 American Indians.
The blanket electronic closing of a department that manages everything from
seashores in New England to Lincoln’s birthplace in Kentucky stemmed from a
problem that has been out of sight of much of official Washington but has
played havoc with the lives of millions of people who depend on an agency
that is landlord to one-eighth of the United States.
A federal district judge ordered the department on Dec. 5 to shut down its
entire computer system, saying it could not safeguard the accounting system
that manages money for Indians.
The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, who is hearing the largest class-action suit
ever filed by Indians, has already found that the government mismanaged
Indian money for more than a century. In the process of a second trial, to
determine whether Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton should be held in
contempt for failing to comply with past orders on cleaning up the
department, the judge found that Interior’s Web sites were vulnerable to
computer hacking.
In court in Washington yesterday, Secretary Norton promised Judge Lamberth
that checks were on the way to thousands of Indians and said that about 40
percent of the department’s Web sites were safe enough from hackers to
reopen. The other major Interior Web sites remain offline.
To Indians who live in cities and on the reservations in the West, and
depend on the $500 million in annual income that the department manages for
them as part of a historic trust, the promises have a hollow ring, some of
them said.
“I’ve watched them jump around for Enron while I haven’t received so much as
a single word about the money they owe me,” said Rosemary Pimms, a Yakama
Indian who lives in Seattle on the royalty payments that the government
manages for her. “Nothing new there: the Indian is always last in line.”
In Oklahoma, New Mexico and Washington state, which have large tribal
populations, the cutoff of royalty payments, which come yearly, quarterly or
monthly, put some families in danger of losing their homes.
“The house payment is the one we’re most worried about now,” said Billy
Wolfe, who lives in a trailer with his wife, Christine, in Lamar, Okla. The
couple depend on $450 a month in royalty income that the government manages
for them. They have not received a check for three months, and there is a
lien on the trailer, Mr. Wolfe said.
The Indians point out that the checks are not government handouts, but money
owed individual Indians from land leased to outside business interests and
managed by the Interior Department.
There are more than 500,000 such accounts, though the bulk of the money goes
to 43,000 Indians who get regular royalty checks ranging from a few dollars
to several thousand. The tribes say the government has lost up to $100
billion over the last century because of mismanagement and poor accounting.
“The way these people have been treated recently is an outrage,” said
Representative Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, whose district is 21
percent Indian. “It’s just been a huge injustice. There are people out there
living day to day, month to month on these checks, and the pace from
Interior has been like molasses in winter.”
Some tribes, including the Blackfeet, the Oglala Sioux and the Navajo, have
made emergency funds available from their tribal welfare accounts to
individual Indians.
They say they are furious with Secretary Norton. “Where I live, in Glacier
County, Mont., home of the Blackfeet Nation, one of the 25 poorest counties
in the United States, I can tell you that many people depend on these
payments for the bare necessities of life,” Elouise Cabell said in testimony
before Congress last week.
Ms. Cabell, a former banker who is a member of the Blackfeet Nation,
initiated the lawsuit six years ago. She says the way the government manages
Indian money is “a national disgrace.”
Interior officials said yesterday that they should be able to pay about half
of what the Indians are owed from the computer shutdown and would work to
make up the full amount in coming months. “I’ll believe it when I see it,”
Mrs. Pimms said.
The accounts date from the 1880’s, when the government tried to break up the
tribal land ownership system and awarded allotments of land to individual
Indians. These lands were then managed by the government, and usually leased
to gas, oil or timber companies. As with many trusts, the funds are given to
descendants as the oldest generations die.
While most of the Interior computer shutdown has been felt in Indian
Country, outdoor enthusiasts have been upset at the loss of Web access.
Complaints from people planning vacations to national parks, or trying to
get permits to float rivers on federal land, or simply trying to find out
the status of bird species from the Fish and Wildlife Service, have been
pouring into the department, officials said.
The shutdown has disrupted recruiting for summer firefighters and studies on
wetlands and endangered species, and has forced thousands of government
workers back to an era of typewriters and endless paper forms.
“We are frustrated because we don’t have e-mail between employees, but the
public is frustrated because this whole link has been cut off,” said John
Wright, a spokesman for the department.
Even with the National Park Service Web site scheduled to open within a day,
an Interior agency that manages even more land – the Bureau of Land
Management – will remain offline indefinitely, as will the Fish and Wildlife
Service and the department’s general site, officials said.
The Indians are trying to force the government to set up a proper accounting
system for the trust funds, and to repay beneficiaries who may have lost
money over the last century. The accounts have been so mismanaged, tribal
members say, that they do not comply with even the basic standards of
running private trusts.
When President Clinton was in office, Judge Lamberth found Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin in contempt
for their handling of the trust fund records, and the government paid a
$600,000 fine.
In ruling three years ago for the Indians, Judge Lamberth wrote, “It would
be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program.” His
ruling was upheld last year by a federal appeals court in the District of
Columbia, which wrote, “The trusts at issue here were created over a hundred
years ago, and have been mismanaged nearly as long.”
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