by Robert Gehrke
Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) – A federal judge on Thursday blocked plans to move
mountains of records crucial to a lawsuit filed on behalf of 300,000
American Indians, fearing the records could be lost or destroyed.
The documents in question track oil, gas, grazing and timber activity on
Indian land and royalties owed for those activities. The government
mismanaged that money for more than a century.
Special Trustee Thomas Slonaker, appointed by Congress to fix the
mismanagement, wanted to move 32,000 boxes of records from warehouses in
Albuquerque, N.M., to a federal records center at Lee’s Summit, Mo., in a
streamlining, cost-saving move.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth blocked the plan after court investigator
Alan Balaran said the move was ill-advised, was poorly planned and lacked
guarantees that documents would not be destroyed or lost.
Lamberth has ordered the department to piece together how much the Indians
are owed. Balaran said the documents are “the very heart” of those efforts.
Attorneys for the 300,000 Indian landowners claim their clients are owed
more than $10 billion; the Interior Department, which manages the money,
says it is much less.
Lamberth also noted that the contents of the boxes had not been catalogued,
making accessing them almost impossible. “Without inventories, those records
might as well be burned,” he said.
About 35,000 boxes have already been moved to Missouri. Lamberth halted any
shipments for 10 days while the Indians’ attorneys seek to permanently block
the move.
Balaran said the special trustee “is uniquely unqualified to handle its
trust records responsibilities.” Nearly 1,300 of the 8,000 boxes that were
supposed to be stored in one Albuquerque warehouse could not be found.
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