Aug. 21, 2003 - 18:08 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Again

An article in August 21st Rocky Mountain News by M. E. Sprengelmeyer, headlined, "Indians underpaid for land leases, official charges." Sub-headed, "Appraisal program under Norton targeted."

Not all are direct quotes, but faithful to the meaning of the article I believe.

Alan Balaran, a court official -- a special master appointed to monitor the Interior Department's handling of Indian trust accounts, said in a report filed in U.S. District Court Tuesday that "Interior Secretary Gale Norton and her delegates 'abrogated' their responsibility to make sure Indians are fairly compensated."

Balaran's report concerns Navajo lands and is based on his visit to Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Window Rock, Arizona and Gallup, New Mexico. Balaran found that the Office of Appraisal Services had "erased, deleted and misplaced" information on Indian trust land. He said the property was often leased for pipelines for a fraction of what non-Indian landowners received for nearby lands."

"It is doubtful, as a result, whether Navajo allottees are receiving 'fair market value' for leases encumbering their land," Balaran wrote. "It is certain they are denied the information necessary to make such a determination."

The article goes on, "He (Balaran) asked Judge Royce Lamberth, who has already made several harsh rulings against the Interior Department, to order "an immediate formal investigation" and devise an appropriate remedy."

On the other side, Gale Norton is a former Colorado Attorney General and has been more or less ? cleared ? of being to blame in any of the Indian affairs because "she couldn't be held liable" for things that took place before she was in office. Then, "Interior spokesman Daniel DuBray called it "another faulty and biased report" from Balaran and pointed out that the department is seeking to have him removed from the case for alleged bias."

Sprengelmeyer has this in his article also, "The controversy is the latest twist in a lawsuit accusing the Interior Department of decades of neglect and mismanagement of programs that administer lands held in trust for hundreds of thousands of people, some with miniscule shares."

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My opinion is as it has been. "Something under the bed stinks." And it has been more than decades of misuse and abuse but stretches back to the time the Great White Father took the Indians as his children. The people appointed to manage Indian Affairs from what I have read were unscrupulous from the word go. It seems to me that it compounded as the years went on.

If all the treaties that our government signed with the Indians had been kept faithfully, I think that the Native American folk would own a lot more of their native land than they do today, and would be a lot better off financially also.

So it appears to me that the Department of the Interior is planning to obfuscate, erase records, stonewall and continue to do as they have done from the dim past on and on and on yet Again . . . . . . . . . .

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