SHADES OF THINGS TO COME FOR HAWAIIANS IF THE AKAKA BILL PASSES -
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department took the unusual step of asking that a new judge be assigned to a 9-year-old lawsuit by American Indians seeking a century's worth of unpaid oil and gas royalties.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth has been highly critical of the Interior Department for failing to identify how much money Indian tribes are owed.
Last year the judge held Interior Secretary Gale Norton in contempt of court....
The department criticized Lamberth for making a "gratuitous reference" to murder, dispossession, forced marches and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians.
Lamberth's ruling, the Justice Department complained, described the Interior Department to be a "dinosaur -- the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind."
The government's problem is not the judge, said Dennis Gingold, lead attorney for the Indians suing the government.
Gingold said the government's problem is the district court calling it to account for "100 plus years of bad facts, its pattern of unethical behavior, and its persistent strategy of diversion, delay and obstruction."
In 1994, Congress found problems with the Interior Department's administration of 260,000 Indian trust accounts containing $400 million.
The Indians allege the department mismanaged oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties from their lands dating to 1887.
Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet Indian tribe and others sued in 1996 to force the government to account for billions of dollars belonging to about 500,000 Indians....
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, has criticized the government for having "never really even made any serious attempt at keeping track of the revenues" it owed the Indians.
