Navajo landowners shorted, report says

WASHINGTON — Companies paid private landowners near the Navajo reservation in the Southwest nearly 20 times what Navajos got for the right to build pipelines across their land, a court-appointed investigator reported Wednesday.

Such discrepancies and the destruction of records related to the deal are a failure of the Interior Department's legal duty to American Indian landowners to ensure fair payment for the use of their land, the report said.

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

Balaran was appointed by a federal judge to investigate document destruction in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of an estimated 500,000 American Indians. They allege the Interior Department failed to properly manage oil, gas, timber and grazing royalties for Indians over the last century, and put the mismanagement at tens of billions of dollars owed to the Indians since 1887.

The Navajo Nation is the largest Indian reservation in the nation, spanning 18 million acres, an area larger than West Virginia, in parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

It is plagued with near-Third World living conditions. Of the 30,000 Navajo homes, nearly 50 percent lack plumbing. The average annual income is $4,100, and 55 percent live in poverty.

The tribe's revenue is primarily from oil and gas mining. The reservation is crisscrossed with major pipelines carrying natural gas to California.

In 1999, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled the Interior Department had breached its trust responsibility and ordered the government to account for what should have been paid to the Indians.

The department has accused Balaran of bias and asked the judge to remove him from the case. Department spokesman Dan DuBray said the latest report is flawed and again reflects that bias.

DuBray said the process for appraising Indian lands is complex, but "an independent, objective and unbiased review of Interior's appraisal activity will find it is reasonable and appropriate."

"These Navajo allottees are people who rely on this for their basic necessities. It's just devastating when they don't get what they're entitled to," said Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., whose district includes part of the Navajo Nation.