Wampum

Whistleblower fired by Interior...

I sort of understand why Democrats haven't made much hay with the Cobell v. Norton lawsuit (namely because Clinton's guys have been implicated as well), but the recent nefarious behavior by Bush's Interior in regards to other Indian issues is a story in and of itself. And it only gets worse; this story was picked up by a few media outlets:

Interior Department Fires Whistleblower
By ROBERT GEHRKE
Associated Press Writer

September 17, 2003, 8:36 PM EDT

WASHINGTON -- The Interior Department has fired an employee who told a court investigator that the department was failing in its duty to protect the Navajo Indians from being cheated by oil and gas companies.

Kevin Gambrell, who had been head of the Farmington, N.M., Indian Minerals Office since 1996, said he protested for six years that Navajo landowners were not receiving fair compensation for the use of their land, but he was ignored.

This year, he contacted Alan Balaran, an investigator appointed by a federal judge presiding in a class-action lawsuit against the Interior Department. The suit alleges that the department has mismanaged Indian money for more than a century.

Balaran filed a report last month that said private landowners near the sprawling Navajo Nation were paid, in some cases, 20 times what the Indians were being paid.

He said those discrepancies and the destruction of records related to the deals constituted a failure by the Interior Department to meet its legal obligation to American Indian landowners to ensure fair payment for the use of their land.

In May, the department put Gambrell on paid administrative leave, saying he had destroyed documents and was insubordinate. On Monday, the department formally fired him.

"It was just an excuse to get rid of me," Gambrell said. "It's very unfair treatment."

A spokesman for the Interior Department said he could not comment on personnel matters.

According to Gambrell, the Navaho (Dine), many of whom don't speak English or Spanish, were given blank leases to sign by oil and gas companies. The leases were for the corporations to build pipelines across tribal land, and the Navaho leaders were told the companies would fill in the lease rates later. But the tribes weren't even provided land appraisals, required by the Interior Department, and the companies paid them well below market rate for the leased land, $25/rod (5.5 yds) where private non-Indian landowners were leasing their land to the same companies for upwards of $50/rod.

The Navaho were underpaid millions for the leased land over time. Gambrel learned of attempts by Interior to supress the misdeeds of the gas and oil companies and blew the whistle. So much for federal whistleblower protections.

Posted by MB Williams at September 18, 2003 08:58 PM | TrackBack