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A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Interior Department continues to allow the destruction and damage of crucial records that track the amount of money the government owes Native Americans for Indian lands it has managed for more than a century. U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said Interior employees have come forward with new and credible evidence that the agency allowed at least 350 boxes of records to be ruined by mold in an agency office in New Mexico and left an untold number of boxes to be damaged under a leaking roof. Lamberth said Interior appears to have deliberately failed to report the damage, despite being under a court order to report on the safety of court records to a special master. In this mammoth eight-year-old suit, 500,000 Indians assert that the agency, essentially the keeper of their inheritance, has failed to keep accurate records of an estimated $10 billion in gas, oil and other leases on lands the government has managed since 1871. [more

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