Judge chastises Interior Dept.

WASHINGTON -- The Interior Department was ordered yesterday, by a judge who called it a ''pathetic outpost," to admit it can't provide accurate information about lost royalties owed to American Indians.

In a scathing condemnation of the government's treatment of American Indians, US District Judge Royce Lamberth directed the department to enclose notices in its correspondence saying information provided on trust assets may not be credible.

The notices also are meant to alert people that they may be members of the class-action lawsuit brought by lead plaintiff Eloise Cobell in 1996 on behalf of more than 300,000 American Indians. Under Lamberth's order, the notices must say: ''Evidence introduced in the Cobell case shows that any information related to [American Indian trust accounts] . . . from the Department of the Interior may be unreliable."

Lamberth has been locked in a nine-year battle with the Interior Department about its inability to accurately account for what American Indians are owed.

Lamberth wrote in his opinion yesterday that ''one would expect, or at least hope, that the modern Interior Department and its modern administrators would manage it in a way that reflects our modern understandings of how the government should treat people.

''Alas, our 'modern' Interior Department has time and again demonstrated that it is 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."

Interior officials had no immediate response yesterday.

Calculating payments of oil, gas, grazing, and timber royalties from American Indian lands dating back to the trust fund's creation in 1887 and adding accrued interest, Indian plaintiffs in a suit against the government say they are owed at least $27.5 billion.

Lamberth's decisions in the case have occasionally been reversed by a federal appeals court. It threw out a plan he had for making the Interior Department account for the money and told Lamberth he could no longer ''micromanage" how the system gets fixed.

Lamberth's 34-page opinion accompanied a three-page order.