Gil Vigil can’t help wondering if Haskell Indian Nations University is being set up for a public relations disaster.

The U.S. Department of the Interior and the National Archives and Records Administration want to put Haskell in charge of training workers for a planned repository for millions of American Indian records.

There’s money in the budget for the first and second years. But what happens, Vigil asked, when “three years down the road,” federal officials cut or drop the program’s funding, and services at the repository suffer?

“We need to be leery and cautious,” said Vigil, who’s president of Haskell’s board of regents and vice chairman of the All Indian Pueblo Council in Albuquerque, N.M.

He added, “History has taught us to be cautious.”

Vigil’s comments were part of a Wednesday panel discussion at a national conference here on issues tied to the preservation of millions of documents that define — or could define — the federal government’s handling of American Indian trusts.

The trusts are at the heart of an ongoing $137 billion class-action lawsuit that accuses the government of systematically shortchanging tribes.

Others on the panel shared Vigil’s concern.

“Haskell has, historically, been underfunded,” said Lana Redeye, a regent for the past 22 years. “We cannot put ourselves in the position of sacrificing other programs to take on another one. That would be irresponsible.”

Seated in the second row, Abraham Haspel, an assistant deputy secretary at the Department of the Interior, heard the regents’ call for fiscal assurances.

“I can tell them this,” he said afterward. “We have $100,000 for (curriculum) planning in this year’s budget, and we have around $250,000 in next year’s budget for two full-time faculty, some adjunct-faculty positions and a van to take students to and from the repository,” Haspel said. “Beyond that — the ’05 budget, I can’t say anything about that because it hasn’t been submitted by the president.”

But Haspel assured the regents that both the Department of the Interior and the NARA wanted Haskell to train workers for the repository as well as other tribal archives throughout the United States.

He encouraged Haskell to recognize that “nothing breeds success like success.”

Redeye wasn’t convinced.

“Congress needs to put its money where the (Department of Interior’s) mouth is,” she said.

Redeye, Vigil and other regents on the panel all said their tribes had entered agreements — some old, others recent — with the government that weren’t carried out.

Dan Wildcat, an American Indian studies professor at Haskell, said he would encourage Haskell to press Interior officials for full funding while, at the same, reaching out to individual tribes.

“That commitment needs to be there,” Wildcat said.

Wildcat is in charge of developing the records management curriculum.

Though Haskell has already accepted $100,000 in planning funds from the Department of the Interior, the regents are expected to discuss the program’s long-term prospects next month.