In August 2016, ReGina Zuni found herself working in a windowless room on the campus of Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute. The ceiling was cracked and falling. Loose wires hung along the walls. The administrative support assistant at the federally funded, Interior Department-run community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had been relocated to what was deemed the campus’ “Siberian office” shortly after filing a report to Interior’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office and its inspector general alleging that she had been raped by a top executive at the school.

SIPI is one of two post-secondary schools operated by Interior’s Bureau of Indian Education. The bureau states that its mission is to serve tribes with educational opportunities and “to manifest consideration of the whole person by taking into account the spiritual, mental, physical and cultural aspects of the individual within his or her family and tribal or village context.” But that lofty goal is at odds with the working environment many faculty and staff there say they have experienced. In interviews with Government Executive, multiple former and current employees described a history of sexual abuse and harassment on the federal campus, and a pattern of covering up claims, silencing victims and retaliating against those who dare to speak out.

The allegations at SIPI are reflective of a much broader problem at Interior. In December, the department released an internal survey that found 35 percent of department employees reported being the victims of harassment in the preceding 12 months, and more than 85 percent of those said they had to continue to work with the person who harassed them. Interior launched the probe after a series of congressional hearings and IG reports identified pervasive sexual misconduct at several outposts of the National Park Service.

Those figures compare to a 2016 survey recently released by the Merit Systems Protection Board that found 20 percent of female federal employees had experienced sexual harassment in the preceding two years. In 1994, the last time MSPB conducted such a survey, that figure was 44 percent.

‘I Felt Threatened for My Life’

Barbara Borgeson started working for the Bureau of Indian Education in 1981. She was the first female architect at the bureau and helped design the first LEED-certified building at Interior. In 2016, after a stint at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she took a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where she was responsible for the design and construction of K-12 schools on reservations throughout the country.

On April 1, 2016, Borgeson attended a meeting to discuss the five-year plan for her division. Some of the attendees participated via video teleconference. One of Borgeson’s supervisors in Washington, D.C., asked to share his screen with others at the meeting to display some Microsoft Excel documents. But when he did so, Borgeson told Government Executive, she and everyone else on the video teleconference could see—behind the documents—a partial view of a pornographic chat with lewd language and graphic sexual descriptions.

Barbara Borgeson (courtesy photo)



Borgeson reported the incident to BIA’s information technology team. Two months later, in June 2016, she was sent to SIPI on detail. She was removed from all the contracts on which she was serving as a technical representative to help implement a new software program. She worked out of an office near Zuni’s, which she described as a “janitor storage area.” Borgeson, who earned a six-figure salary as a General Schedule-14, Step 6 employee, was assigned routine administrative work.

Prior to her arrival at SIPI, she had heard warnings from employees she knew at the campus to watch out for Eric Christensen, SIPI’s vice president of college operations. His reputation, confirmed by her new coworkers upon her arrival, she said, was that he harassed students and attractive women on campus. Christensen denied these allegations in an interview with Government Executive. Borgeson said she never personally felt victimized by Christensen during her 120-day detail at SIPI, but more than once he pressured her to disparage colleagues who had accused him of wrongdoing.

She had another problem: On one occasion, while at BIA, two male coworkers, she said, “cornered” her in her office to question some of her work. This occurred just days before Walt Keays, the supervisor who shared the pornographic chat, was placed on unpaid suspension. Borgeson believed the coworkers were acting in response to her role in that punishment.

“I felt threatened for my life,” Borgeson said. She filed an equal employment opportunity complaint with BIA just days after the incident, which was reviewed by Government Executive. A friend of Borgeson’s, who used to work with her at the Army Corps of Engineers, said Borgeson reached out immediately after the incident and “she was shaken up,” the friend told Government Executive. In her complaint, Borgeson told her EEO office she felt like she needed to “get a restraining order in order to come to work.”

She is now back at BIA, stripped of her previous duties and no longer invited to any meetings. Keays, BIA’s deputy director, remains in his position. He told Government Executive the incident occurred on his day off, but he voluntarily logged onto the conference call because it concerned an important project. He noted that he was using his personal computer and the image in question was a text document that contained jokes with inappropriate language.

“Obviously I’m personally embarrassed by the whole thing,” Keays said. He said he was not aware of the complaint against him for several months and that Borgeson was reassigned for the “good business reason” that she was in between projects.

Dan Galvan, another assistant secretary at BIA, and Dale Keel, a BIA branch chief, the two employees who allegedly cornered Borgeson, also remain in their positions. Keel could not be reached for comment, while Galvan said he has “provided my feedback to the investigator” and could not get into more details as he believed the case was still open.

‘It Was Unbearable’

SIPI maintains a sprawling 165-acre campus in northern Albuquerque. Margaret Pictou, a former teacher at the college, often went running on the the grounds during lunch. On one such run, Christensen allegedly drove alongside her in his car and catcalled her, making sexually suggestive comments that she tried to tune out. The behavior continued, and she privately began to refer to him as “Creepersen,” she said.

On Friday, Feb. 14, 2014, Pictou wrapped up her teaching for the day around 2 p.m. She lingered behind in her classroom to prepare for the following week. But in the hallway, she saw Christenen, whose office was in another building across campus.

“What are you doing?” she asked him. “Are you lost?”

“No,” she recalls as his response. “I know exactly where I’m going.”

She felt uncomfortable, and went into her classroom. Christensen followed her in, she said, and closed the door behind him. He asked her to go as his date to a Valentine’s Day dinner the school was hosting. He stood between her and the door, and she felt intimidated.

“I felt if I said 'no' in a harsh way I would lose my job,” she said. “It really put me in an uncomfortable position. This was the VP of operations.” She defused the situation by “slithering out” of the room. She said he did not try to block her exit, but her classroom was isolated and she was frightened. In an interview with Government Executive, Christensen declined to get into specifics of Pictou’s accusations, only saying generally his alleged actions did not mean he “committed a violation of the law.”

She was shaking from the incident and went to a male colleague she trusted. He told Pictou to report it. She then described the encounter to her supervisor, Gloria Mariano, who agreed not to elevate the story up the chain due to Pictou’s fear that she would lose her job. Mariano did not respond to a request for comment.

“I felt if I said no in a harsh way I would lose my job.” - Margaret Pictou

Later, during the course of a probe unrelated to Pictou’s case, investigators in Interior’s inspector general office reached out to her to ask about the incident and interviewed her off campus. When her supervisors found out, she said, they reduced her coursework without explanation.

“Once we start to know too much,” she said, “they start to bring in new people.”

After six years, Pictou decided she had to find a new job.

“I left,” she said. “I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. It was unbearable.”

‘I Stepped Up’

Before Pictou left SIPI, she met Zuni, who briefly filled in at Pictou’s department after two women there abruptly left the college. Zuni and Pictou got to talking and eventually exchanged stories. Zuni emotionally described a night when she claimed Christensen raped her, Pictou said, and began to cry. In his interview with Government Executive, Christensen vehemently denied the rape allegation, but acknowledged a history of complaints about his behavior during the course of his federal career.

For Zuni, the conversation with Pictou, who shared the story of her own encounter with Christensen, served as a kind of validation. But Zuni’s complicity in an earlier incident involving Christensen and another woman haunted her. Early in her tenure at SIPI, which began in February 2015, Christensen had allegedly asked Zuni to write false statements disparaging an employee in human resources, Merlynda Johnson, for performance issues related to her hiring responsibilities. Zuni had heard about allegations that Christensen had sexually harassed Johnson. Still, she agreed to write the letter. Christensen did not address the specifics of these allegations in his interview with Government Executive.

Johnson had filed a claim against Christensen, and according to multiple accounts, he sought to discredit her. He referred to her as “that bitch,” Zuni said, and pledged to “fucking fire her.”

Johnson “doesn’t know who she’s dealing with,” Zuni said Christensen told her.

At that point, Zuni got along well with Christensen and saw no reason not to trust him. Christensen asked her to be his “eyes and ears” when he was not around, she said.

Zuni has not forgiven herself for her failure to stand up for Johnson, she said, and the two remain on bad terms, according to both women. In an interview with Government Executive, Zuni began to sob when recalling that she agreed to write—at Christensen’s direction—the statement critical of Johnson. She was new to the job and felt pressured to do what her boss asked of her, Zuni explained.

“I just sat there and did nothing to help her,” Zuni said of her failure to stand up to Christensen. “And it came back to haunt me.”

For her part, Johnson declined to get into the specifics of her allegations against Christensen, because she signed a non-disclosure agreement under a settlement she reached with Interior before the Merit Systems Protection Board, the federal government’s internal, quasi-judicial arbiter of civil service laws. Johnson told Government Executive only that Christensen “physically assaulted” her. She added that Sherry Allison, the SIPI president, “verbally assaulted” her on multiple occasions when she complained about those experiences to Allison. (Allison did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Government Executive, but several individuals cited Allison for actions ranging from negligence to condemnation when they brought alleged harassment to her attention).