50 Years Ago: Treat tribe like Appalachia, states say

The Navajo Times learned this week that officials in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado have been meeting quietly over the past six months to iron out a plan that they say will improve the life of many people living in the Four Corners area, including members of the Navajo Tribe.

Leaders of the four states are proposing to the federal government that Congress treat the residents of the Four Corners area the same as they did the people in Appalachia just a few years before and provide between $50 million and $80 million to improve roads in that area.

It began during the John F. Kennedy administration. Realizing that the people living in the Appalachia area were living, in some cases, worse than people in the developing countries in Africa, the federal government made a commitment to correct this by pouring in tens of millions of dollars over a 10-year period to bring living standards up.

They did this by building new roads and bringing water and electricity to areas that had none.

The leaders in the four states want the federal government to take the same approach for people living below the poverty line on the Navajo Reservation and in other low poverty areas in the Four Corners region.

What they especially want is money for new roads because they feel this will allow residents in poor areas to travel to bigger communities and get the jobs they need to improve their lives.

For example, the New Mexico government wants a $13 million commitment over the next five years with the top priority being completion of the road from Crownpoint past Chaco Canyon National Monument so that it connects with New Mexico 44 south of Farmington.

The four states never were able to get Congress to commit to such an ambitious program but when he heard of the proposal when he took office, Richard Nixon, in the first months of his presidency, decided on his own to make money available to the Navajos to help them out.

A lot of this money went to the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity where Peter MacDonald, its director, used the money to bring more services to low-income families on the reservation and plant the first seeds of his campaign to win the chairmanship of the tribe in 1970.

In other news, officials for the Gallup Ceremonial office began noticing something that would eventually have a major impact on many Navajo families living on the reservation — Americans were beginning to become very interested in Indian culture and especially Navajo culture.

Ike Merry, manager of the Ceremonial, said he picked up on this when the Ceremonial association did its annual survey in the spring on the number of books available in print on Indians and Indian culture.

That survey showed that there were more than 2,000 books in print from more than 200 publishing companies.

“That’s a far cry from the 400 books we found in our first survey some six years ago,” he said.

New books were coming out weekly and most were selling well, he said, adding that many of the books dealt with Navajo crafts, such as silversmithing and rugs.

What Merry didn’t know and what would become evident as the 1960s came to a close and the 1970s began was that 1967 was the beginning of what would become boom years for Indian traders.

By the end of the 1960s, demand for rugs and Navajo jewelry would become so great that Navajos would see prices for anything they did increase and when this wasn’t enough to meet the demand, they started getting encouragement to teach their children.

This all would reach a peak about 1972 and things would start to getting back to normal a couple of years later but during this time a lot of Navajo families as well as most dealers of Indian arts and crafts saw their biggest profits ever.

Graham Holmes is a name that most people today don’t remember but back in the 1960s and 1970s, he was probably the most powerful person on the Navajo Reservation — more powerful than even Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai or any member of the Navajo Tribal Council.

Holmes was the Navajo Area superintendent for the BIA and he had to give his approval over almost anything the tribe did, including how it spent its money.

For the most part he left the tribal government alone to spend its money any way it wanted but if he saw any indications that the tribal government was going to spend more money than it took in, he had no problem stepping in and requiring the Council to make adjustments to its budget or risk having the BIA reject the budget entirely.

In June 1967 he released figures showing that the BIA was planning to spend $52.3 million in the next fiscal year on programs on the Navajo Reservation. Two-thirds of this — $34.4 million — was being spent on education and paying for the cost of running all of those BIA boarding schools on and around the reservation.

He said the total employment of the Navajo Area BIA was 4,488 with 3,659 working in the BIA schools.

One thing he did not mention, however, and it was probably because no one asked, is how many of these employees were Navajo. This was probably not a big number, especially in the high administration ranks.

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