50 years ago: Underwear war with Hopis in third month and counting

As of fifty years ago this week, the fight between the Hopis and the Navajos over underwear had been going on for three months with no end in sight.

At the center of this dispute was BVD, Inc., a company that manufactures underwear as well as other clothing. The company had been talking to the Navajo Nation for more than a year about building a clothing factory on the Navajo Reservation.

The Navajo Tribal Council had already passed a resolution supporting the idea and agreeing to use tribal funds to build a plant somewhere on the Navajo Reservation with Fort Defiance apparently being the top site being considered.

But company officials had told the tribe that they and the BIA were also negotiating with the Hopi Tribe with the idea of putting the plant in Winslow.

The plant would still hire a lot of Navajos, company officials said, but it would also hire Hopis. Company officials also said they would rather build the plant in Winslow because the non-Indians who would be running the plant would rather live in Winslow than in a relatively remote spot on the Navajo Reservation.

Indian Commissioner Robert Bennett pointed out that the Navajos and the company didn’t have a signed agreement.

He said BVD officials thought the factory would have a better chance of succeeding in Winslow. The plant would employ several hundred people and would have a substantial annual payroll.

He confirmed that the company was in talks with the Hopis.

As for Bennett, he said the Interior Department would also rather see the plant built in Winslow, in part because the process of getting land approval and building permits would go a lot faster off the reservation than on and this would benefit the Navajos and Hopis who were eyeing jobs at the plant.

Business interests in Winslow had offered a 200-acre site for the factory at no cost because of the economic benefit it would have to the community.

Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai had told company officials that the only way they would be getting any Navajo funds to build the factory is if they agreed to build it on the Navajo Reservation.

So far the Hopis had not made any offers to provide any funding to the company.

In other news this week, it became apparent that Sam Billison didn’t trust Peter MacDonald.

Billison, who was running against Nakai for tribal chairman, said he wanted the federal government to audit the Navajo Office of Economic Opportunity because he didn’t trust that MacDonald and Nakai were using the money in the best interests of the Navajo people.

MacDonald and Nakai were “attempting to misuse the program for their own political purposes,” Billison said, adding that the two “are working hand in hand to use ONEO funds to assure their own political future.”

Billison was the first person to point out something that would become very evident in the next couple of years: Being in charge of a program that provides millions of dollars annually to the Navajo people is a great way to gain political support on the reservation.

Billison also charged MacDonald and Nakai with talking out large chunks of the money meant to go to the Navajo people in direct services and instead using it to pay for “fat salaries for the organization’s administrative staff.”

He said an audit of ONEO’s books would prove just how much of the federal funds were going to help the Navajo people and how much were being used to fund a bloated administrative staff.

He claimed that tens of thousands of dollars were being spent on travel and overtime that was not needed. “Nepotism and incompetency should also be checked,” he said.

Interesting enough, a check of the Navajo Times, as well as other area newspapers, for June and July of 1966 shows no immediate response from either MacDonald or Nakai to Billison’s charges. There are also no reports of anyone in the federal government actually listening to the charges either because there were no reports that summer of any audit of the program.

As for the allegation that MacDonald especially was using his job at ONEO for his own political advantage, anyone who looked at the political structure on the reservation in 1970 would see that MacDonald had become a major political force on the reservation and all that was due to the attention he received as ONEO director.

While Nakai probably would have liked to have gotten some of the credit for securing the funds for the poverty program on the reservation, by 1968 and 1969 MacDonald was going around to the chapters claiming credit for the program and a lot of Navajo voters believed him, to Nakai’s lasting regret.

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