2020 not the first pivotal year for Navajo

I have seen all the episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” so many times I can repeat the opening narration from memory. “In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.”

I bring this up because it relates to my coverage of the Navajo people over the past 49 years.

No, I don’t mean that there are vampires or demons on the reservation, but over the years I have written articles about the sea monster supposedly living underwater at Ganado Lake, the bigfoot family that has been seen roaming through the Chuska Mountains and the shapeshifter being held in detention at the Window Rock jail.

No, the Buffy narration has a deeper meaning, something to the effect that in “every generation there is a year that brings sorrow and heartache and forces major changes in life for all or at least a portion of the Navajo population.” The Navajo people, including the 125,000 members who are living on the reservation and the estimated 200,000 or so currently living in border communities and elsewhere, are undergoing extreme hardship because of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

So 2020 will definitely go down as one of those years and one that will be recounted to younger generations in the future. The first of these upheaval years was 1864, the year of the first Long Walk during which thousands of Navajos were forced to leave their homelands.

An anthropologist would later say that the post-trauma shock caused by the Long Walk and the years in captivity is “critical to contemporary Navajos’ sense of identity as a people.” The next generational year was 1905 when a continuous stream of snowstorms kept Navajo families stranded at their homes for almost two months.

This led the various chiefs then in power and the Navajo government to annually make plans in case one of these events happened again. I was made aware of the next generational milestone within weeks of beginning to cover the reservation in 1971.

Howard Gorman, the beloved Council delegate who represented Ganado, took time out to give me a brief history of what the Navajo people went through in 1935 and why it still affected the people and their government 36 years later. The livestock reduction program was actually put in place by the federal government in 1933 as a response to studies that showed the reservation was grossly overgrazed.

A land that had adequately grazing for 500,000 sheep was the home of more than two million.

To protect the land, the federal government called for a voluntary reduction, helping Navajo ranchers to sell off their excess sheep. This program went on for two years until a new land study in late 1934 found that the sheep population was even higher.

So what became voluntary became a year that will forever live in tribal history as U.S. government officials began a campaign to rid the reservation of sheep by any means possible. From what I have read in history books, I believe that many of the officials in charge if the sheep reduction thought they were helping future generations of Navajos by making sure the reservation lands would still be around for grazing when it came their time to use it.

But their actions resulted in a massive trauma in most Navajos who had to sit by and watch government officials take their sheep. Some families tried to save their sheep by hiding them in canyons but federal officials were prepared for this by having range riders roaming the remote parts of the reservation. Gorman said what really incensed the Navajo people was a decision by the government to slaughter hundreds of thousands of sheep, because the market could not handle that large a number.

He pointed out that the wealth of the average Navajo family was in their livestock. They didn’t build huge mansions or invest in the stock market so watching the government destroy their livestock was akin to a Third World government coming in and seizing their entire wealth and leaving them penniless. Gorman said the experience forever changed the way the Navajo people looked at the federal government, leading to a mistrust that was still rampant among the population in 1971.

I discovered this firsthand when I looked into complaints by federal Census workers trying to gather data for the 1970 Census. Hundreds of Navajo refused to give out any details of their lives believing the data would be used in another livestock reduction.

I found the same mistrust over the years when I wrote stories about the tribe enacting a tribal constitution. Since the 1930s, the federal government tried to get the tribe to enact a constitution and although it seemed like tribal members were supportive of the idea in the 1920s, after the livestock reduction sentiment changed as Navajos believed the federal government was going to force the tribe to create a constitution that would help to control the livestock population.

It was around 1981 when the next generational year occurred. At the center of the controversy that year was the chairman of the tribe, Peter MacDonald, whom everyone knew was corrupt but a large segment of the Navajo population didn’t care because he made sure that his supporters benefited. For example, there was a time when the Navajo rug market had died and prices for rugs dipped to the point where some weavers found when they sold their rugs they were making less than $2 an hour for their labor.

The Council, at MacDonald’s urging, agreed to fund a program to buy the rugs for what the market paid them before the market collapsed, with the idea that the tribe would make back its cost when the market revived.

MacDonald turned the program over to an Anglo trader who was one of his biggest supporters and it wasn’t long before we in the media began hearing reports that MacDonald supporters were getting payments far above what the rug was worth before the market died. We heard the same stories in early 1983 just days before MacDonald was set to step down and turn over the reins of the government to Peterson Zah.

The tribe had a $600,000 program to loan money to Navajos to help them start a business or expand. When Zah took over, we learned that MacDonald supporters raided the program and received huge amounts of money with so little paperwork that the tribe was not able to go after the recipients when they refused to pay it back.

So as 1988 began, there were already efforts to remove MacDonald who had been re-elected chairman in 1986. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs had held a hearing, which revealed MacDonald had conspired with two Anglos to sell the tribe the Big Boquillas Ranch for $33 million just minutes after they had bought it for $26 million.

The others involved in the deal were given immunity and testified that MacDonald was a part of the conspiracy. In early 1988, groups wanting to unseat MacDonald began going to chapter houses and playing excerpts from the hearing, hoping to start a grassroots rebellion to remove MacDonald as chairman.

This effort failed but it did convince enough members of the Council, the so-called 49ers, to step up and suspend him. But if they hoped that this would solve the problem, they were sadly mistaken as MacDonald supporters took over possession of the tribal headquarters and for weeks, MacDonald continued to run the government, claiming the suspension was illegal.

He controlled the police department so the 49ers appointed their own police chief, creating confusion in the police ranks as they tried to figure out who was actually in charge. When the tribal courts supported the 49ers, MacDonald just created a new court that ruled in his favor. For weeks, the reservation was in turmoil as demonstrations were held, to which tribal police responded with tear gas to keep them under control.

There was so much fear of violence that the BIA brought in a SWAT team and kept them nearby in case there was a widespread rebellion. The chaos ended, as expected, in violence when the Council stepped in and ordered the tribal controller to stop paying high-ranking tribal officials. This led to MacDonald supporters storming the financial building to try to take control of the controller’s office.

Gunshots were fired when demonstrators attacked a Navajo Police officer and took his weapon. Two MacDonald supporters were killed and in the aftermath, MacDonald and 10 of his supporters were found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to prison terms of three to 14 years.

By the start of the fall of that year, everything went back to normal but in the aftermath, the Council decided the problem the tribe faced was giving too much power to one man so they created a three-branch government and stripped the chairman, now called a president, of much of his power. The theory was that this would stop the corruption but what it did was take away the power of the leader and put it in the hands of the Council delegates.

Two decades later ethics charges were filed against 72 of the 88 members of the Council for their involvement in a conspiracy to defraud the tribal government of more than $3 million from a discretionary program that was designed to help low-income tribal members.

Each of these previous years created changes in the life of tribal members so there is no doubt that when life turns back to normal, hopefully by the spring of 2021, the events of this year will bring about positive changes on the reservation.

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