50 Years Ago: 1965 – a really bad year for Chairman Raymond Nakai

If he had his druthers, 1965 would probably be a year that Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai would just as soon forget.

He spent the entire year fighting the Old Guard on the Navajo Tribal Council who used all of their resources to make sure none of the programs he wanted to be put in place saw the light of day.

And for the most part, they succeeded although Nakai was able to develop the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity using federal funds. ONEO would play a major role throughout the rest of the 60s and early 70s in bringing services to the Navajo people.

It would also launch the political career of Peter MacDonald, who would use his leadership as director of ONEO to pave the way for a future career as chairman of the tribe.

And through him would come the creation of DNA-People’s Legal Service that would create its own controversies in the last 60s and early 70s through a series of class action suits to protect Navajo consumers from being ripped off by border town car dealers.

It was the year that the Navajo people probably got sick of reading about Normal Littell, the controversial tribal general counsel who was Nakai’s bitter enemy but who managed to keep his job because of support from the Old Guard.

Nakai tried several times during the year to get him removed as general counsel, at one time holding up his pay, which at that time was $35,000 a year.

Although the articles in the Navajo Times that year – and there were a number of them – concentrated on the fights between Littell and Nakai as well as the fights between Littell and Stewart Udall, the Secretary for the U.S. department of the Interior.

In hindsight, however, it would appear that Littell was ahead of his time in his efforts to convince the tribe not to sign a coal lease with Peabody Coal Company that was being pushed on the tribe, he said, by Udall.

In fact, on the last day of 1965, he put out a press release once again attacking Udall over the coal agreement, saying it was not in the best interests of the Navajo Tribe to sign any agreements at that time.

Littell’s press release was in response to a press release issued by Udall about a meeting dealing with coal matters that was held the previous weekend in San Francisco.

Then Udall release claimed that the meeting was a major success with tribal officials and representatives of the BIA and the Peabody Coal Company resolving a number of issues dealing with coal mining on the reservation.

But Littell said that was all hooey and those statements made by Robert Vaughan, a deputy assistant secretary for land management were “false and therefore grossly misleading.

“For some mysterious reason, he (Udall) has gone to great lengths over the past two years to force on the Navajo Tribe a lease agreement for Peabody Coal Company on his own terms, even to the embarrassment of the new administration at the coal company,” he said.

Anyone who remembers the 1970s will remember that one of the main efforts of MacDonald and his general counsel, George Vlassis, was to get the agreement approved with Peabody in the 1960s overturned.

MacDonald would contend that the agreement would only give the Navajo Tribe a sum equal to the price of a can of Coke for every ton of coal removed from the reservation. He would later get a new lease that would give the tribe sum equal to 12 and a half percent of the value of the coal once it was removed from the ground, giving the tribe millions of dollars more a year in coal royalties.

For the time, it was also a bitter year as another editor, Marshall Tome, left in disgust, saying he was tired of tribal officials putting pressure on him and the newspaper staff not to report what was really going on.

Nakai, as well as members of the Old Guard, would criticize the paper throughout the printing inaccurate or biased stories but for the most part Nakai ignored the paper and said at a couple of chapter meetings that he didn’t read the paper and refused to talk to reporters because they “got the facts wrong” and misquoted him.

According to statements made by Tome in the 1970s, putting out the paper was a constant struggle since the budget was not based on how much money the paper was bringing in but on the budget approved by the council for its operation during the year.

Most of the paper’s budget, he said, went to the cost of printing the paper each week in Albuquerque and having it brought back for distribution on the reservation. There was money only for five staff employees so the paper had no funds to hire a full-time reporter and had to continue relying on press releases or photos sent in by readers to fill up the paper.

Some of the criticism of the paper from readers during those days was probably accurate since much of the information about the operation of the government and the various disputes came from stories in the off-reservation press that were either ignored by the Times or watered down to try and avoid criticism from the various factions on the reservation.

Very few of the issues of the paper that year had more than two or three staff written stories – the rest were press releases.

And although there were editorials in each issue, they were very seldom controversial, and instead consisted of general praise for organizations that were trying to provide services to the residents of the reservation.

The letters to the editor were the same with most of the letters from people who were new subscribers or people who were renewing their subscriptions and praising the paper for giving them information about the reservation.

Many of the writers were non-Navajos and it seemed that a lot of the people who were buying subscriptions – as opposed to those who were buying the paper at trading posts and stores – were non-Indians who just wanted to keep track of what was going on within the tribal government.

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