50 Years Ago: Council strips Nakai of power

The tension between Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai and the old guard on the Navajo Tribal Council had been growing in recent weeks but what the Council did on Dec. 19, 1964, came as a surprise to everyone.

For the first time in the tribe’s history, the Council stripped a sitting chairman of much of his powers and named someone else to be in charge.

This wasn’t the last time the Council would do this. In 1989, a majority of the Council voted to take away the powers of then-chairman Peter MacDonald and put him on suspension.

Since the Navajo Tribe had no constitution, the powers given to a chairman came from the Council and the theory went that if it could give a chairman powers it could take them away just as easily. Which is what they did in 1964.

The Council voted 42-12 to name J. Maurice McCabe, the tribe’s executive secretary, as the director of administration and they gave him the powers they took away from Nakai.

This was somewhat ironic because Nakai had been trying to fire McCabe for some time because of his association with the old guard (the anti-Nakai faction on the Council) but the Council wouldn’t let him.

The Council turned over to McCabe all of the major functions of the tribal government — accounting, payroll, employment and purchasing. Nakai stayed on as chairman but his power and influence was severely limited.

The Council’s move came on a resolution submitted by Glenn Landbloom, superintendent of the Navajo Agency, and it all centered on a recent audit of the tribe’s finances which found that departments were violating financial procedures left and right and there was no control by Nakai.

The situation was so serious that many Council delegates who supported Nakai in the past deserted him on this issue and sided with the old guard.

Nakai still had some supporters on the Council, including John Brown Jr., who tried to stop any transfer of authority to McCabe citing a report that McCabe had used tribal equipment to lay a utility line from Window Rock to his service station in Crystal.

McCabe told members of the Council that he had done nothing wrong and had asked permission from Navajo Tribal Utility Authority for the line and it was approved through normal procedures. He said when the line was completed he paid $1,700 to the tribe.

There were also accusations from Brown that McCabe had used his tribal credit card to purchase $570 worth of clothes in May of 1963 but McCabe denied any wrongdoing, pointing out that immediately after the purchase he told accounting officials for the tribe about the purchase and they took care of it.

It turned out that McCabe was already making as much as Nakai — $18,000 — so there was no need to increase his salary. He also kept his same office and Nakai kept his — the two seldom talked to each other anyway — and tribal officials who had anything to do with accounting or personnel were told to report to McCabe instead of Nakai.

The interesting thing about all of this is how the Council managed to take away Nakai’s power so quickly that he didn’t have time to present his own case. It happened in about two hours and Nakai couldn’t manage any kind of defense that would have kept his supporters on the Council on his side.

One of the things he could have brought up is the question of who was responsible for the problems brought up in the audit.

Yes, Nakai was chairman but as executive secretary, McCabe — on paper — had some control over the accounting and purchasing. The problem was that Nakai, in his effort to get rid of McCabe several months before, had basically stripped him of his power and had division officials report to him instead of McCabe.

Within a couple of days of the Council’s decision, F.M. Haverland, the BIA area director, sent Nakai a letter trying to clarify the situation.

In his letter, Haverland pointed out that one of the things that the Council resolution does not do is remove the director of administration from under the supervision of the chairman of the tribe.

So while the Council turned over a lot of Nakai’s functions to McCabe, Nakai still had supervisory authority over him and while this may seem to be confusing, the Navajo Times pointed out that McCabe didn’t follow Nakai’s orders when he was executive secretary so having him ignore Nakai’s orders in his new position didn’t change the situation any.

No one, according to the Times, expected that this situation would work and that the outcome would create more chaos than ever within the tribal government.

For Nakai, it was a major defeat, not so much that a lot of his power had been removed but because he had lost the support of many delegates that he had depended on to fight the efforts by the old guard to undermine what he was trying to do in his administration.

No one expected Nakai to take this sitting down and as tribal members began preparing for the Christmas holidays, a lot of them began wondering what Nakai would do in January to try and get some of his power back.

And in the back of many tribal members’ minds was the idea that the secretary of the Interior, who had come to Nakai’s defense in the past, may do so again and if he did the Council and its attorney, Norman Littell, would be ready for anything that Nakai would do.