50 Years Ago: Diné government Run by non-Natives

So what was one of the biggest differences in how tribal government was run back in 1966 compared to now?

If you were a regular reader of the Navajo Times back then and some 4,000 papers on average were sold every week, you probably would not have noticed.

But if you were a reporter for the Times you would have noticed because almost all of the people you interviewed for a story would be non-Indian.

I’m not sure of what the makeup of the tribal government was back in 1966 but in 1970, when I first started reporting on the tribal government, only about a quarter of the people running the programs were Navajo. And so in 1966, the number of Navajos employed was probably fewer than that.

But reading the Navajo Times, you would see a lot of Smiths, Fergusons, and other non-traditional Navajo names (of course, if you didn’t know, would you have thought that Peter MacDonald could be a Navajo name?)

If you talked about other governments, such as the BIA, it seemed to be more with only an occasional Navajo heading the minor BIA program but all of the top people were non-Navajo.

Most of Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai’s staff seemed to be Navajo, according to what was said about them in the Times, and MacDonald, who was at that time heading the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity, seemed to have mostly Navajos working for him.

Another big difference – drug usage did not seem to be a problem and there was no mention of reservation gangs in the paper, although there were a couple of stories during that time of teenagers and adults being picked up for sniffing glue.

And there were also stories every now and then of people being arrested for bringing liquor on to the reservation but you had to have a lot – 50 six-packs or something like that – to be worthy of making the paper.

Of course, with that much liquor, you had to be a bootlegger but there were no stories in 1966 of anyone being charged of that, probably due to the fact that there was a liquor establishment, the Navajo Inn, that was located less than a mile from the state line on State Highway 264.

The Times would get a letter or two every year complaining about racism in either Gallup, Farmington, Holbrook, or Winslow but it was not called racism in those days.

Instead, the letter would claim that the writer was a Navajo and some business in a border town had gypped him and he wanted other Navajos to know so they would not give that person their business.

The Times would also receive letters from people living in Los Angeles or other big cities in search of nannies or maids requesting young Navajo women in their late teens or early 20s who wanted to live in a big city to apply.

Today, these letters sound awfully suspicious but back then, they were probably accepted for what they were – an opportunity to get off the reservation in search of a decent paying job.

A few years later, a woman named Grace Halsell answered one of those ads and pretended to be a Navajo looking for a job. She wrote about her experiences working as a domestic for a white family in the book, “Bessie Yellowhair.”

Halsell had written an earlier book named “Soul Sister” in which she pretended to be a Black woman and she got a job in the late 1960s in Mississippi working for a white family.

The book did so well, that she decided to try her hand at posing as a Navajo. She had dark skin and looked a little Navajo, but to her advantage the people she applied to work for had never seen a Navajo in their life.

Her book is hard to find now (it’s been out of print for decades and Halsell herself passed away back in 2000) but it is worth reading because of its vivid descriptions of what it was like to be taken advantage of by white families.

That book did not sell as many copies as “Soul Sister” but it opened a lot of eyes in this area to the practice.

Chet MacRorie, who took over as editor of the paper again in 1967, said he refused to accept the letters anymore and told his ad department not to accept these kinds of ads. But he said he continued to see these ads in border town papers even in the early 1970s.

Another major difference between now and then centers around the letters to the editor.

A lot of the letters still start with “I read the Navajo Times and I think you guys are doing a wonderful job…”

If you wanted to get your letter in the paper, it seemed like all you had to do was start it that way and then you could say anything you wanted, within reason of course.

In 1966, the paper was starting to print letters that were somewhat critical in nature but nothing like it is today. Most of the letters would take an issue and just showcase the writer’s opinion.

If the paper got a letter criticizing Nakai, they probably would not print, in part because the editors of the paper were shying away as much as possible from getting in the middle of tribal politics since they were still a department within the tribal government.

The Times is now independent of the government and operates under the supervision of a board.

MacRorie would say later that as far as he knew, the paper lost money throughout the 1960s and had to go to the tribal council for a subsidy. But in those days, the subsidy did not amount to very much because until 1968, the paper was still being put together with an editorial staff of three or four people.

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