50 Years Ago: Hippies raise ire of Nakai

Back in the 1960s, it was big news when a long-time trader on the Navajo Reservation died so it was no surprise when the Navajo Times put the news of Rueben Heflin’s passing on the front page of the August 24, 1967, issue.

Heflin, born in 1909, was a trader on the Navajo Reservation for more than 30 years and operated trading posts in the 1940s and 1950s in Oljato, Utah, and Shonto, Arizona, before coming to Kayenta in 1964 to become manager of the Monument Valley Inn.

The Inn was owned by the Navajo Tribe and leased to Heflin and another man. Heflin was also the owner of the Wetherill Inn in Kayenta.

Heflin, at his funeral, was praised for being a true friend of the Navajo and someone who dealt with his customers courteously and honestly. The Times called him one of the most prominent traders on the reservation at the time of his death.

In other news, Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai was telling his people not to worry about new laws put in place by the U.S. Interior Department dealing with the running of tribal elections.

The Interior Department was getting a lot of complaints from some Navajos, mostly in California, claiming that the persons elected as tribal chairman were not elected properly.

The new regulations said that for an election to be valid, at least 30 percent of the people on the voting register had to vote in the election. Nakai said this wouldn’t affect the Navajos since more than 60 percent of those registered to vote would turn out on election day to cast their ballots.

The problem, he said, was in the smaller tribes in California and other states that had populations of 500 or less where only a small percentage of the voters would vote because other voters didn’t care for either candidate and did not bother to vote.

On its editorial page that week, the paper expressed disdain for the hippy culture which was springing up in and around reservations, including the Navajo.

It seemed, at least in the editorial in that issue of the Times, that tribal officials had a lot of problems with the hippy lifestyle and the fact that a colony of hippies had moved onto the western portion of the reservation and were setting up a home among traditional Navajos in places like Big Mountain.

The editorial in that issue of the Times was written by Ernie Stevens, director of the Indian center in Los Angeles. But his beliefs coincided with that of Nakai who in several speeches had spoken out against bands of hippies trying to settle on the reservation.

Nakai called them “free-loaders” since they brought nothing to the table and wanted to cause trouble because of their anti-American views. He was especially upset, he said, because their lifestyle also promoted having more than one sexual partner.

“Among Indians,” the editorial stated, “virtue was held in high esteem. A brave who liberally exchanged women usually met an untimely end. Certain names were attached to women who made free with their favors.”

Another common denominator among many of the hippies who moved onto the Navajo and other reservations was their fondness for growing beards, which Stevens said was treated with suspicion by traditionalists.

“Body hair is abhorred by Indians,” he said. “To cultivate on the face what grows wild on other parts of the body is considered to be in extremely bad taste.”

This is apparently a viewpoint that many Navajos held even past 1970.

When George Vlassis, who became general counsel for the Navajos throughout the 70s and early 80s and who proudly wore a beard, was first introduced to the Navajo Tribal Council in 1971, he made sure to shave off his beard — because he was afraid there would be traditionalists on the Council who would distrust him solely because he was wearing a beard.

He soon regrew the beard once he learned that Navajos either liked him or mistrusted him not based on a beard but on how they viewed Peter MacDonald as chairman.

He was able to eventually win over a majority of the Council delegates by making himself and his firm available to help any delegate who had a legal problem, big or small.

But the biggest problem by far that Nakai had with the hippies was their efforts to stir up traditional Navajos to oppose the American government.

Nakai was a big supporter of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson and spoke out against those who came to the reservation to raise support to oppose the Viet Nam War.

He would point out that there were hundreds of Navajos who had signed up to fight in the war and he felt that those who would hold anti-war demonstrations were disrespecting young Navajo men who were risking their lives to protect the American way of life.

The Navajo Times shared his view to the point that each issue of the paper during the Vietnam conflict contained at least one page and sometimes as many as three of news about Navajos serving in the war.

These short articles came from the armed services themselves. At the end of basic training, each soldier, sailor or flyer would be asked to name the papers that served their area. As a result, the paper would receive dozens of short articles about members of the tribe that could be used to promote the armed services or the war.

For example, in that issue of the paper, readers learned that Pvt. Thomas Cooke, son of Mr. and Mrs. Seth Cook of Pinon, Arizona, had completed eight weeks of basic training at Fort Lee in Virginia.

This was accompanied by a photo of him wearing his uniform and also his military address in case any of his friends wanted to send him a letter.

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