50 Years Ago: Leaders look for ideas for time capsule

The Navajo Tribe is soliciting ideas from tribal members about what to put in a time capsule that tribal leaders are planning to bury in two secret places in the Window Rock area to be unearthed in 2068 — 100 years later.

The tribe is planning to bury more than 80 items in a 5×1.5-foot capsule on Memorial Day, 1968, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of 1868. The idea is that the artifacts will give a clue to tribal members in 2068 what life was like for their ancestors in the 1860s and 1960s.

The projected is being coordinated by the Plateau Science Society under the supervision of a five-member committee consisting of Carl Cords, Griffith Ramsey, Wiley Hendrick, Sylvester Carr and Wahneeta Lucas.

When tribal leaders of the future dig into the ground and take out the capsule, some of the things they will find, according to the Navajo Times, are a ceremonial mask, tribal songs and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address.

Exactly where the capsule will be buried will remain a secret — tribal leaders don’t want someone to dig them up before 2068 but steps have been taken so that at that time tribal leaders will know where they are located.

Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai said a lot of the credit for organizing the project has to go to John Claw, director of the Window Rock High School Resource Center and Martin Link, director of the Navajo Tribal Museum.

In other news, General Dynamics put out a press release saying the first manager of the new plant that is expected to open this fall in Fort Defiance will be C. J. Jameson, who is being transferred from the company’s operation in Pomona, California.

The company plans to start training the first 200 employees for the plant in September and company officials say they have more than 1,000 applicants already for those spots.

The tribe itself is spending $800,000 of its own money to build the plant and plans to use federal training dollars to help defray the training costs.

Things are looking up for Nakai as he has seen a lot of positive news in the last week.

The biggest probably centers on the tribe’s vast oil and gas reserves.

The latest sale of oil and gas leases brought bonus offers of $1,186,034, showing, according to tribal officials, that there is a lot of interest by energy companies who want to join others in drilling on the reservation.

The 552 bids were opened on May 27 at the Navajo Tribal Council Chamber. More than 200 people, many of them representing oil companies, were in in attendance.

The tribe put up 341 tracts of land up for grabs and bids were submitted for 209 tracts. There was about 215,822 acres that was set aside for use of the land.

The highest bid that was submitted came in at about $100 an acre. That bid, from Tenneco, was the highest bidder of the day. Others wanted to turn over as much as $25,651 in bonuses for one tract of land. That came from the Gulf Oil Company.

One reason for the interest stems from the fact that much of the land offered in 1967 was near or adjacent to land where Kerr-McGee operations were reporting a huge success.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs conducted the sale.

And finally, that thing about the Russian journalist visiting the Navajo Reservation recently has flared up again.

S. Kondrashov, the journalist who spent time touring the reservation, is beginning to publish his findings and no one here seems to be happy about that. He says the federal government is exploiting U.S. Indians for profit and they are treated with “cruel indifference” while at the same time the government is tying to stamp out their culture.

The Indian reservations, he said, have “the smell of colonialism.” Kondrashov said the school he visited on the Navajo Reservation was clean and well lit but school officials there are making no effort to preserve Navajo culture.

Instead, they force the Navajo students to learn English, he said.

He added that the schools are also teaching the students lies about Russia, pointing out essays he saw written by fifth graders that said the Russian citizens don’t have the same level of freedom as Americans do. He said he wanted to laugh and cry when he read that, but he was able to restrain himself.

Kondrashov made no mention in his articles of the challenge made by Nakai who asked him to arrange for an Indian to visit the Soviet Union and be allowed to travel as freely as Kondrashov did when he visited the Navajo Reservation.

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