50 Years Ago | Major issues in ’72 – rodeo, basketball

There are two things that all Navajos took seriously in 1972 – rodeos and basketball.

Rodeos were becoming a huge draw during the spring and summer months and the two rodeo associations – the All-Indian Rodeo Cowboy Association and the Navajo Nation Rodeo Cowboy Association – were implementing rules to reduce bias in judging which gained a lot of praise from the rodeo riders.

But in January, the big news was in high school basketball. For the first time in history, the Northern Arizona Class A state tournament was going to be held on a tribal reservation and Navajo Tribal Chairman Peter MacDonald was planning to spend big bucks to make the Window Rock Civic Center a top-notch arena.

The state athletic association had a policy of rotating the state tournament to among the schools that were part of the association. But when it came time to hold it on the reservation, association officials would give it to an off-reservation site because they felt that arenas on reservations would not meet their standards.

But MacDonald would not stand back and allow the reservation schools to be looked at as second-class sites so he lobbied the association and told officials that they could not continue to skip the reservations.

You know how countries fight to have the Olympics held in their cities, promising to spend billions of dollars to do whatever it took to make the site suitable to hold the Olympics there. To leaders in those countries, being chosen as a host city brought a lot of attention worldwide and greatly improved its image.

That was basically the same case with MacDonald. He was willing to spend whatever was necessary to show reservation communities could compete with other cities as hosts of the event.

The floor of the basketball court was repainted and the Navajo government seal was painted in the center of the court. It was also waxed to a bright shine. The Navajo Times reported that MacDonald visited the civic center on a daily basis to see how the improvements were going.

A new scoreboard is expected to arrive next week and center officials said it will be arranged so that every spectator in the stands will be able to see the score from their seats.

New goal posts have also been ordered and the Navajo Police said that as the event gets closer, inmates at the local jail will be on hand to tidy up the grounds outside the building.

The Times tried to get an estimate on how much this would all cost but no one would supply the answer. A spokesman for the chairman’s office said the funds for the improvements were coming from the divisions of the Navajo government.

The chosen 11

The big story in the Jan. 14 issue of the paper in 1971 took up a third of the front page and informed readers of a major announcement made by Louis Bruce, the commissioner of the BIA, the previous week.

After more than two years in the planning stage, the BIA was ready to embark on its biggest change in dealing with tribal governments.

Bruce said the BIA has chosen 11 tribal governments that will become the first phase in its new relationship with the tribal governments.

Navajo officials said they were confident that the Navajo would be one of those 11. Bruce said he would release the names on Feb. 1.

Chet MacRorie, the managing editor of the Times, said the core of the new imitative would be different with each tribe. The idea was that tribal leaders would sit down with BIA leadership and help focus where federal funds need to be directed to solve the problems facing the tribe or where the funds can best be used.

According to the Times, tribal officials were hoping to revert as much federal dollars to economic development needs.

With unemployment on the reservation over 60%, any program that would reduce that figure would go a long way to solving other problems on the reservation.

Front page photos

No one is counting – well, maybe former chairman Raymond Nakai – but as MacDonald approached the end of his first year in office, people began comparing MacDonald with Nakai.

Take, for example, coverage in the Navajo Times.

Nakai managed to get his name on the front page about once a month, his picture every three or four months.

MacDonald, on the other hand, had his photo on the front page 22 times during his first year and if you count photos inside the paper, there were only a handful of issues where his photo did not appear somewhere in the paper.

Nakai would meet with Howard Graves, a reporter for the Associates Press, two times during a four-year term. He would not do interviews with local reporters except on very rare occasions.

MacDonald, on the other hand, welcomed any reporter, local or national. Any request for an interview received a quick response and oftentimes it would be done the day the request was made.

Tribal employees found Nakai to be intimidating. His wearing of sunglasses even inside the office seemed to create a barrier to any kind of dialogue with employees. He almost always directed the employee to talk to the tribe’s administrator who was in charge of day-to-day operations within the tribal government.

MacDonald would often refer the tribal employee to one of his staff aides but he also took note of the problem and ask his aides to give him an update on what was decided.

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