50 years ago: Mitchell fights back; feeding ‘starving’ kids

Posted by Bill Donovan | Sep 13, 2018 | 50 Years Ago |

The decision by the Navajo Tribe to expel the head of DNA-People’s Legal Services from the reservation had finally made it to federal court.

Ted Mitchell, the director of DNA, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Phoenix in late September 1968 claiming that his expulsion from the reservation by the tribe’s Advisory Committee violated his civil rights. Mitchell had been banned from the reservation the previous month after he laughed in an Advisory Committee meeting when Annie Wauneka, a member of the committee, was talking. She called this disrespectful and went up to him and slapped him in the face two or three times. The following day the committee voted to ban him from the reservation as a “danger to the community.” Since then he had been running DNA from a trailer set up at Tse Bonito, New Mexico.

The Navajo Times this week said the suit filed by Mitchell may have “far-reaching ramifications.” Congress had recently passed the Indian Civil Rights Act, which provides protections for tribal members who live on reservations, but the question is, said the Times, Do non-Indians who live on the reservation have the same rights? Mitchell, in his suit, claimed that a tribe has no more right to ban him from the reservation than a town off the reservation could say he has no right to live in their community. However — and this would be an important aspect of any decision that is reached, said the Times — the concept of tribal sovereignty had to be considered and one aspect of that is the right of any nation to determine who should and should not be allowed to stay within its borders. The Navajo Tribe was also expected of bring up the Treaty of 1868, which allows a tribe to remove any non-Indian who creates a problem to the tribe or any of its members.

Mitchell had asked the federal court to speed up the process in making a decision, since normally these cases takes months or years to go through the system. He pointed out that his ability to effectively run DNA had been put in jeopardy by the fact that he was not allowed to visit its headquarters or any of its branch offices on the reservation. Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai continued to support the Advisory Committee’s decision based on the principle that the tribe has the right to ban any non-member of the tribe it wants to.

In other news, the Navajo Times, in its editorial section, took issue with a recent spate of news stories claiming that Navajo children, especially in the Tuba City area, were going hungry because there was no food available.

This was being picked up by nonprofit organizations who were trying to raise money for relief programs to bring food to starving children on the reservation who they said often went to bed without anything to eat during the day. Tribal officials were also getting upset at the stories, which seemed to indicate that the tribal government was either without power or didn’t care about the starving kids on the reservation. The Times pointed out that all of these stories had no basis in reality.

There are no starving children on the reservation, the Times said. The editorial pointed out that there were numerous programs on the reservation available to low-income members of the tribe to get food for their table, including ones provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture which, through the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity, brought in food to distribute to needy families. This whole idea that there were starving children on the reservation, the Times said, seemed to have started a year or two before when a health official in Tuba City was quoted as saying that Navajo children in her area were not getting enough protein in their diet. If children on the reservation go hungry, said the Times, there is no reason for it, pointing out that the state of Arizona spent $5 million in 1967 for programs to provide food and clothing to low-income families on the reservation.

The Times also has some good things to say about the BIA, pointing out that Navajo children who were enrolled in boarding school received high quality meals as did students who went to public schools.

The Times said if there were children on the reservation who were not being fed properly, it was because of parental neglect and tribal social workers were always on the lookout for these kinds of cases to make sure that all of the children on the reservation receive proper care. This was the first time the newspaper brought up this subject but it wouldn’t be the last. Every few years, the paper would go after nonprofits who would claim to be helping feed the starving children on the Navajo Reservation and would print photos of malnourished Native children in order to get more donations.

In many cases, the children portrayed as Navajo in the photos were not Navajo and the paper would point out that little if any of the money raised by these organizations actually made it to the reservation because there were no starving children on the reservation that needed their help.