50 Years Ago: Nakai: Good for people to know about budget

Posted by Bill Donovan | Nov 2, 2017 | 50 Years Ago |

WINDOW ROCK

Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai gave a left-handed compliment to the Navajo Times 50 years ago this week when he spoke to members of the Navajo Nation Council about the tribe’s finances. He didn’t mention the Navajo Times by name but members of the council knew what he was talking about.

The subject matter was the tribal budget and the good news was that finances were in good condition although the auditors reported that several departments continued to spend more than they were allocated. But the other news that came out of Nakai’s speech directly concerned the people at the tribal newspaper. Nakai said it had only been in recent years that the Navajo people knew what was going on with the money their tribal government spent. He said this was good for the Navajo people and good for the government because it kept tribal officials honest. What he didn’t say was that the credit for informing the Navajo people about the tribal budget fell squarely on the shoulders of the Navajo Times, which since 1962 had made it a policy to print all of the necessary information on how much money the tribe was getting and how they were spending it.

This started under the former chairman, Paul Jones, who made the budget documents available to Chet Macrorie, the paper’s editor, and it continued during the Nakai administration. It’s difficult from reading the articles to determine if Nakai gave out the documents or someone in the Council did, but somehow the newspaper managed to get most, if not all, of the documents every year. The reason why it’s hard to determine if Nakai gave out the documents is because some of those early audits showed serious problems within the Nation, problems that the anti-Nakai forces on the council tried to use against Nakai and force him to resign.

Those who knew Nakai remember him as a man who was not prone to let bad news out to the public so it was probably the anti-Nakai forces who leaked the information to the press to embarrass him. And this may be one of the many reasons why Nakai, after being friendly with the Times during his first few months in office, eventually refused to have anything to do with the paper and was instrumental in getting Macrorie removed as managing editor and Dick Hardwick to replace him. The Times reported that in 1967 the tribe’s total worth was about $146 million (it’s now worth several billion dollars). This included the value of all tribal assets – cash, buildings, equipment and property. It did not include the value of minerals within reservation borders mainly because no one knew at that time how much oil, gas and coal was under the Navajo land but everyone thought the number, if known, would be staggering.

Nakai pointed out that the tribe had an investment of $10 million in the U.S. Treasury earmarked for the tribe’s scholarship program. The interest from that money was used to provide free college scholarships for deserving Navajo high school students. But Nakai wasn’t happy with the scholarship program and he spoke out on numerous occasions during his second term about its problems. He pointed out that the tribe in 1967 had more than 500 tribal members receiving scholarships. But only a handful were expected to get a college degree. “It seems to me we should have more graduates,” he said. “For some reason or other, we don’t seem to have many graduates.”

November also marked the beginning of the love affair between the Navajo Times and Ned Hatathli, who over the years became one of the major figures in the tribal education system with his involvement in Navajo Community College (the cultural center there is named after him) and traditional tribal politics. In November 1967, he was just getting known to the public by stepping down as director of the tribe’s Resources Division, a position he had held since 1960, and at the age of 44 accepting a job as education and training specialist for the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project. Hatathli, the first Navajo to get a Ph.D., had served two terms on the Council representing Coalmine Chapter before coming to work with the tribe.

And finally, a controversy of sorts had been addressed by the tribe with the decision to sanction Thelma Pablo of Crownpoint – a replacement – to reign for the remainder of the year as Miss Navajo for 1967 and 1968. The Miss Navajo Committee would not go into detail as to why a replacement was named. It only issued the following statement: “This decision was reached as a result of various complaints and/or criticisms received by the office of the Navajo tribal chairman and the Navajo Fair Commission.”