50 years ago: Nakai tries to quell fears of takeover

Looking at the papers back in late 1966, it appears that there was a profound fear by a number of tribal members, including those in the Navajo Tribal Council, that it would only be a matter of time before the Navajo tribal government no longer existed and that the federal government would be stepping in to run the government and make all of the decisions.

This movement began back in September when a series of court decisions came down saying that The Secretary of the Interior had the right to remove the tribe’s general counsel if he wanted to and he also had the right to veto legislation approved by the Navajo Tribal Council.

So,in an effort to quell people’s concerns, Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai had the tribe’s legal department write a memo giving tribal leaders a legal response to all that was happening.

He may have been hoping that the legal opinion would lay all of the controversy to rest since he was a good friend of the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, at the time and he didn’t want to see Udall come under severe criticism from others in the tribe.

If that was what he was hoping, he didn’t succeed because the legal response only made the situation worse.

“It is the secretary’s opinion that the Navajo Tribe has no sovereignty,” the legal opinion stated, adding that it was evident that the secretary believed that since the tribal council was created by the secretary, “it could be dissolved by him.”

“It is obvious that if the secretary is successful in his attempts to remove Harold Mott as the tribe’s general counsel, he may consider that this would provide him with authority to cancel every action of the Navajo Tribal Council itself,” the opinion stated.

This could not have been worse for Nakai because he was going around stating that Udall removed Mott because of Nakai and others who said Mott was creating a division within the tribal government and had to go.

Nakai was saying that Udall was doing what Nakai asked him, and here was the tribe’s legal department saying that Udall had become power-hungry and wanted to take over the tribal government.

But the opinion at the end even created more problems when it stated that the tribe’s legal department did not believe Udall had that authority and the  department “hereby commits themselves to stand ready to prevent any such takeover of the tribal government.”

Nakai was probably beside himself, looking at the possibility of this becoming an issue in the campaign, forcing him to take a stand in support of tribal sovereignty and against his friend or risk having the Navajo voters believe he was too weak to protect their interests from the federal government.

This issue would go on for months.

The Navajo Times in its first issue of October, 1966, devoted almost a whole page to the story of Kenneth Benally hoping it would be an inspiration to older Navajos to go back to school to get their college degrees.

By 1966, there were thousands of Navajos who for one reason or another quit going to college after one or two years. In fact, this was the case in probably more than 90 percent of he cases where Navajos went to college.

Benally was 42 and head of the guidance department at the Nenahnezad Boarding School when he received his degree in elementary education from the University of New Mexico.

And while the great majority of those who received Navajo tribal scholarship funds were in the late teens or early 20s, scholarship officials for the tribe were reporting  they were seeing older Navajos applying for the funds to finish off their college courses.

And, according to the figures provided by the scholarship office, older Navajos, on the whole, stood a better chance of graduating then their younger counterparts.

Benally said it took him eight years, going to school and working but he said he was determined to succeed this time.

“Daggoneit, I was determined to get a degree,” he said. “I have been to business college for two years but I found out when you apply for a job, the first thing they ask you is whether you have a college degree.”

From the Shiprock area, Benally talked about the fact that everyone in his family had a different last name.

“I had no non-Navajo name when I started to school,” he said. “My dad had a long Navajo name. There was a cousin, by clan, Grant Benally, in school with me.

“They gave me his last name and the superintendent, Mr. Shelton, gave me the name Kenneth,”he added.

He said his father later took the name Tom as his last name and Benally said he decided he liked the name and stuck with the Kenneth and the Benally. Benally said his four uncles liked the name Tom and two of them took that name and two others converted this to Tome.

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