50 Years Ago: Nakai’s campaign strategy, non-Indian use of IHS hospitals

Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai is spending a lot of time on the campaign trail as he urges tribal members to vote him back into office in the upcoming tribal election.

What’s interesting abut this election, according to articles that have appeared recently in the Navajo Times, is that Nakai is not talking about the issues, rather concentrating most of his speeches on the need to bring harmony back to the tribe. And he is doing it in such a way as to challenge tribal members to choose him over their council delegate.

If you elect me back to office, he says, and don’t change the members of the tribal council who have been doing everything they can to bring down my administration, all you will be doing is creating another four years of bitter discord.

So Nakai has been spending a lot of his time campaigning in those chapters where their council members are members of the “Old Guard.”

The big news this week, however, was the news that the federal government was spending $2.7 million in 1966 for the operation of the PHS hospital in Gallup.

But what was interesting about reading the stories from back then was the feeling by many people, within and outside of the government, that it was only a matter of time before non-Indians would be allowed to make use of IHS facilities.

The Wall Street Journal in February of 1966 went even as far to quote unnamed government officials who said that they expected within four or five years that elderly non-Indians on Medicare would be cycled into the IHS as a way for the federal government to save money.

It seems that the U.S. Surgeon General, the highest-ranking health official in the nation, was a big supporter of the idea, according to the Wall Street Journal.

At the time, there were some non-Indians who had access to IHS services – employees, their spouses and families.

Ken Nelson, the administrator of the facility, said regulations at the time would require the hospital to turn away a non-Indian seeking treatment.

That, however, was not strictly true.

The policy then, as it is now, required the hospital to provide emergency care to non-Indians if the services there were needed in order to save a person’s life. That was not a big issue at the Gallup facility because there were two other hospitals in town, one county facility and the other operated by the Rehoboth Mission (they had not been combined yet).

Still, the Gallup PHS hospital, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, would, on occasion, see non-Indians brought there with serious injuries because IHS had the best emergency doctors at their facility with more experience in treating these kinds of injuries than the other two hospitals.

Nelson said that if the federal government wanted to lift the restriction and allow IHS hospitals to treat a limited segment of the non-Indian population – for example, the elderly – the Gallup facility would have to see an increase in its budget.

The interesting part of this whole debate was that in the several articles that were printed or excerpted in the Navajo Times, not one reporter thought to ask how the main users of the hospital – the Indian people – thought about the idea.

It was apparent in the stories that whether the tribes and/or its members, were in favor of the idea was not important. The decision, like all the other decisions made by federal officials at that time, would be made by government officials with little if any input from tribal leaders.

Over the years, this discussion has come up and there have been a few instances on the Navajo Reservation and within other tribes, where non-Indians have been allowed to use IHS facilities, primarily because the clinic or hospital was located in such a remote place that it would not be feasible for non-Indians to travel to the nearest non-Indian hospital for regular treatment.

The key here is that the Indian tribe or the Indian community is the one that seeks to get rid of the restrictions.

In recent years, the discussion on this issue seems to be turning toward making better use of IHS facilities by allowing non-Indians to go there as long as administrators realize that the treatment of Native Americans would be their number one priority.

But as the money for the IHS hospitals and clinics continue to shrink, the idea of opening the doors to non-Indians and their insurance coverage is looked on as a way to increase money to the hospital and bring better care to everyone.

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