50 years ago: Navy Seabees consider rez for training base

Window Rock had some special visitors this week the Navajo Times said could be in the midst of changing life on the reservation for many Navajos.

“Thirteen khaki-clad Seabee officers are here doing a feasibility study, looking into the possibility of making the Navajo Reservation a naval construction training ground during the 1971 fiscal year,” the Times reported.

All of them are Naval Reserve officers assigned to spending their two-week tour of duty in Window Rock drawing up the report, which will then be sent to the Naval Facilities Engineering Command to determine whether to do it. If the Navy does accept the plan, it would mean that some 7,000 to 8,000 men would be trained on the reservation during the year with about 1,200 here at any one time.

The reservation would benefit greatly, said Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai. Part of their training would be to build roads, culverts, earthen dams, buildings and additions to buildings, he said, all of which would be paid for by the Navy. Nakai would bring up this possibility off and on for the next few months but it was later reported that the Navy rejected the proposal. Although they could see a great need on the reservation for the kind of work they did, the cost of creating a place for them to stay during the training period was considered to be too great.

While that possibility was good news for the tribe, there was also some bad news this week. Former Navajo Tribal Chairman Sam Ahkeah had died on Dec. 5 at the age of 71. He had been ill for several months and had gone to the Shiprock Indian Health Service Hospital the previous week for treatment and remained there until he died.

Ahkeah was the fifth tribal chairman and had served from 1946 to 1954 and had been very popular. “During his administration,” said the Times, “Ahkeah worked hard on such projects as Utah Mining and Construction, Arizona Public Service and the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project.” Before becoming chairman, he worked for many years for the National Park Service at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. He was also a farmer and rancher, owning land in the Cudei Project, an irrigated farming area just west of Shiprock.

This was a good week for Geronimo Martin, the pastor at the Sanostee Navajo Christian Reformed Mission. Blind since birth, the 51-year-old Navajo was chosen as New Mexico’s “1967 Handicap Citizen of the Year” by the New Mexico Governor’s Committee for Employment of the Physically Handicapped.

“I am happy even though I am blind,” he said. “I keep my mind occupied by listening to the radio for the news of the world and my wife reads the newspapers to me, especially the Navajo Times. “My faith, as a Christian, gives me strength and courage and I have comfort in Him,” he added. “He makes me happy.”

Although he was born blind, Martin started school early – first at the Methodist School in Farmington then transferring to Rehoboth Mission east of Gallup. He later transferred again to Albuquerque Indian School where he graduated. After graduation, he did missionary work at Toadlena as an interpreter for about a year and a half.

He later went to work for Wycliff Bible Translators who had set up shop in Farmington. Working for them, he translated most of the New Testament and many well-known hymns into Navajo. He did this, he said, by using copies of the Bible and hymnbooks written in Braille and then translating them into Navajo.

He continued working as a translator until 1951 when he went into the hospital at Rehoboth and stayed there and at Ganado Mission for six years recovering from his illness. Once cured, he went back into preaching and translating, spending five years as head of the Houck Mission, serving as pastor and teaching the Bible to young Navajo children. After that he was chosen to take over the Teec Nos Pos Mission.

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