50 Years Ago: Oil spill fueled lots of jini

Navajo tribal officials, as well as a lot of people in northern Arizona and southern Utah had been worried for three weeks about a pipeline break that was spilling crude oil onto land near Lake Powell.

The fear was that the break — which occurred some 26 miles upstream from the mouth of the San Juan River — would send thousands of gallons of crude oil into Lake Powell, contaminating it for years or decades.

But the Bureau of Reclamation and the National Park Service sent crews out to the area several days after the April 3 break and created a log barrier that officials hoped would stop the crude oil from getting into the lake.

“We can allay completely all fears regarding the oil break and brand as false all stories which we may hear regarding oil being on the Lake Powell waters,” said Vaud Larson, a Bureau of Reclamation official.

This was way before Facebook and Twitter so the rumors that Larson was talking about were coming from anti-oil groups who were going around to Navajo chapters and urging them to pass resolutions calling for a halt to any further oil development on the reservation until the oil companies could guarantee that no further oil pipeline breaks could occur.

Of course, no such guarantee could ever be made and tribal officials, including Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai, were urging tribal members not to get worked up by the many rumors that were circulating that fish were dying by the thousands and boating would be prohibited for years as the lake was being cleared of the oil.

“There has not been any report of dead fish or the existence of adverse conditions for fish life or for boating or any other recreational activity below the log (barrier),” said Larson.

Nakai took the unusual step to call tribal council delegates from that area — even members who were anti-Nakai — into Window Rock and gave them a briefing on the situation, asking them to visit their chapters and give them the true information about what was going on.

As he was doing this, the Bureau of Reclamation was continuing its efforts to mop up the mess, a process that BOR officials said was expected to take several weeks.

One of their methods of doing this was by air-dropping hundreds of bales of hay onto the area where the oil spill has occurred with the idea that the hay would soak up the oil and be easy to remove.

Nakai and the tribe’s vice-chairman, Nelson Damon, journeyed to Lukachukai on April 30 to dedicate a new school there that had been funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Nakai’s speech pointed out that the demonstration school at Lukachukai marked a new era in education on the Navajo Reservation due to the fact that it was one of the first schools where the BIA was making a point of involving parents and grandparents in the effort to educate Navajo children in their culture and language.

The school, said Nakai, “shall have a language laboratory just like the best schools in the country,” It shall also have “full-time remedial teachers just like the best schools in the country.” It shall also have “professionally trained counselors, just like the best schools in the country.”

But more important, said Nakai, the school “shall use some of the elder Navajo people in the community to teach Navajo culture, history and stories.”

And, Nakai added, they would even be paid for providing that knowledge to Navajo children.

In something that had never been seen in a reservation school, the BIA had agreed to train those who were hired to teach Navajo history and culture as full-time teachers and did not require them to have a college education. In fact, he said, they would not be required to have a high school or even a grade school education.

They would be paid because of their expertise in the Navajo way of life, something, said Nakai, that is more important than a high school or college degree.

As a demonstration school, its success would depend not solely on the grades of the students but also “on the participation and interest of the people living in Lukachukai, Tsaile and Wheatfields.”

The hope was that the school would graduate a whole new generation of Navajo students who would carry on tribal traditions, working in jobs that benefit other members of the tribe.

An interesting fact about his speech was that he never mentioned the need to teach the Navajo language in the school. The reason was simple. All the Navajo kids in those days, for all intents and purposes, were fluent in Navajo or were at least were expected to be fluent from growing up on the reservation and speaking it at home.

There was also hope that the increased emphasis on Navajo culture and history would encourage some of the students to become traditional healers.

As the membership in the tribe continued to grow, Nakai had been promoting an increase in the number of medicine men on the reservation, saying that many of the old-time healers were getting into their 50s and 60s and needed to find replacement.

He was also encouraging existing medicine men who did not have apprentices to begin becoming mentors, especially those who had knowledge of ceremonies that were dying out.

This concern had become so great that there was talk both within the Indian Health Service and the tribe to fund programs to reimburse medicine men for the training they gave to their apprentices.

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