50 Years Ago: Tallman passes, Chapman arrives

Newspapers in the area noted the passing of Henry Tallman Sr., 71, a former tribal chairman who died on June 8, 1967, at the Ganado Hospital after a long illness.

Born in Cornfields, Arizona, Tallman was one of the first Navajos to go off the reservation to get training, attending the Cone School of Drafting in Chicago before serving with the U.S. Artillery and Calvary from 1917 to 1924.

When he got out of the military, he worked for the St. Michaels School and Mission as a supervisor of construction and interpreter. From that he got involved in tribal politics and served as a member of the Navajo Tribal Council from 1933 to 1937.

In 1937, he ran for tribal chairman with his running mate Roy Kinsel and after pledging to support Navajo livestock owners in the dispute over stock reduction, he won the election, serving for two years.
He was elected back to the Council by members of the Oak Springs Chapter in 1945 and was active in Council affairs up until his death serving at times on the Advisory Committee and was chairman of the Resources Committee at the time he died.

The Navajo Times, in the first week of June 1967, spotlighted on its front page the new school in Cottonwood which was completing construction and scheduled to open in the fall.

The new BIA school would provide educational services to 450 students who up until then had been housed in three portable buildings in Cottonwood, Blue Gap and Whippoorwill.

It was, and still is, located just off a paved road about 22 miles southwest of Chinle and would vastly improve the experience of going to school for students within a 25-mile radius of Chinle, BIA officials said.
A person who would make his mark on the reservation moved to Gallup for the first time 50 years ago.

Jack Chapman, who was general manager of a radio station in El Paso, Texas, had just purchased KGAK, which at the time was a small-town radio station covering mainly Gallup and the surrounding areas.

Shortly after purchasing the station, Chapman made a bold move — at least for that time — turning over a significant amount of airtime to programming in the Navajo language and promoting Navajo interests.

It was his afternoon programming in Navajo that caught on quickly and although it featured country-western music in English, what attracted Navajo listeners by the thousands were the freewheeling Navajo announcers who would become some of the most well-known personalities in the area.

Chapman opened up the program to Navajos from all over the reservation who would come to his station on Coal Avenue and report meetings or seek to find other Navajos who were shopping in the Gallup area.

They would report on everything from events happening in their chapters to things happening in their lives and in the lives of their families. Everyone — that is everyone who spoke Navajo — was welcome to come in and be interviewed.
And that included J.B. Tanner, an Indian trader who had a business in Yah-Ta-Hey and who had a regular program for years on KGAK where he would talk in his own unique Navajo accent about what he thought was important.
It was riveting radio and up until KTNN was created a decade or so later, it was the dominant radio station in the area.

More than two dozen Navajo educators spent part of the early days of June 1967 attending an English as a secondary language conference at Fort Wingate, New Mexico.

One of the things that got a lot of attention at the conference was a discussion about Navajos who had trouble making certain sounds in the English language, much like people from the South being unable to pronounce the “oi” sound which is why for them a word like “oil” comes out sounding like “all.”

Navajos, because their language is so different from English, had trouble with the final “g” in words, one speaker said. They are apt to say “pink” for “pig” and “pik” for “big.”

Linguists at the conference said that because Navajos have no terminal consonants in their native language, they are thrown by stop consonants in the English language.
And finally, there was talk within the New Mexico Legislature to approve a bill that would allow Navajo students living in Arizona and attending New Mexico state colleges and universities to pay in-state fees instead of having to pay the much higher fees that out-of-state residents have to pay.

This was a novel concept back in 1967 and was being pushed by tribal leaders who said a Navajo living in Arizona should not be discriminated against just because of where he lived on the reservation.

It was a concept 20 years later that a lot of colleges and universities in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah would embrace, saving the Navajo Nation scholarship program hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.

---