50 years ago: Udall proposes changes in trustee relationship

The big story in December 1966 centered around attempts by Stewart Udall, the secretary of the Interior, to change completely the relationship between tribes and the federal government.

It should be mentioned upfront that his attempt went nowhere, but readers would already know that because if it had passed, their lives as residents of the Navajo reservation would have been greatly affected.
What Udall wanted to do was simple: get rid of the federal trustee status that has existed between Indian tribes and the federal government and require that any tribal government that wanted “to exercise the powers of self-government” would have to pass a tribal constitution.

Udall had a bill to this effect drawn up and was trying to garner enough support in Congress to get it to pass, but the Indian Economic Development Act of 1967, as it was called, was universally objected to by tribal leaders and many members of Congress.

The advisory committee members of the Navajo Nation Council received copies of the proposed bill on Dec. 15, called an emergency meeting of the committee and then adjourned, telling members of the council to take the bill and ask members of their chapters how they felt about it.

It didn’t take long for the tribe to learn how the Navajo people in the chapters felt about it.

By the end of the first weekend, after copies of the bill had been passed out, more than 30 chapters had passed resolution strongly opposing it, although there were some isolated cases where the measure was supported because it would solve one of the biggest obstacles to economic development on the reservation – the inability of business owners on the reservation to own the land the business was located on.

White traders were already learning how much of a problem this was because of their 25-year leases to operate on the reservation. Many worried that their leases would not be renewed, forcing them to give up their business and leave all of the improvements to the next owner with no reimbursement of the money they spent improving them over the years.
But this was also true of the few Navajos who had started up their own businesses and were operating under a lease with the tribe. Being allowed to buy the land from the tribe would solve that problem.
Members of chapters like Low Mountain and Piñon, however, voted in large numbers against the proposed bill because of the “C” word – constitution.

The elderly ranchers who had had a lot of power in these and other remote chapters still remembered the federal stock reduction program of the 1930s when tens of thousands of their sheep were seized by federal authorities in an attempt to improve Navajo rangelands.
The stock reduction program hit all of the chapters hard, but ranchers in communities like Low Mountain and Piñon were especially affected because ranching and raising livestock was their primary source of income since there were no government or business jobs available as there were in communities like Chinle and Tuba City.

The federal government had been trying to get the Navajos to approve a tribal constitution for 30 years but members of the tribal council refused to consider it because of the fear that many Navajo ranchers had that with a tribal constitution, the government would have even more power over their livestock and life.
What some Navajo leaders, including the tribe’s chairman, Raymond Nakai, liked about the bill is that it would finally get the BIA off the tribe’s back and allow the tribal government to pass bills on its own without having to get approval from the BIA or the Interior Department.
Even the people who drew up the bill realized that the system in place wasn’t working, pointing out in the bill “that the paternalism inherent in the existing trusteeship has seriously hampered the development of a spirit of independence in Indians and has not assisted them in gaining that managerial experience they needed to become self-sufficient.”
Eventually, the Navajo Tribal Council joined most of the other tribal governments expressing their opposition to the bill and members of Congress apparently felt the same way because the bill didn’t go anywhere.
However, the subject attracted the interest of a lawyer from California who was working at that time for a New York law firm and he, too, felt that the hold of the federal government over tribal governments was hampering progress.
So when Richard Nixon became president, he began working with members of Congress to get a law passed that would allow Indian tribes to take control of federal programs and run the programs themselves without any interference from the BIA, and without having to end the trusteeship arrangement.

The tribe’s then chairman, Peter MacDonald, embraced the proposal wholeheartedly and the Navajos took the forefront in using it to take over a lot of the BIA programs during the years in office.
But this whole dispute would have some political ramifications for MacDonald when he ran for his fourth term in office in 1982.
That was the election where, for the first time since he entered tribal politics, some 20 years before, Nakai’s support was so low that he could not make it through the primary, resulting in the first battle between MacDonald and Peterson Zah.

Now everyone knew Nakai hated MacDonald and MacDonald hated Nakai, but similar to what is going on today how Republican leaders who were trashed during the primary by President-Elect Donald Trump but are now becoming strong allies, MacDonald and Nakai somehow were able to put aside their differences.
Everyone was surprised to hear that Nakai was giving his support to MacDonald in the 1982 general election and there was a lot of talk about what MacDonald had to promise Nakai to get that support.
Nakai, of course, wasn’t talking to the Times – he probably hated the newspaper more than he hated MacDonald – but he was going around, according to the word the Times was getting from his biggest supporters was that Nakai wanted an end to the tribe taking over government programs.
So the word was that MacDonald promised him to slow down on the takeovers, making Nakai happy, but everyone knew this wasn’t going to happen because MacDonald had been able to more than double the size of the tribe’s government by these takeovers.

In any case, the issue was moot because Zah won the election, sending MacDonald into exile for four years.

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