50 Years Ago: Death of longtime delegate spotlighted

ABOVE: Trading Post, Indian Wells, Arizona, C.1890 (Courtesy of Sharlot Hall Museum).

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WINDOW ROCK

The Navajo Times spotlighted one of the most respected members of the Navajo Tribal Council — Roger Davis Sr. — who died 50 years ago this week after a long illness.

He was 70 years old and had been suffering from impaired vision during the last two months before his death.

Davis was first elected to the Council in 1939 and had served almost 25 years at the time of his death. A well-respected member of the Indian Wells, Ariz., community, Davis had been a member of the old guard on the Council who had opposed many of the changes that then-chairman Raymond Nakai had tried to enact.

“Those who have known Mr. Davis with his firm handshake at his late age can see the aggressiveness and ability of his people,” the front-page article stated.

While Nakai put out a statement of regret at his death, it was obvious that one less member of the old guard would aid Nakai in his efforts to take control of the Council, although the old guard still — just barely — had enough votes to thwart his efforts at change.

Speaking of Nakai, his people had been putting pressure on the Navajo Times for several weeks to allow Nakai to publish a message to the Navajo people on a regular basis. Marshall Tome, the paper’s editor, was not opposed but he could see problems with allowing Nakai to have free access to the paper’s readers.

The first was the reaction of the anti-Nakai forces on the Council, which was a considerable problem, since the old guard controlled the Council’s budget committee. This is the committee that decided how much money the Times would get each year to operate.

The Times in 1964 was getting somewhere around $95,000 for the year and Tome had been trying to get that increased so he could hire a couple of more reporters since he was still doing much of the writing and using press releases or reprints to fill out the rest of the paper.

Later, talking about those years, Tome would say that the lack of a decent reporting staff made it difficult for him to take vacation time and it also prevented the paper from covering the chapters or communities.

It was strictly a government-type newspaper and although such a paper was needed to inform the Navajo people about the goings-on in Window Rock, he felt more needed to be done and this cost money.

So he reluctantly agreed to the request from Nakai’s staff but he put a few limitations on it. If any of the columns attacked the old guard or basically attacked any interest on the reservation, he reserved the right to give the opposite side a chance of rebuttal, preferably in the same issue.

While that was a noble position, he found it hard to carry out since Nakai’s staff would ignore the deadlines imposed by the paper and would often turn it in just before the pages were laid out for printing.

Fortunately for the paper, however, Nakai seldom attacked anyone in his column and instead used it to promote programs he had started or was planning to start.

For example, in his first column, he used the space to promote his support of Lyndon B, Johnson for re-election to the U.S. presidency over Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and Republican nominee.

Pointing out that one of the big problems on the Navajo Reservation was the level of poverty, Nakai praised the efforts of Johnson and former President John Kennedy to help the poor in rural areas and on Indian reservations.
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Their efforts had made a major difference for hundreds of Navajo families and plans to set up a Navajo version of the Office of Economic Opportunity would change the lives of thousands more Navajo families, he said.

“A course has been set which will, in the long run, end the present conditions of poverty and disease,” he wrote. “I, for one, want to stay on that course.”

One of the big questions at that time was who actually wrote the columns and years later Tome would admit that he had a hand in writing many of the press releases and columns that came out of Nakai’s office. This was a definite conflict of interest but Tome said he didn’t see anything wrong with it since it kept him — and the Times — in good standing with Nakai and it enabled him to find out a lot of what was going on behind the scenes in Nakai’s administration.

Speaking of the fight between the old guard and Nakai, the anti-Nakai forces on the Council scored a major victory that week in getting 11 of their members appointed to the Council’s 18-member Advisory Committee.

The Council vote was 49-16 and was somewhat of a compromise because in getting control of the powerful Advisory Committee, the old guard agreed not to pass any resolutions that would take any power away from Nakai.

This was a major concession on the old guard’s part because the Navajos did not have a constitution and the powers given to Nakai came from the Council. If they could give him powers, they could take them away as well.

The only thing that kept them from doing this is the past was that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Interior Department had been on Nakai’s side in many of the disputes with the old guard and the BIA had to sign off on any major legislation approved by the Council.

But Secretary of the Interior Steward Udall had been saying that he wanted to give back a lot of the authority to tribal governments and Nakai was afraid that this meant that Udall and the BIA would not be there to help him out in the future.