50 Years Ago: Nakai pushes for resolutions to attain more Council power

Even for the Navajo Tribal Council, this was a resolution that raised a lot of eyebrows.

The council was meeting in its winter session 50 years ago and spent much of the first day of that session in a fight over two resolutions that supporters of Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai wanted to get on the agenda.

The first would prohibit certain members of the Old Guard, the members of the council who opposed Nakai, from seeking re-election to the council.

This turned out to be an interesting debate because the sponsors of the resolution refused to give out copies of the proposed resolution – it hadn’t gone through the committees as it was supposed to – so no one knew which members of the council they wanted to prohibit from running again.

Nakai, who was at the council session, was asked who was on the list and why were they being prevented from running again.

That’s not important, said Nakai. The only issue that was up before the council was to get the resolution on the agenda. Once it was on the agenda, the names would be revealed and the delegates could vote it up or down.

There was a question at this point as to how much power the members of the Old Guard still had because Nakai, by making promises to certain members of the council to get funding for their projects, had turned some of the members of the Old Guard onto his side and he may just have enough votes to get such a resolution approved – but probably not by more than one or two votes.

The problem was getting it onto the agenda.

Since this item had not gone through the committee process, it took a two-thirds vote of the membership to get it on the agenda and while he may have a majority, he didn’t have that great a majority.

As one tribal council member said after the item went down in defeat, who was going to vote for a resolution that may have resulted in him being prohibited from running again?

But there was even a more controversial resolution that Nakai supporters were trying to get on the agenda – one that would have increased the powers of the tribal chairman that would, if approved, have allowed him a lot more control over the council.

One of the main proposals in the resolution was to give the tribal chairman the right to decide who would be in the various committees of the council.

Nakai wanted this for the simple reason that it would have allowed him to put those who opposed him on committees, like the one dealing with health programs, while he could put his own people on the more important committees that controlled the tribe’s finances and economic development.

As it was at the time, members of the Old Guard controlled most of these important committees and as a result, Nakai couldn’t get any of his programs out of the committees and onto the council floor.

Again, his supporters failed because not only did the Old Guard oppose it, but so did a few of Nakai’s supporters who worried that this would give the chairman too much power.

This was, however, later enacted into law and those who opposed it found out that they were right – giving the chairman this power basically gave him authority over all three branches of the tribal government and would create massive problems within the government and finally a decision in 1990 to revamp the entire government to reduce the power of the chairman and give it back to the council.

Another resolution that would give Nakai veto power over any action taken by the tribal council was also soundly defeated, so Nakai ended up 0-3 even before the council began debating the resolutions that did make it onto the agenda.

Not a good way to start 1966.

But Nakai did get some good news this week.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided it wanted to have nothing to do with the dispute that had been going on for years between Nakai and Norman Littell, the tribe’s general counsel who was in the pocket of members of the Old Guard on the council.

Over the years, Nakai had tried – unsuccessfully – to keep Littell from being paid his $35,000 annual salary and to thwart Littell’s efforts to control mineral development on the reservation.

But Littell was getting tired of Nakai’s attempts and filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Arizona asking a judge to forbid Nakai from interfering with his contract.

The district court in Arizona dismissed the suit, as did the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Now it was the Supreme Court’s chance to do the same thing, and Supreme Court members said “federal courts will not interfere with internal affairs of Indian tribes.”

Littell was the big loser in this case and tribal members would find out several months later just how much of a loser he was when he announced that the suit had cost him more than $40,000 in legal fees and expenses, not counting the time he devoted himself to working on it.

---