50 Years Ago: Nakai wins another battle over Norman Littell

It’s not too often that you see a chairman or president of the Navajo Nation being sued in federal court by someone who claims that the tribe’s highest leader is interfering with his ability to do his job.

But that is what Norman Littell, who was general counsel for the tribe, did back in 1962, naming then chairman Raymond Nakai as the person who was making it impossible for him to do his job.

What he was upset about was that Nakai wouldn’t sign off on his pay vouchers and as a result, he was owed more than $10,000 from the tribe. Nakai was being arbitrary and exceeded his authority as chairman by doing this, said the complaint.

Everything in his complaint was true and eventually Nakai went ahead and approved paying the money but Littell continued with the suit, hoping it would embarrass Nakai or at least give him a warning not to do that again in the future.

It didn’t work since the federal district court n Arizona dismissed the complaint, saying it lacked jurisdiction. If he had a complaint, he should take it to tribal court but Littell knew enough about how the tribal government worked in those days that he knew taking it to tribal court would be futile since all of the judges were Nakai supporters.

So he did the next best thing. He appealed the district court decision and asked the U.S. Court of Appeals to step in and issue the restraining order, telling Nakai to basically leave him alone.

But 50 years ago this week, Nakai got another victory when the Court of Appeals also rejected the suit for lack of jurisdiction.

In his appeal, Littell had argued that the controversy arose “under the Constitutional laws and statutes of the United States.”

The Court of Appeals disagreed, pointing to previous laws that recognized the Navajo Nation as a “separate political community” that had to be treated as such by the federal courts.

There were a couple of questions raised by he Times about this action.

First, who was paying for the costs of that litigation – Littell or the tribe. While no answer to that was ever given, it appears that the work Littell did on that lawsuit came during the time he was working for the tribe but no one seemed to care.

It was also ironic that Littell, who had been general counsel for the Navajo Tribe for 16 years had gone to federal court to settle his problem with Nakai since he had, on several occasions, defended the tribe from other suits filed in federal court, saying that tribal business disputes should be handled by the tribal courts.

This wouldn’t be the last time this happened. Just remember that then chairman Peter MacDonald filed a sit in federal court trying to get the suspension of his powers overturned back in 1989 and just a few months ago, four members of the Navajo Nation Council, including now president-elect Russell Begaye, went to federal court to try and overturn a decision by the Navajo Supreme Court.

In 1965, the Navajo Times was claiming to have a subscription base of 5,000 people, all of whom were paying 10 cents a copy for the paper. It was also claiming to have a readership of 50,000, using the theory that, on average, 10 people read each of those 5,000 papers.

This basically meant that about 70 percent of the adult Navajo population read the paper, although statistics at that point indicated that less than 20 percent of the elderly Navajo population had the ability to read or write English proficiency.

The Times would later justify that figure, which the paper used heavily in house ads to get businesses to advertise, by saying that while many elderly Navajos could not read English, they enjoyed getting the paper because they looked at all of the photographs that the paper published each week.

Which was, to some extent, a true statement because the Times published a lot of photos even though it did not have a photographer on its staff or even a full-time reporter for that matter.

What the paper did have was 24 tabloid pages to fill each week and to do this, the staff made use of any photo that was submitted and any press release, no matter how lose its connection was with what was going on within Navajoland.

Chet Macrorie, who was editor of the paper in the early 1960s and came back in the 1970s, said that the paper struggled financially throughout the 1960s – and 1970s as well – trying to be self-sustaining.

The paper didn’t make any money on circulation since most of the circulation revenue it received went to paying the carriers as well as the businesses that sold the paper.

This left advertising money and that had to pay for the cost of the paper and the salaries of the four or five people who put out the paper every week.

The paper therefore had to rely on subsidies from the tribe and those subsidies continued to get bigger in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the paper increased its staff to meet the demands of its readership.

It would also lead to continued problems with the tribal administration and members of the council who would threaten to cut back on the subsidies every time the paper printed an article that the people in power and that would lead to a number of changes within the Times editorial staff.

This would end when the Navajo Tribal Council allowed it to go independent and have its own board of directors, which it operates under today.

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