One more inch

T he Navajo and Hopis tribes came one step closer last week to finally shutting the door on the Bennett Freeze.

On March 13, the U.S. Senate unanimously and with almost no debate approved a bill that would finally, after more than 40 years, lift the ban on development on land around Tuba City.

The ban was put in place by former U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert Bennett after the Hopis filed a lawsuit against the Navajos claiming ownership of 700,000 acres of land that were occupied by the Navajos.

The suit flowed from the century-old Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute involving some 1.8 million acres of land.

While the original land dispute was settled in the 1990s, the Bennett Freeze dispute kept going until 2006 when the two tribes reached an agreement that provided the Hopis with ownership of a small portion of the disputed lands.

The settlement was approved by a federal judge and everyone assumed it was over at that time.

Roman Bitsuie, head of the Navajo-Hopi Land Commission office, explained that the settlement paved the way for residents of the disputed area to start renovating their homes or building new ones.

But it didn't provide any money to build infrastructure and other improvements needed to bring the area up to the same living standard as surrounding areas of the reservation.

Neither tribe has the money to finance the improvements and, in order to provide federal funding, Congress would have to officially approve lifting the ban. For the past year, the two senators from Arizona, John McCain and Jon Kyl, have been working to get the Senate to do just that.

Bitsuie said the resolution passed by the Senate will now go to the House, where he expects it will also pass with little or no opposition.

Once that occurs, he said, the Bennett Freeze will be officially at an end and tribal and federal officials can get down to the task of improving the quality of life for the thousands of Navajos who live there.

Recent studies of the area show that a lot needs to be done, since most of the homes were built in the 1940s and '50s and have had little or no improvement since then.

The study showed that 77 percent of the homes aren't fit to live in.

At the time of the survey two years ago, there were still families of seven or more living in one-room structures without electricity or running water.

More than 40 percent of the homes surveyed didn't have electricity and 10 percent of the families had to haul their water on a daily basis.

An AP story on the subject said it would cost more than $1.3 billion to rehabilitate the area but Bitsuie said those figures are based on old estimates.

The cost in today's dollars would exceed $5 billion, he said, adding that the federal government has a "moral obligation" to support the redevelopment of the Bennett Freeze area.

However, while McCain and Kyl have agreed that some federal help needs to be provided, no one expects the federal government will be able to come up with anything close to the full amount needed, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Bitsuie said he plans to go to Washington, D.C., early next week to address a House committee on the subject.