50 Years Ago: Times ponders the ethics of promoting the reservation

For the first time, the Navajo Times has decided to get involved in the annual “make the reservation look good to travel writers” program.

This program started in 1962 as a way to promote tourism on the Navajo reservation. With the help of the Arizona Department of Tourism, each year about a dozen travel writers from across the nation (actually the world since a Japanese magazine was also represented in 1964) would be invited to come to the reservation.

The cost of wining and dining the travel writers was paid for by the state but Navajo tribal tourism officials (well, the tribe’s only tourism official) was expected to come up with a travel program to show off the reservation at its best.

Either the Navajo Times was never asked to participate before 1965 or more likely, former managing editors of the paper decided not to get involved because of journalistic ethics but in 1965, Leslie Goodluck, the acting managing editor, said “why not.”

The paper’s advertising director, Jack Luttrell, was put in charge of coming up with a program to promote the reservation sites among the 11 travel writers who had agreed to participate in the event in 1965.

The news writers would only be on the reservation one day so Luttrell decided to keep it simple, taking them to on a brief tour of the Window Rock area, showing them “the rock” and the Navajo Tribal Chamber.

They had lunch in Window Rock and during the lunch, Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai, gave a short speech welcoming them to the reservation and asking them, if they wrote a story about the visit, to pass on a few dos and don’t for non-Indians who wanted to visit the reservation.

If you take any pictures of Navajos, he said, be sure to get their permission first and if they say yes, you will be expected to pay them. The payment was left up to the individual tourist but a dollar or two was suggested as the going rate for a photo that would be kept in the person’s photo book.

If the photo was to be used in a newspaper or magazine layout, a bigger gratuity was expected.

The Times would participate in these events off and on over the next couple of decades and the staff would debate the issue every time the paper was asked to do so because of ethical questions.

It was one thing to go and write about the event – after all that was what the paper was there to do – but to actually promote the reservation as a place for people to travel seemed to some to be shilling for the tribe, which is not something that newspersons were supposed to do.

This was probably a moot question in 1965 since the paper still had no one full-time on its writing staff and the only people involved in the matter worked on non-editorial matters such as Luttrell.

By the way, the photo that was printed in the paper 50 years ago showed Luttrell with Anthony Weltzel, travel editor for the Chicago Daily News. Luttrell was shown giving Weltzel a turquoise and silver key chain, something that the Times gave to each of the writers that year who came on the tour.

Whether Goodluck meant for it to be a positive reflection on the value of free publicity, that issue of the Times featured two pages of an article about Canyon de Chelly being featured in the October issue of Arizona Highways.

The cover also featured a photo of the Navajo scenic site and the photographer, Ray Manley, who visited the reservation almost yearly, said photographing the reservation and Canyon de Chelly in particular, was his “favorite.”

Manley and the other commercial photographers who came to the reservation in those days had to pay no fees for the privilege of shooting on the reservation (except for the gratuities to Navajos they photographed).

The Navajo Tribe wouldn’t set up a fee schedule to take photographs or videos commercially on the reservation for more than 10 years.

In other news, a lot is being made of the fact that two Navajos – Monroe Jymm and James Atcitty – are making a run for the New Mexico House of Representatives to represent Navajos living in McKinley and San Juan counties.

No Navajo had ever been elected to the New Mexico Legislature, primarily because few Navajos ever took the time on election day to vote. But this year may be different because Navajo tribal officials are making a major effort to get Navajos to register and then go out to vote.

It helps that both Jymm and Atcitty are popular and well known in their areas, although Atcitty probably has an edge over Jymm in that regard.

But Jymm said he has a secret weapon – his grandfather who is almost 100 years old. Cinnijinnie Clah is a well-known medicine man in the Coyote Canyon area where his grandson, now a student at the University of New Mexico, grew up.

Atcitty, who is running to represent the Shiprock area, is a well-known figure, well revered in tribal politics. Later he would become of the Peter MacDonald’s top assistants in the 1970s and 80s when MacDonald became tribal chairman.

---