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50 years ago: Tribe tries to get traders to pay up

Fifty years ago, the Navajo Tribe for two years had been going after trading post operators who had not been paying their lease payments. The program was apparently a big success.

Harold Mott, the tribe’s general counsel, told members of the Navajo Tribal Council that several trading posts had been forced to shut their doors because of their refusal to make their lease payments current. Depending on when they took out their leases, trading post operators were required to pay the tribe anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a year to lease the land on which the trading post operated and while that, in the scheme of things, was not much compared to what the trading post brought in annually, it became a problem for many traders because they were more than 30 years in arrears in some cases.

The problem was that in the 1930s through the early 1960s, the leases were negotiated by the BIA and there was no mechanism set up within the agency to monitor and collect lease payments.

Regardless of that, some traders were diligent and sent in their payments annually to the BIA but the record keeping was so bad that there were no records as to who paid and who didn’t. So the tribe, when it took over the process in the mid-60s, had to rely on the traders’ own records as to who paid and who didn’t.

That was all right for traders who had a good record-keeping system but there were a number of them who only had partial records, so the tribe usually worked out a compromise and only billed for only a portion of what was owed. But for those who had not paid anything for decades or couldn’t prove any payments, coming up with $20,000 to $30,000 or more became a serious problem, given the fact that by 1968 a lot of trading posts were seeing revenue declining sharply as their customers began going elsewhere to shop as the government began improving the roads on the reservation.

At the same time this was going on, said Mott, his office was bringing pressure on some trading post operators to start complying with legislation passed in 1967 by the Council’s Advisory Committee requiring trading posts to hire more Navajo employees. This had been a requirement under their leases but since the leases had never been monitored in the past, this was another situation where traders did not comply and, by 1968, found themselves forced to deal with their lease or having it cancelled.

Some traders said they had problems with Navajo employees who would allow relatives or friends to take items without paying for them. Since the trading posts were usually open 14 to 16 hours every day of the week, the trading post owner could not be on site all of the time to make sure this did not happen. This is a problem that exists today, which is why major stores on the reservation and in border communities have policies that prohibit cashiers from handling the checkout for any of their relatives. So even if the clerk checked out a relative honestly, they stood a good chance of being fired if the management found they had violated that rule.

Mott also told the Council that the tribe’s legal aid department was being overwhelmed with clients. He reported that in the past year, the department had handled 4,987 cases, a record. He said that the department was receiving between 400 and 500 new cases a month, which was putting a major strain on the department since it only had two attorneys and a clerk on staff.

He also addressed another issue that had arisen since Raymond Nakai had been elected to a second term in 1966: tribal politics. There were still about 25 members on the Council that belonged to the “old guard” and were opposed to anything that Nakai did. They had been claiming that Mott and other attorneys in his department had been ignoring them when they sought answers to legal questions. Mott denied this. He said he realized that there was still a lot of political animosity within the Council but he had issued a memo to all of the attorneys in his office not to get involved in tribal politics and to treat all members of the Council the same.

He also mentioned one other area that affected a lot of tribal members — the payment of state taxes. Navajos living on the reservation were not required to pay state taxes but Mott said there were discussions in the Arizona and New Mexico governments to get Congress to change that. Mott said if the states were successful in getting Congress to listen, he would aggressively fight it. Since his main office was in Washington, D.C., he said he had a lot of contacts in Congress and would make them aware that any discussion along these lines would not only get serious objections from the Navajos but all tribal governments.

But there was a component to this — the fact that many Navajos weren’t aware they did not have to pay state taxes and paid them annually. When they found out that they weren’t required to pay the state taxes, they would file for a reimbursement and it would take months, if not years, to get the states to comply because the states would say they would have to investigate to determine if the person actually lived on the reservation.

Their contention was that a lot of Navajos who lived in border communities were using their parent’s address on the reservation as their own to get out of paying state taxes and it was hard to determine, in many cases, where the person lived since he or she would continue to have ties with his or her reservation community.

And finally, it turns out that William Yazzie, a prominent Navajo tribal judge, was making a name for himself as an Indian dancer.

Yazzie was named as a member of the Blackfoot, Kiowa and Apache Singing Society because of his efforts to get tribes to start preserving their tribal dances. “In many tribes, he said, “these dances are being lost forever because no one does them anymore.” That had changed in recent years, he said, as dancers had made efforts to revive old dances by talking to elders who remembered the dances and how they were done.


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About The Author

Bill Donovan

Bill Donovan wrote about Navajo Nation government and its people since 1971. He joined Navajo Times in 1976, and retired from full-time reporting in 2018 to move to Torrance, Calif., to be near his kids. He continued to write for the Times until his passing in August 2022.

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