Former Navajo Nation Vice President Rex Lee Jim dies at 63

TÓNANEESDIZÍ

Former Navajo Nation Vice President Rex Lee Jim, a naat’áanii, poet and hataałii who spoke eloquently in Diné Bizaad, has died. He was 63.

Jim served as vice president from January 2011 to May 2015 under President Ben Shelly and previously represented his community on the 20th and 21st Navajo Nation Council from 2003 to 2011.

He was Kinłichíi’nii and born for Táchii’nii. His maternal grandfather is Kinyaa’áanii and his paternal grandfather is Naakaii Dine’é. He was from Tsédildǫ́’ii near Tsénitsaadeez’áhí, Arizona.

Friends and colleagues described Jim as someone who brought traditional knowledge into public life without turning it into a slogan. Raised by his grandparents, he learned Hózhǫ́ǫ́jík’ehgo hatáál and later used those teachings in his work as a medicine man.

“He was a bona fide medicine man who performed Beauty Way,” explained Deswood Tome, who served as the special advisor to the late President Ben Shelly. “He went through the whole teaching and through the ceremony that (authenticates) them after they’re finished learning.”

From Tsédildǫ́’ii to leadership

Jim’s path to leadership included schooling far from home. He attended Rock Point Community School and later studied at the Newfound School in Asheville, North Carolina. He graduated from the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, Colorado. He went on to attend Princeton University and the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, including its Oxford campus in England.

He was also a writer. Jim published poetry and plays in Diné, English and Spanish. His works include Áhí Ni’ Nikisheegiizh and Saad. One of his best-known collections, Saad Lá Tah Hózhóón, includes 30 poems written in Diné Bizaad with English translations.

Outside government, Jim’s work also included editing and cultural projects. He edited Dancing Voices: Wisdom of the American Indian, published in 1994.

His public role sometimes put him in the center of political debates, but he also spoke in settings where language and values came first.

“What people may not know is that during the days Rex Lee Jim was a Council delegate, he became the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, and he would often travel to Washington, D.C.,” Tome said. “That’s the time I met (him), and we would go up on the (Capitol) Hill––we would pass out what they call ‘one-pagers’ to members of Congress. Mostly on appropriations to ask for increase and funding for public safety––law enforcement.”

Tome added, “He wanted letters sent out to members of Congress that we met with and so we worked another couple of hours at the office in Washington and waited until all the letters were finished. He would look over them, and he would make corrections on a few of them. We would finalize them and he would sign them. Then the next day, he would be back on a flight back to Window Rock.”

2010 run, vice presidency

In 2010, Jim announced he would run for Navajo Nation president. After finishing fourth in that primary, he was later selected as Ben Shelly’s running mate and won the vice presidency.

“After the primary election, we came in at a distant second,” Tome explained. “We came up with a list of 65 names for potential vice president choices. We came all the way down to two names and Rex Lee Jim was one of them. And the other was Dr. Patricia Nez Henderson.

“We met with both Patricia Nez Henderson and Rex Lee Jim in Albuquerque on a Saturday morning because we had a time limit. It was at that time Vice President Shelly had made a decision and chose Rex Lee Jim,” Tome added.

In 2018, Jim ran for president again.

During his years in leadership, Jim also took part in health and education discussions beyond the Navajo Nation. He traveled to Havana, Cuba, with Dr. Gayle Diné Chacon, who served as surgeon general for the Navajo Nation, where they met with Cuba’s School of Medicine to discuss the creation of a medical school on the Navajo Nation. The discussions built on earlier work tied to Dr. Taylor McKenzie, the late vice president under the late President Kelsey A. Begaye.

Words, prayer and global document

During a 2018 presidential forum at Twin Arrows Navajo Casino, Jim told a live audience he had helped write the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and that he had not shared that with fellow leaders. The moment became one of the most talked about lines of the night because it reframed a well-known international document as something tied to his own experience.

“When the Declaration was passed (by the U.N. General Assembly in 2007), people always placed that (10-page) document before me and they would tell me what it reads,” Jim said in a 2018 interview with the Navajo Times. “I never told them that I’m one of the people who actually wrote that.”

At the same event, he described the work behind the document and connected it to prayer and careful thought.

“We prayed about it and thought about it thoroughly before the literature was written in the Declaration,” he said.

Jim said he worked late into the night at that point in time drafting the Declaration, which he says was composed by the Diné line of thought and through songs and prayers.

“Free, prior and informed consent,” Jim said. “Feeling satisfied and content, that’s what it means.”

For some listeners, the remark captured Jim’s style. He could take a complicated policy phrase and translate it into everyday language without losing meaning. It also reflected his insistence that government work should be understandable to the people affected by it.

Jim also drew attention for his role in repatriation work while in office. Tome said Jim traveled to Paris with other officials to determine the origin of masks connected to wintertime healing ceremonies and to negotiate for their return if they were authentic.

Led by Jim, the Navajo delegation bid on and purchased eight sacred Navajo objects at auction so they could be returned home.

“This was a very delicate mission,” Jim said afterward. “We are happy to be taking these Navajo sacred objects home to be cleansed by our Navajo medicine people, who will determine how and when these objects will be used in our wintertime ceremonies.”

In elected office, Jim moved from legislative work on the Council into the vice president’s role at a time when the Navajo Nation faced familiar pressures involving jobs, health care, education and the changing energy economy. He did not separate those issues from language and ceremony. Those who watched him closely said he used Diné Bizaad in public settings and returned to traditional teaching when he explained what leadership required.

Jim stayed connected to home. He continued to live in Rock Point and remained involved in community life there.

His work as a poet and playwright developed alongside his work as a traditional practitioner and elected leader. Supporters of his writing said his poems made room for Diné Bizaad on the page and that his translations helped readers who did not speak Navajo understand what the language carried.

His book Saad Lá Tah Hózhóón was described by those familiar with it as a collection that introduces readers to his home place, his language and his worldview through poetry that shifts between Navajo and English.

No additional details about the circumstances of his death were available Tuesday.