Restoring federal duties: O’Halleran bill tries to fix Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act deficiencies

WINDOW ROCK

Last Friday, Congressman Tom O’Halleran, D-Ariz., introduced a bill (H.R. 6141), which proposes technical amendments to the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974 that address “deficiencies” in the law.

The amendments to the act (Public Law 93-531) were carefully developed in consultation and collaboration with the Navajo Nation Council’s Navajo-Hopi Land Commission, president’s office, Washington office and the Department of Justice.

In a Dec. 8 press release, O’Halleran’s office said the bill would “restore federal obligations” in the original act, account for impacts of the relocation on Navajo relocatees while advancing tribal sovereignty, authorizing critical funding, and expanding rehabilitation in the former Bennett Freeze area.

“The relocation of thousands of Navajo families caused generations-long problems and has hamstrung growth and economic development of entire swaths of sovereign lands,” said O’Halleran.

“It’s incumbent upon the federal government to live up to its promises to these families to right these wrongs and to provide social services, infrastructure, and acceptable housing,” he said.

‘Sad legacy’

In 1974, Congress passed the act to address a land dispute between the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe.

O’Halleran’s office said, regrettably, the act not only required division of the disputed lands but that citizens of one tribe living on the other tribe’s lands had to relocate.

According to the president’s office, despite the opposition of the Navajo Nation, the legislation ultimately mandated the forced relocation of thousands of Navajo people from ancestral lands in northeast Arizona.

President Jonathan Nez said when Navajos agreed to relocate to other communities, it was with the federal promise of adequate housing, social services, and infrastructure that have not been fulfilled to this day.

“For generations, Navajo people have faced hardships caused by the forced relocation from our ancestral lands in northwest Arizona,” said Nez. “This sad legacy disrupted the way of life for nearly 16,000 Navajo citizens, including many elders, and separated them from their ancestral homelands — forever changing their quality of life.”

O’Halleran’s office recognized that the “poorly-handled relocation process” caused large-scale “social, economic, and cultural disruption and hardship.”

And, in order to promote negotiations to resolve another Navajo-Hopi land dispute in the Joint Use Area, in 1966, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert Bennett imposed a development freeze, named after him, on the western side of the Navajo Reservation that lasted for 40 years.

This included a ban on home building and repairs, construction of gas and water lines, and roads.

“The freeze devastated a 1.6-million-acre area encompassing nine Navajo chapters,” O’Halleran’s office stated. “Navajos in these areas were either trapped in poverty or effectively forced to leave their lands to find employment and decent housing.”

Although the freeze was lifted in 2009, the approximately 20,000 people in the area continue to suffer hardship, with many homes still standing uninhabitable or without electricity and running water.

Navajo Hopi Land Commission Chairman Otto Tso (Tó’Nanees’Dizi), said O’Halleran’s bill has the potential to usher in a process of healing through concrete action and policy changes.

“The forced relocation of Navajo individuals and families off our ancestral lands is a black stain on American history,” said Tso. “It has seeped through the generations to leave its mark on relocatees’ children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are being raised apart from their sacred sites in substandard housing in areas that lack basic infrastructure, facilities, and services.”

Constraints that have impaired economic development coupled with inadequate community resources have all but locked relocatees and their descendants in poverty, he said.

“All of this has been made so much worse by generations-long construction freezes, such as the former Bennett Freeze,” said Tso. “Congress must act now to alleviate this intergenerational suffering and scrub this stain clean.”

‘Major step forward’

One of the key amendments in the bill would restore language that was removed in from the original act in 1988 in which the United States committed to a relocation program that would:

1. “take into account the adverse social, economic, cultural, and other impacts of relocation on persons involved in such relocation and be developed to avoid or minimize, to the extent possible, such impacts;” and
2. “assure that housing and related community facilities and services, such as water, sewers, roads, schools, and health facilities, for relocates shall be available at their relocation sites.”

“This legislation. will finally set the federal government on the path of fulfilling these long-awaited promises,” said Nez. “We stand united with Congressman O’Halleran in support of this bill as a matter of fundamental justice for the Navajo Nation.”

Robert Black, Navajo-Hopi Land Commission office executive director, said O’Halleran’s bill is “a major step” towards resolving numerous issues that affect Díné people who are still feeling the negative impacts of relocation.

“If passed by Congress, the amendments will make a huge impact on the lives of many of our people,” said Black.

Other amendments in H.R. 6141 include:

• Requiring the Secretary of Interior to conduct a comprehensive study of the social, economic, cultural, and other impacts of the relocation and federal development freezes.
• Allowing Navajo families who signed agreements allowing them to remain on Hopi-partitioned land to relinquish those agreements and receive relocation benefits.
• Correcting a Bureau of Land Management surveying error that resulted in the Navajo Nation unintentionally selecting 757 more acres of land than it had intended, reducing the amount the Nation has left to select under the relocation act – allows for Navajo Nation to select 757 additional acres of land to compensate for the error.
• Expanding the authority of Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation, allowing its commissioner to carry out a rehabilitation program in the Former Bennett Freeze Area for housing construction and renovation, infrastructure improvements and economic development.

“The traditional lifeways and subsistence practices of our people, often referred to as relocatees, and their descendants, were disrupted, causing deep physical, spiritual and cultural harm that has been passed on through the generations,” said Vice President Myron Lizer.

“In addition, similar federal action mandated a development freeze… that has severely impaired community and economic development,” he said. “We need Congress to support this bill to resolve these longstanding issues.”

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