Navajo Administrative History

Changes in the demography of employment at the monument only reflected the changing cultural climate outside its boundaries. By the early 1970s, the western reservation had begun to undergo comprehensive transformation. The people of the region had a long and proud history. Navajos had begun to settle in the area in an effort to avoid the forced confinement at the Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner in the 1860s. Fleeing the American military, they found the area around Navajo Mountain far enough from the reach of the cavalry. The result was a regional culture intentionally isolated from the encroaching industrial world and its material by-products, less receptive to Anglo-Americans than other parts of the reservation. Trading posts came later and were fewer and farther between on the western reservation. Nor was their influence as pervasive before the stock reductions of the 1930s. [13]

As late as the early 1970s, the western reservation seemed lost in time. Nearly a decade after paved roads crossed the region, the most common form of transportation for Navajo families in the area was the classic orange and green Studebaker horse-drawn wagon. Bill Binnewies recalled that during his tenure as superintendent of Navajo in the early 1970s, the pick-up truck era began in the Shonto vicinity. About the same time, Navajo families began to travel to other places, a practice uncommon prior to that time. Yet these symbols of greater exposure to the outside world were the harbinger of a revolution in lifestyle for the people of the western reservation. [14]

Before the Visitor Center and the paved approach road, park personnel and their neighbors had an interdependent relationship. The park was the long arm of an industrial society. Its needs were supplied from elsewhere. But in the remote backcountry of Arizona, the people who ran the park had to rely on their neighbors in many instances. Area Navajos could also benefit materially from their relationship with the park. Besides employment, the park could offer communications, transportation, support, and medical facilities unavailable to most of the people in the region. In addition, both the Park Service and the Navajo had to battle the often inclement climate of the area.

The interdependence produced a number of close personal relationships between park personnel and their neighbors. Neighbors and often friends, the staff and area Navajos looked out for each other. This solidified existing relationships in instances such as a major snowstorm in the late 1960s, when Superintendent Bill Binnewies left his home on horseback in thigh-deep snow, loaded with canned goods for the nearby Austin family. On the way, he met E. K. "Edd" Austin, Sr., the patriarch of the family, coming toward him with a side of beef in case the park was out of food. These concomitant gestures of personal concern suggested the feeling of community that transcended cultural and institutional lines at the monument. [15]

The empowerment of the Navajo began before the 1960s. By the late 1940s, Navajos in the vicinity of the monument had become avid workers in a range of programs. Wage scales had been standardized, and Navajo laborers were paid a sum equal to that of laborers in different parts of the country. In 1947, this rate of $1.15 per hour put laborers dangerously close to the hourly wage that could be factored out of the custodian's annual salary. Park Service standards for wages were set in Washington, D. C., and exceeded even the rates paid by the U.S. Indian Service. As park budgets were limited, the high cost of wages limited the number of workers and length of time for which they could be employed. [16]

Federal regulations and policy bound the department. Even in 1947, when discrimination in wages was the rule in the U.S., the Park Service insisted on paying its Navajo laborers the same rate as non-Indian workers. This practice, which clearly frustrated some who perceived that the standard wage on the reservation should be lower than elsewhere because of the large available pool of labor, was in part testimony to the commitment of the Park Service to support local constituencies. It was also part of the process of empowering the Navajo people, particularly in their own land. [17]

By the middle of the 1950s, the Navajo had taken a more aggressive approach towards activities on the Navajo reservation that did not use Navajo labor. Preferential hiring clauses were instituted, requiring that off-reservation construction companies employ Navajos. This attitude affected the Park Service as well. When looking for labor, the NPS was required to select a fixed percentage of Navajo workers. When they did not, even in exempted activities, there could be consequences. In 1958, Tribal Council member Paul Begay threatened to close down a stabilization project at Inscription House because it employed no Navajos. [18] The incident reflected a growing militancy among Navajos that came to the fore in the 1960s.

That decade saw the culmination of major changes in the cultural history of the U.S. The civil rights movement served as the starting point; the effort to achieve the attributes of citizenship for American blacks inspired a panoply of other reform-oriented activities. A student protest against the war in Vietnam was one major ramification. The emergence of Hispano, Indian, and other movements that sought to extend the advantages of the modern world to groups that previously had been left out was another. There was a growing sense of empowerment among these groups, most of whom had previously been relegated to peripheral positions in American life.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Navajo people began to exert influence on state and local government, education, and other institutions and processes that affected their lives. In Chinle and Window Rock, Navajos gained the majority on the school boards; in other places Navajos swarmed the polls, voting in unprecedented numbers. In southern Apache County, Anglos feared a Navajo majority and unsuccessfully sought a separate Navajo County. Despite these and other efforts to curb their growing power, Navajos showed that they were on the verge of becoming a force in regional politics.

Navajo politics were generally pragmatic and issue-oriented. Concerned with basic civil rights and economic and social issues, the Navajo people were generally far removed from the political radicalism most evident on college campuses and in the anti-war movement. Although the cultural revolution that swept the nation helped fuel a Navajo awakening, the Navajo themselves looked to solve the problems of their world. Despite the emergence of "red power" as a philosophy and the militance of Indian organizations such as AIM, the American Indian Movement, the Navajos remained largely apart from efforts to destroy the modern world and rebuild it anew.

Organizations such as AIM had a complicated impact on the Navajo. Some people embraced these empowerment movements wholeheartedly, defining themselves in opposition to mainstream American society. Many of the people who became enthusiastic about these changes were urban Navajos, who felt caught between both worlds, neither wholly Indian nor white. Others, predominantly more traditional Navajos such as many of the "longhairs" in the vicinity of the monument, were much more ambivalent toward radical Indians. Closer to traditional culture and the way of life expressed through it, they did not value recognition from the white world as much as the spirituality and sentience of the Navajo way. The more traditional Navajos were less tied to the Anglo world. As a result they felt less oppressed by it and had little need to express their anger towards it.

Within the Navajo Nation, empowerment led to the formation of numerous support organizations. Among these was a legal aid society called Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditahe (DNA), which was supposed to help poorer Navajos who had problems with the legal system. During Peter McDonald's first administration, DNA made impressive gains for Navajos, filing a class action suit against trading post operators seeking fairer trade practices and winning an affirmation of the right of individual Navajos to be exempt from state income tax on wages earned within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation. DNA had two tiers, one made up of lawyers--most of whom were not Navajos--and another of advocates, Navajos who could explain the legal system to other Navajos. In the climate of the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a powerful political dimension to the activities of DNA, and the organization was often embroiled in controversy. [19]

One DNA advocate, Golden Eagle, who had previously been known as Leroy Austin, brought the influence of the outside to the remote world of Navajo National Monument. A son of E. K. Austin, who ran the guided horse tours to Keet Seel, Leroy Austin had been away from the area for a long time. In an unusual series of events one summer weekend in 1973, he terrorized visitors and a ranger at Keet Seel, threatening them in an abusive manner while intoxicated. In the fashion of the time, he regarded the Park Service as an occupying power on Navajo land. In search of assistance, the park ranger left Keet Seel for headquarters. In the interim, the incident came to a tragic end when one of Leroy Austin's brothers shot and severely wounded him. But the incident itself revealed that with the access of the paved road came every attribute, good or bad, of modern society. [20]

The incident was more typical of the era than of relations between the park and its neighbors at Navajo National Monument. There was an extreme tone to the late 1960s and early 1970s, an all-or-nothing, for-or-against feeling that, at its most outlandish, suggested that the monument was a symbol of oppression. The instigator himself had become an outsider. He had not been back home for a long period prior to the incident and the prisms through which he viewed the relationships of Tsegi wash were more those of urban America than the Colorado Plateau. Yet influenced by the furor of the time, he expropriated the ideals of a social movement for individual purposes and seized on the NPS as a symbol of perceived oppression. Ironically, many of the Navajos of the Shonto area were appalled by his behavior.

No good resulted from such an incident, but it served to further enunciate that the remote character of the monument that insulated it for so long had ceased to exist. It also offered insight into the complicated web of relationships that predated the Memorandum of Agreement and that the agreement did not erase. Ultimately this culminated in threatening and violent expression in an era of emphasis on identity and fidelity to cultural ideals of mythic proportions.

There were other smaller incidents that reflected the changes in cultural attitude of the Navajo and caused the Park Service to be aware. In 1974, a medicine man display in the Visitor Center attracted negative attention. The collection, comprised of the parts of a Navajo medicine man's kit, had been purchased by the park from a Shonto man named Bert Barlow in 1971. This was a relatively frequent occurrence, as a similar purchase occurred from some unnamed Navajos the following May. An exhibit featuring these articles was displayed beginning in May 1971. In December 1973, a number of Navajos who claimed to be from the family to which the kit belonged came to the park and sought to buy it back. They returned on at least one other occasion, but never made contact with the superintendent. Yet the possession loomed as an issue. "It makes my heart sad to think of [the collection] imprisoned," one of the Navajo told a park technician. [21]

The response of the park was complicated. In the early 1970s, repatriation of Indian artifacts and remains had not yet become an issue. Recognizing the interdependence that characterized their existence, park officials knew that they had to proceed carefully. The artifacts had been purchased legitimately, park staff reasoned, and some had doubts about the people involved. Superintendent Hastings had "no inclination or authority to sell or give it back to these people because they only wish to resell it for a better price." The specter of DNA advocacy appeared, and Hastings feared pressure. Although no further developments occurred at that time, again the impact of the 1960s reached the park. [22]