racism, window rock, retaliation, & rebellion

7/30/2019 Racism, Window Rock, Retaliation, & Rebellion

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Racism, Window Rock,Retaliation, & Rebellion

September 2013By Christine C. Benally and Jack Utter

Christine Benally & Jack Utter, Ph. D., J. D., when they presented at an American Indian rights conference some years ago.A husband and wife team, they live and work in the Window Rock, Arizona area on the Navajo Nation.

Racism & Movies

Art imitates life is a common saying. Wesee the idea most often, perhaps, in motion pictures.A recent film and an even more current one, Djangoand The Butler , respectively, address racism against

black Americans. We ve watched both films, thelatter on Memorial Day of this year. It wasemotionally tough for Jack because of the too closereminder of the 1950 s and 60s South in which hegrew up. It troubled Christine most because of subtlecomparisons she made with today s Navajo N ation.

Django is a fictional parody of a brutalexample of cotton plantation slavery in the mid-1800s. It ends with gratifying though equally brutal

revenge by a gun-toting and explosives-wieldingfreed slave just before the Civil War. Django has the typical white master of a

plantation; and a white overseer, or foreman. It alsohas a head slave butler who keeps all the other slavesin line through their fear of him and the power heexerts on behalf of the white master. The treacherous

butler can have slaves flogged, beaten, and evenkilled. They do what he says.

The second film, coincidentally titled The Butler , is a true story. It begins, as well, on a cotton plantation in Georgia in the 1920s. Slavery has beenunconstitutional since 1865, but racism obviously hasnot. The black workers on the plantation are stillunder great fear of job loss, intimidation, and perhapsmuch worse retaliation by the white plantationoverseer and others in the white-controlled politicaland legal system in the Deep South at that time.

The overseer is, as well, the son of the whitewoman who owns the plantation. He wears a pistolas he patrols the black workers picking cotton in thefields. One day he takes a black work erswife from next to her husband and little son while

theyre working in a cotton field and rapes her in anearby shack. The husband and the other workers,despite knowing and hearing whats happening, donothing. The son, warned by his dad not to cross theoverseer, asks why his father doesnt do something when the overseer walks by after the deed is done.

The father then, and apprehensively, says,Hey to the overseer, who stops 10 feet away. Theoverseer turns toward the father, pulls out his pistol,and shoots him dead through the forehead in front of 20-30 black witnesses. They know their realities, andcower back into the cotton rows. The dead man islater buried in a makeshift hole by the field hands.This was ordered by the plantation owner , a w itnessto the killing, and the murder goes unreported.

The little boy about eight years old, andwhose mother loses her mind is taken to live in theowner s house where he is strictly raised to be ahouse servant. Years later he leaves, and as an adultworks his way north to Washington, D.C., where he

becomes a waiter in one of the fanciest hotels intown. He is so good at his job that in the mid-1950shes hired to be a butler in the White House.

The butler works there originally for President Eisenhower, and on into the time of theReagan Administration. Then he retires. Restrained

but still degrading racism is experienced in the WhiteHouse for most of the nearly 30 years of hisemployment. Two examples are the lower pay andno promotions for black staff, when compared towhite staff doing the same jobs for the same length of time. This goes on for decades. The black staff,even in the White House, feel compelled not toquestion the discrimination in pay and promotion.

Eventually, under the Reagan White House,the butler from Georgia presses the claims for

promotion and equal pay for equal work when he


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goes before the racist white equivalent of anoverseer of the White House staff. The butler isdenied his request. He only succeeds with anintervention by Mr. Reagan who, nonetheless, is notentirely sympathetic to issues of racial equality in theU.S. and elsewhere.

Window Rock,Retaliation, & Rebellion

Window Rock, the Navajo Nation capital, isa symbol of Navajo, or Din, government; likeWashington D.C. is for the United States.

There are perceivable parallels between thesettings and racism of the films just referred to andwhat has happened and is happening to the Navajo

Nation, and with the Din People of today.Since at least the 1930s, the Navajo Nation

has been like a big money-making plantation for outside interests. Its not cotton and slaves at issue,

but things like coal, oil, gas, water rights, and border town fleecing of Navajo buying power.The obvious masters of the plantation are

multiple outside corporations, coal companies, power companies, politicians, major retail business interests,and the surrounding states. And, yes, they alsoinclude the Tribe s trustee, the federal government,and its primary agent, the Interior Department.

The white overseers for the Navajo Nationare now, and have been, made up of certain lawyersin the Navajo Department of Justice (DOJ), andsometimes in the Legislative Branch, who further influence outcomes through their own Navajo andnon-Navajo agents within the government. One of the more noteworthy of these non-Navajo agents,

Najam Tariq, is within the Department of Water Resources (DWR). He controls nearly all Navajolivestock water and millions of Navajo dollars; asubstantial amount of which he misapplies in waysthat serve him politically, and perhaps otherwise.

There is another highly relevant phenomenon about him. Jack, who also works in theDWR, has observed how closely this agent of DOJcompares to the white controllers of AfricanAmericans when, right after passage of the CivilRights Act of 1964, the controllers had to changetheir ways. They cleverly modified their techniquesof racial domination to be less abrupt and obvious,

but still effective in keeping black people in check and themselves superior as before.

The non-Navajo DWR man, Najam Tariq,manipulates, bribes, intimidates, psychologicallydominates, intimates DOJ is tapping phones, and very occasionally physically threatens the moreresistant from among the over 100 Navajo Nation

employees in the Department; a number of whomcower in the cotton rather than stand up to him.

The few who do resist are quicklysuppressed, get frustrated and leave, or are fired.Oddly, but stereotypically, some of the oppressed arehis biggest supporters, because they are either wellassimilated to his control, or they benefit from it anddo not want anyone to rock the boat.

He has also exploited the Nation for decades, making sure his family living verycomfortably in a nice Phoenix home five hoursaway benefit more than they legitimately should,and at the cost of the Din People. Although there isa Navajo hiring and promotion preference, this mancleverly avoids it and has displaced up to four thusqualified employees. Hes further insure d hes one of the highest paid employees on the Nation.

Over recent decades, t he Navajo head butlers who serve outside interests above their own people have been a few Navajos on the Council, atDOJ, in the Speakers office, in the Presidentsoffice, and in several Divisions of the ExecutiveBranch. They too, in their own ways, overlyaccommodate the outside masters and DOJoverseers who make up what many are calling theshadow government of the Navajo Nation. It isthis shadow government, and not the legitimate

Navajo government, that ultimately controls the Nation and its economic and political destinies ;which remain in a nose dive as the outside interests

parasite off the Din in multiple ways.Within the Nation itself, it is DOJ and

lawyers like Stan Pollack and Kathryn Hoover (and perhaps Henry Howe, now often named by the DWR agent, Tariq, as his helper) who head the shadowgovernment, which wrongly rules the Nation to the

benefit of outside political and economic interests.Todays DOJ, and the lawyers who preceded

them, serve and have served as a conduit, or funnel,through which outside control is exerted on economicand other issues critical to the Navajo Nation. Hereare two brief examples.

The first takes place in 1949. The Navajo Nations lawyers , with Interior Department support,told the Council it would be a great thing for them togive up to the surrounding states a large part of their sovereignty represented by the Nations civil,criminal, and court jurisdiction. The Council wasthereby duped into passing a resolution supportingthis idea, by a vote of 37 to 20. But only Congresscould finally approve the giveaway. It actually did.

Not long after that Navajo vote the U.S.Congress, relying on the Navajo Councils legislativesupport, passed federal legislation to accomplish thismajor step toward termination of Navajo government.


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A few Navajo leaders finally realized what washappening and desperately went to Washington to tryto put a halt to implementation of the federallegislation. They and their few supporters were ableto convince President Harry Truman to veto thelegislation. Incredibly, the Navajo Nation lawyerswho backed this travesty retained their jobs.

The second representative event took placein 1969. T he Navajo Nations lawyers again, andwith tremendous Interior Department support, toldthe Council how great it would be to accept thesupposedly super deal being offered them by theowners of the proposed Navajo Generating Station.(NGS is a coal-fired power plant then proposed to

be placed on the Reservation next to Page, Arizona,where it has now operated for over 30 years.)

The largest NGS owner, the U.S. Interior Department (which had, and still has, a huge conflictof interest), owns roughly 25% of the project.

Accepting the advice of their lawyers andInterior, the Navajo Council approved everything put

before them. Only recently has the full extent of howmuch the Navajos were cheated been realized. Itamounts to hundreds of $millions since 1969.

One of the smaller but most easily explainedexamples of the gross NGS cheating was the landlease fee paid to the Tribe for the 7,400 acres of Reservation land used by the highly profitable (for the owners) NGS project. The fee was set by theInterior Secretary ; again the Tribes trustee and headof the biggest NGS project owner Interior.

For use of the NGS-related land, the Tribewould receive a one-time payment, covering the next50 years, of 14 an acre. Therefore, they got a totalof only $1,000 for use of the 7,400 acres for 50 years,when they should have received $millions.

Thus, the entity which benefitted most fromcheating the Navajos was the one which owned thelargest interest in the NGS project, the faithfulInterior Department trustee of the Tribe.

The Nations lawyers were not fired andInterior was not sued for these gross violations of fiduciary and trust responsibilities. This was becauseof more cowering in the cotton and acquiescing inthe arrogant and dishonest influence of the Interior Department, other NGS owners, and disloyallawyers. Old habits, embedded in Indian countryfrom centuries of oppression, are hard to change.

Even when Navajo Nation lawyers of morerecent times have been caught at still serving outsideinterests above the those of the Tribe (and at the costof hundreds of $millions to the Din People), the

Navajo leadership eventually have backed off and letthe offending lawyers again including those likePollack and Hoover remain here and in control of

things as they were before. The most glaring recentexample involved the (thankfully) failed and

potentially disastrous water rights settlement act proposal of 2012, known by its U.S. Senatedesignation of S. 2109.

The se lawyers, and others, manipulate our government against itself and our People , observesChristine. Its the case of cowering in the cottonfields or fearing the White House overseer all over again. Yet i t doesnt have to continue, as we shouldrealize and change; like the Georgia butler finally didduring the Reagan administration.

Thus, the entire premise behind thisillegitimate shadow government on Navajo evolvesfrom the same seeds of racist denial of human self-determination that took place on the plantations in the19 th and 20 th centuries, in society as a whole in thoseeras, and even in the White House into the 1980s.Were still less than to those traitors in the shadowgovernment , says Christine, and we let it go on.

So, racism routinely happens here on Navajo, and elsewhere in Indian country, in the 21 st century. Again, we saw it in the patronizing,deceptive, and bigoted introduction of S. 2109 intothe U.S. Senate by Jon Kyl on Arizonas 100 th

birthday in 2012. He was supported secretly,illegally and in writing by the two white lawyers,Pollack and Hoover. Neither of these lawyers hasany Navajo Nation sovereignty and no right tounilaterally exercise it, yet they did so without

permission from, or even knowledge of, the Councilor the Navajo People when it came to S. 2109. TheDin were thereby denied their human rights of free,

prior, and informed consent. This, again, wasultimately and obviously a race-based denial.

Theres an Englis h term for that kind of treachery, if it were done to the United States . Its called treason. Why would these lawyers dare do it?Its because they look down on the Din, as doPeople like Jon Kyl. And, they believe they can getaway with it, even if caught. They bet on the Navajoleadership eventually reverting to the old pattern, andrelenting under the authority of arrogance and liesexercised by DOJ (and supported by the outsidemasters and a white-controlled system) much likethe field hands in Georgia did in the 1920s.

Its not the Councils fault, until they realizeexactly what s been going on for decades. The bizarre thing is, the shadow government (especiallythe lawyers and their internal agents) only has the

power we Navajos allow it to have , remarksChristine. The flow of that power from us to themcan be cut off in an instant, as soon as the truth of the

betrayal is recognized and acted upon. We havegenuine greatness among us, but it is greatnessinterrupted and stolen by the shadow government.


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What underlies this ongoing sedition andsabotage? Its r acism and greed, plain and simple ,adds Christine. Yet, again, it would stop if we, thePeople, and Window Rock would halt it.

The subversion was seen once more with therecent NGS lease renewal and Peabody Coal-relatedissues, and the condescending actions of DOJ and the

public relations people for NGS and the corporations.These outside interests, in union with DOJ,

had the audacity, for example, to repeatedly transportscores of Corporate employees to the Navajo CouncilChambers in fancy commercial buses, and subsidizeand feed them, so they (serving as political agents of

NGS and Peabody) could come in and take over the physical space and atmosphere of the Chambers andintimidate susceptible Council members.

They did similar intimidation of the smallnumbers of grassroots Din (including some non-English speaking elders) who were somehow able toget to the Chambers for the few seats left, and whoused their limited funds and transport to come andobserve and perhaps participate in their government s

process. But the process became dominated by NGSs, Peabody s, Salt River Project s, Jon Kyls ,and DOJs dishonest influences. (We dont have thetime or space to address the collateral issues of environmental, economic, and health racism observedhere and elsewhere in Indian country.)

Navajo water rights were also wrongly tiedto and much limited by the NGS lease renewalagreement. This too was bigoted, as it was done tokeep the Navajos down and prevent them frommoving forward on their Colorado River rights and

having an equal place at the table with the other competing Colorado River interests. But the Navajo

Nations lawyers and the usual outsiders conspired toonce again deceive the Nation into thinking it has tosit in the back of the bus on this extremely importantissue relating to Navajo economic and politicalsurvival. And, yes, the same lawyers were behindthis too, serving as that conduit of power and controlthe outside employs to minimize the Din People andmaximize the economies of the surrounding states.

The U.S. Congress would never let such athing happen to itself, yet the illegitimate shadowgovernment controlling the Navajo Nation helps

engineer it and keep the Nation in economic bondage; with a never-ending unemployment ratethat hovers at 50% and above, while the surroundingstates and the U.S. anguish over a mere 7.5%unemployment rate. The average unemployment rateduring the Great Depression was 17%. So we donthave an economic depression, but a chroniceconomic disaster continually imposed on us byoutsiders and our own lawyers, declares Christine.

Then why dont more Navajo people speak up? Many have. But those who do realize they runthe risk of retaliation from the racist and subversivemasters, overseers, head butlers, and inside agents of the shadow government.

As we write this, these same subversives areattempting one of their perennial efforts to terminateJacks jo b. (Theyve already demeaned, demoralized,and indirectly forced out his Navajo supervisor.)They do this to those who question or expose them.

In Jacks case , this time, its because he,with his supervisors consent, agreed to speak thetruth on Navajo water rights and S. 2109 to Councilmembers in the summer of 2012 at the Councilmembers request . Despite their declarations that noretaliation would be tolerated, it has been Jackscontinuous experience since then. DOJ and the restof the shadow government are at the heart of it.

The fear factor created by what they did toJacks supervisor and are doing to Jack is supposed tointimidate others who might think that human rights,equal rights, a democratic government, and a level

playing field are worth pursuing for the Din People.The question must be asked, why and how

can retaliation, intimidation, work harassment, andrelated activities go on with impunity? Once more, ithappened to Jacks boss, it happens to him, and ithappens to others. How is it that these

perpetratorslike the disloyal DOJ lawyers, a certainDivision director, one or two Executive Office staff,and DWRs Najam Tariq (described earlier, as one of DOJs agents) can go on doing these things?

What does this do to Navajo Sovereignty?

What does it do to free speech? What does it do toelected officials of the Navajo Nation and the DinPeople and their ability to obtain the truth and not bedenied their human rights of free, prior, and informedconsent. It destroys all of these.

Can the destruction be countered?Yes, and its not that difficult . It requires

exercising Navajo sovereignty for the Tribe itself,and championing Din rights and self-determination.This will involve the firing and/or voting out of thetraitors who implement the racist cloud of illegitimatecontrol that so contaminates the Navajo Nation fromthe outside (i.e., from the plantation masters) and

from the inside (i.e., by the overseers, head butlers,and agents of the illegitimate shadow government) .These inside people are insurgents, in basic

rebellion against the Din and our lawfullyestablished government. They must be removed if the Din are to survive as a Native Nation. We canforgive the insurgents their racist sins, but they cannever again be empowered over the Din People.Investigations for collateral and other crimes mustalso be initiated now. Christine C. Benally.

racism, window rock, retaliation, & rebellion

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