Nation was meant to evolve, past leaders say

WINDOW ROCK, May 8, 2008

The Navajo Nation government was designed to evolve with the people and the times.

However, nearly 20 years after the current government system was established, little has happened to initiate change.

Or in another word: "Reform."

Reducing the Navajo Nation Council, part of President Joe Shirley Jr.'s government reform initiative, was once considered inevitable when the tribal government system was revised in 1989, said leaders who played a significant role in the revision.

The Navajo government system was always intended as a work in progress that the people could revise and approve through the years. However, such efforts seemed to have gotten lost over the years.

"A true government reform has to be ongoing," said Peterson Zah, who became the Navajo Nation's first elected president in 1991, after the 1989 reorganization that separated the council from the tribal chairman, who then re-titled as president.

"This is a serious business," Zah said, "this is our government we are talking about: A government by the people."

Both Zah and state Sen. Albert Hale, D-Window Rock, who drafted the amendments to Title 2 of the tribal code that reorganized the government, say the intent has always been to reduce the council's numbers.

They both even questioned why it was not done sooner.

However, Zah said Shirley's initiative lacks a significant component to government reform, namely the voice of the people, independent from a governmental body.

"You can't have a government reform commission under the speaker's office, he would have full control where he would appoint all of the members and then say, 'Hey, reform us,'" Zah said. "The same thing applies to the president and the executive branch."

Zah described exactly the predicament now facing the Navajo Nation.

Under Shirley's initiative, he has assembled a core group for his reform task force. Of the eight members selected, five are staff members from the president's office.

Shirley, in an interview Wednesday, said there are no plans to include members of the legislative branch in the task force, but he did not dismiss the notion. He added that the initiative is based entirely on voter approval.

"The people will have been afforded the opportunity to vote 'yea' or 'nay,'" Shirley said. "If enough say yes, I don't see how that cannot be the people voicing their opinion."

In December, the council voted to reorganize the Navajo Government Development Commission - which was established in 1984 by Zah to incite reform referendums such as Shirley's - so that it functioned under the speaker's office.

Zah designed the commission so it was made up of several representatives including from each agency council, a student from then-Navajo Community College, the chairman's office and the public-at-large. Together, the group would be fully controlled by local people and would not fall under any government branch.

"That way you can have a lot of legitimacy in trying to put some real reform into what the government was doing or not doing," Zah said. "The local people would have a say in how the government is reformed."

Zah envisioned a commission that would meet and hear grievances and concerns from tribal citizenry. It would then discuss those matters and, if need be, institute referendum efforts to make change.

For instance, any effort to reform the council by reducing its members should have come from the commission years ago.

The commission would not have to seek approval from the council or the president, Zah said, explaining its quasi-independent status.

Still, the commission remained dormant through much of the past 20 years. When Speaker Lawrence T. Morgan sponsored a bill last year to reorganize the commission and place it under his office, the leading argument in favor of the measure was that the commission had done little in recent years.

"They've been there 20 years," said Hale, who also served as president from 1995 to 1998. "Something was going on, the commission was not doing its job. It wasn't effective."

During his time leading the tribe, Hale advocated for local empowerment: moving authority to the communities. The current system gives the council in Window Rock authority over even the smallest projects in rural communities hundreds of miles away.

By pushing local empowerment, it was one way to prepare for a council reduction, Hale said.

"If we could move a lot of that authority out to the local communities, why would we need 88 members?" Hale said. "The central government's main function is to deal with issues that are national in nature."

The local communities should handle general items, Hale said.

"The current system is perpetuating dependency, its forcing chapters to be dependent on the central government," Hale said. "If there's a water well that needs to be fixed, we don't do it ourselves because there is no money or resources to do it. Instead we pass resolutions and give it to the delegates in Window Rock."

As a lawyer, Hale was commissioned to study the Navajo government in the 1980s in an effort to find and eliminate potential areas where the law could be abused.

Out of that study, in which he discovered the chairman held too much power, Hale helped draft the tribal code amendments that separated the executive and legislative branches of government.

The intention has always been that the tribal code would be revisited and revised through time, Hale said.

Specifically, the intent was always to take such revisions to the public, to finally give the Navajo Nation government - originally established by the BIA in 1922 - the approval that it has been lacking in the past.

"Part of the 1990 amendment was also to give charge to the government development commission to go out to the communities and get info from the people on the kind of government that they would like to see," Hale said. "The people have never consented and this was a way to overcome that."

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