Revolt on the Reservation

The treaty they signed with the white man's government in 1868 promised the Navajos sovereignty within their reservation for as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run. Since then, 100 years have swept across the parched Arizona buttes. Now the grass grows sparsely, and water must be hauled from distant wells. As the Navajos' population expands, opportunities shrink. Young men go away. Elders lose esteem. By passed by white progress, the Navajos clutch the tatters of their treaty promises and watch the old ways die.

Indian Siege. When the Great White Father, in the guise of the Office of Economic Opportunity, opened a legal-services office on the reservation two years ago, the OEO lawyers handled such mi nor matters as land titles and grazing rights. But soon the lawyers were be sieged by Indians seeking a full range of legal advice. When that advice was given, it was other Indians who objected. To the tribal council, the Navajos' traditional rulers, the lawyers with their angry Indian clients were a forked-tongued threat.

Risking the wrath of the elders, the lawyers expanded their activities whenever they were able to. How could Navajos get a square deal in tribal courts, they asked, when tradition banned lawyers? The war dance really began when the lawyers helped organize a recall election to oust a reservation community's school board.

At a tribal advisory council meeting, 58-year-old Annie Wauneka, the council's first squaw, rose to ask if the 1968 Civil Rights Act forbade the tribe to banish unwanted whites from the reservation. When he heard her question, local OEO Chief Ted Mitchell, 32, laughed sardonically. To Mrs. Wauneka, Mitchell's laugh was an insult. The next time she saw him, she snapped: "You ready to laugh some more?" Then she smacked the Harvard Law School graduate several times across the face. The following day, two Navajo policemen, acting on council orders, packed Mitchell into his pickup truck and hustled him off the reservation.

On to Court. While younger Navajos staged a revolt, picketing the council and poking fun at Annie Wauneka, Mitchell's office backed up its embattled attorney and went to court to fight the ouster order. Ten dissident Indians joined the suit, and the tribal council was left in an untenable position no matter who won. Since 1924, when Congress decided that American Indians are U.S. citizens, Navajos and other Indians have been both tribal citizens and Americans. Now their rights as members of each group had been thrust into conflict. To oust Mitchell would leave legal aid agencies powerless to help individual Indians fight tribal governments for their rights. On the other hand, if the tribal council were forbidden to say whether white men could come or go on Navajo land, as their treaty specifically guaranteed, their basic rights to their reservation might be critically impaired.

Federal Judge Walter E. Craig's decision last week said that Mitchell and other non-Indians on the reservation deserve assurance that they will not be "summarily ejected because of the disfavor of the ruling segment of the tribe" without due process of law. Mitchell did not get due process, said the judge, because the tribe's edict was ex post facto, banishing the lawyer for deeds declared unlawful only after he performed them. Moreover, said the judge, among its other offenses against due process, the tribe abridged Mitchell's freedom of speech and that of his clients as well. Why must the tribe abide by these provisions of the white man's Bill of Rights? Because, ruled the judge, the 1968 Civil Rights Act categorically says so. As expected, the Navajo council quickly announced an appeal.

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