Christine C. Benally and Jack Utter

By Christine C. Benally and Jack Utter

Racism & Movies

Inspired by NextIndigenousGeneration

“Art imitates life” is a common saying.  We see the idea most often, perhaps, in motion pictures. A recent film and an even more current one, Django and The Butler, respectively,  address racism against black Americans.   We‟ve watched both films, the latter on Memorial Day  of this year.  It was  emotionally  tough for Jack because  of the too close reminder  of the 1950s and ’60s South in which he  grew up.  It troubled Christine most because of subtle comparisons she made with today’s Navajo Nation. Django  is a  fictional  parody of  a  brutal example of  cotton plantation slavery in the mid-1800s.  It ends with gratifying though equally brutal revenge by a gun-toting and explosives-wielding freed slave just before the Civil War. Django has the typical white master  of a plantation; and a white overseer, or foreman.  It also has a head slave butler who keeps all the other slaves in line through  their  fear  of  him and the power he exerts on behalf of the white master.  The treacherous butler can have slaves flogged, beaten, and even killed.  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 been unconstitutional since 1865, but racism obviously has not. The black workers on the plantation are still under great fear of job loss, intimidation, and perhaps much worse  retaliation by the white  plantation overseer―and others in the white-controlled political and legal system in the Deep South at that time. The overseer is, as well, the son of the white woman who owns the plantation.  He wears a pistol as he patrols the black workers picking cotton in the fields.  One day he takes a black worker‟s wife―from next to her husband  and little son while they’re working in a cotton field―and rapes her in a nearby shack.  The husband and the other workers, despite knowing and hearing what‟s happening, do nothing.  The son, warned by his dad not to cross the overseer, asks why his father doesn‟t 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.  The overseer 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, and cower back into the  cotton rows.  The dead man is later buried in a makeshift  hole by the field hands.  
This was ordered by the plantation owner, a witness to the killing, and the murder goes unreported.  
The little boy―about  eight  years old, and whose mother loses her mind―is taken to live in the owner’s house where he is  strictly  raised  to be a house servant.  Years later he leaves, and as an adult works his way north to Washington, D.C., where he becomes a waiter in one of the fanciest hotels in town.  He is so good at his job that in the mid-1950s he’s hired to be a butler in the White House.  

The butler works there originally for President Eisenhower, and  on  into the  time of the Reagan Administration.  Then he retires.  Restrained but still degrading racism is experienced in the White House for most of the nearly 30 years of his employment.  Two examples are the lower pay and no promotions for black staff, when compared to white 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 to question 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 goes before the racist white  equivalent of an “overseer” of the White House staff.   The butler is denied his request.   He only  succeeds with an intervention by Mr. Reagan who, nonetheless, is not entirely sympathetic to issues of racial equality in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Window Rock, Retaliation, & Rebellion

Window Rock, the Navajo Nation capital, is a symbol of Navajo, or Diné, government; like Washington D.C. is for the United States.

There  are  perceivable parallels between the settings and racism of the films just referred to and what has happened and is happening to  the Navajo Nation, and with the Diné People of today.

Since at least the 1930s, the Navajo Nation has been like a big money-making  “plantation” for outside interests.  It’s 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  also include the Tribe’s “trustee,” the federal government, and its primary agent, the Interior Department.

The white overseers for the Navajo Nation are now, and have been, made up of certain lawyers in the Navajo Department of Justice (DOJ),  and sometimes in the Legislative Branch,  who  further influence outcomes through  their  own  Navajo and non-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 Navajo livestock  water and  millions of Navajo dollars; a substantial amount  of  which he misapplies in ways that serve him politically, and perhaps otherwise. There is another highly relevant phenomenon about him. Jack, who also works in the DWR, has observed how closely this agent of DOJ compares to the white controllers of African Americans when, right after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the controllers  had  to  change their ways.  They cleverly modified their techniques of 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, psychologically dominates,  intimates DOJ is tapping phones,  and—very occasionally—physically threatens the  more resistant from among  the over 100 Navajo  Nation employees  in the Department;  a number of  whom “cower in the cotton” rather than stand up to him.

The few who do  resist  are quickly suppressed, get frustrated and leave,  or  are fired.  Oddly, but stereotypically, some of the oppressed are his biggest “supporters,” because they are either well assimilated to his control, or they benefit from it and do not want anyone to rock the boat.  

He has also exploited the Nation for decades, making sure  his family―living  very comfortably in a nice Phoenix  home five hours away―benefit  more than they legitimately should, and at the cost of the Diné People.  Although there is a Navajo hiring and promotion preference, this man cleverly avoids it  and has  displaced  up to four  thus qualified employees.  He’s further insured he’s one of the highest paid employees on the Nation.

Over recent decades, the Navajo “head butlers”―who serve outside interests above their own people―have been a few Navajos on the Council, at DOJ,  in the Speaker’s office,  in the President’s office, and in  several Divisions of the Executive Branch.   They  too, in their own ways, overly accommodate the  outside  “masters” and DOJ overseers who make up what many are calling the “shadow government” of the Navajo Nation.  It is this 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 Diné 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 shadow government, which wrongly rules the Nation to the benefit of outside political and economic interests.

Today’s DOJ, and the lawyers who preceded them, serve and have served as a conduit, or funnel, through which outside control is exerted on economic and other issues critical to the Navajo Nation.  Here are two brief examples.  

The first takes place in 1949.  The Navajo Nation’s lawyers, with Interior Department support, told the Council it would be a great thing for them to give up to the surrounding states a large part of their sovereignty represented by the Nation‟s civil, criminal, and court jurisdiction.  The Council was thereby  duped  into passing a resolution supporting this idea, by a vote of 37 to 20.  But only Congress could finally approve the giveaway.  It actually did.  Not long after that  Navajo vote the U.S. Congress, relying on the Navajo Council’s legislative support, passed federal legislation to accomplish this major step toward termination of Navajo government.  A few Navajo leaders finally realized what was happening and desperately went to Washington to try to put a halt to  implementation of  the federal legislation.  They and their few supporters were able to convince President Harry Truman to veto the

legislation. Incredibly, the  Navajo Nation  lawyers who backed this travesty retained their jobs.

The second representative event took place in 1969.  The Navajo Nation’s lawyers again,  and with tremendous Interior Department support, told the Council how great it would be to accept the supposedly  super deal being offered them by the owners 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 conflict of interest),  owns roughly 25%  of the project.  Accepting the advice of their lawyers and Interior, the Navajo Council approved everything put before them.  Only recently has the full extent of how much the  Navajos’  were cheated been realized.   It amounts to hundreds of $millions since 1969. One of the smaller but most easily explained examples of the gross  NGS  cheating was the land lease 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 the Interior Secretary; again the Tribe’s trustee and head of the biggest NGS project owner―Interior. For use of the NGS-related land, the Tribe would receive a one-time payment, covering the next 50 years, of 14¢ an acre.  Therefore, they got a total of 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 from cheating the Navajos was the one which owned  the largest interest in  the NGS project, the  faithful Interior Department trustee of the Tribe.  

The Nation‟s lawyers were not fired and Interior was not  sued for these gross violations of fiduciary and trust responsibilities.  This was because of more “cowering in the cotton” and acquiescing in the arrogant and dishonest influence of the Interior Department, other NGS owners, and disloyal lawyers.   Old habits, embedded  in Indian country from centuries of oppression, are hard to change.

Even when Navajo Nation lawyers of more recent times have been caught at still serving outside interests above the those of the Tribe (and at the cost of hundreds of  $millions to the Diné People), the Navajo leadership eventually have backed off and let the offending lawyers―again including those like Pollack and Hoover―remain here and  in  control of things as they were before.  The most glaring recent example involved  the (thankfully) failed and potentially disastrous  water rights settlement act proposal  of 2012, known by its U.S.  Senate

designation of “S. 2109.”

“These lawyers, and others, manipulate our government against itself and  our People,” observes Christine. “It’s the case of ‘cowering in the  cotton fields’ or ‘fearing the White House overseer’ all over again.  Yet it doesn’t have to continue, as we should realize and change; like the Georgia Butler finally did during the Reagan administration.”

Thus, the  entire premise behind  this illegitimate  shadow government  on Navajo  evolves from the same seeds of racist denial of human selfdetermination that took place on the plantations in the 19th and 20th eras, and even in the White House into  the 1980s. “We’re still ‘less than’ to those traitors in the shadow government,” says Christine, “and we let it go on.”

So, racism  routinely happens here  on Navajo, and elsewhere in Indian country, in the 21 century.   Again, we saw it  in the patronizing, deceptive, and  bigoted introduction of S. 2109 into the U.S. Senate by Jon Kyl on Arizona’s 100 birthday in  2012.   He was supported―secretly, illegally and  in writing―by the two  white lawyers, Pollack and Hoover.  Neither  of these lawyers  has any Navajo Nation sovereignty and no right to unilaterally  exercise it, yet they did so without permission from, or even knowledge of, the Council or the Navajo People when it came to S. 2109. The Diné were thereby denied their human rights of free, prior, and informed consent.  This, again,  was ultimately and obviously a race-based denial. There’s an English term for that kind of treachery, if it were done to the United States.  It’s called treason.  Why would these lawyers dare do it?  

It’s because they  look down on the Diné, as do People like Jon Kyl.  And, they believe they can get away with it, even if caught.  They bet on the Navajo leadership eventually reverting to the old pattern, and relenting under the authority of arrogance and  lies exercised by DOJ (and supported by the outside “masters‟ and  a  white-controlled system) much like the field hands in Georgia did in the 1920s.  

It’s not the Council’s fault, until they realize exactly what’s  been going on for decades.  “The bizarre thing is, the shadow government (especially the lawyers and their internal agents) only  has the power we Navajos allow it to have,” remarks Christine.  “The flow of that power from us to them can be cut off in an instant, as soon as the truth of the betrayal  is recognized and acted  upon.  We have genuine greatness among us, but it is greatness interrupted and stolen by the shadow government.”

What underlies this ongoing  sedition and sabotage? “It‟s racism and greed, plain and simple,” adds Christine.  “Yet, again, it would stop if we, the People, and Window Rock would halt it.”

The subversion was seen once more with the recent NGS lease renewal  and Peabody Coal-related issues, 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 transport scores of Corporate employees to the Navajo Council Chambers in fancy commercial buses, and subsidize and 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 and intimidate susceptible Council members.   

They did similar intimidation  of the small numbers of grassroots  Diné (including  some  non English speaking elders) who were somehow able to get to the Chambers for the few seats left, and who used their  limited  funds and transport to come and observe and perhaps participate in their government‟s process.  But the process became  dominated by NGS’s, Peabody’s, Salt River Project’s,  Jon Kyl’s,

and DOJ’s dishonest influences.  (We don‟t have the time or space to address the collateral  issues of environmental, economic, and health racism observed here and elsewhere in Indian country.)

Navajo water rights were also wrongly tied to and  much  limited by the  NGS  lease renewal agreement.  This too was  bigoted, as it was done to keep  the  Navajos down and prevent them from moving forward on their Colorado River rights and having an equal place at the table with the other competing Colorado River interests.   But the Navajo Nation’s lawyers and the usual outsiders conspired to once again deceive the Nation into thinking it has to sit in the back of the bus on this extremely important issue relating to Navajo economic and political survival.  And, yes, the same lawyers were behind this too, serving as that conduit of power and control the outside employs to minimize the Diné People and maximize the economies of the surrounding states.  

The U.S. Congress would never let such a thing happen to itself, yet  the illegitimate shadow government controlling  the Navajo Nation helps engineer it and  keep the Nation in economic bondage; with a never-ending unemployment rate

that hovers at 50% and above, while the surrounding states and the U.S.  anguish over a  mere  7.5% unemployment rate.  The average unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 17%.

“So we don’t have an economic depression, but a chronic economic disaster  continually  imposed on us by outsiders and our own lawyers,” declares Christine.

Then why don’t more Navajo people speak up?  Many have.  But those who do realize they run the risk of retaliation from the racist and subversive “masters, overseers, head butlers, and inside agents’ of the shadow government.

As we write this, these same subversives are attempting one of their perennial efforts to terminate Jack’s job. (They’ve already demeaned, demoralized,

and  indirectly  forced out his Navajo supervisor.)  

They do this to those who question or expose them.  In Jack’s case, this time, it’s because he, with his supervisor’s  consent, agreed to speak the truth on Navajo water rights and S. 2109 to Council members in the  summer of 2012―at the Council members’ request.  Despite their declarations that no retaliation would be tolerated, it has been Jack’s continuous experience since then.  DOJ and the rest

of the shadow government are at the heart of it. The fear factor created by what they did to Jack’s supervisor and are doing to Jack is supposed to intimidate others who might think that human rights, equal rights, a democratic government, and a level playing field are worth pursuing for the Diné People.

The question must be asked, why and how can retaliation, intimidation, work harassment, and related activities go on with impunity?  Once more, it happened to Jack’s boss, it happens to him,  and it happens to others.  How is it  that  these

perpetrators―like the disloyal DOJ lawyers, a certain Division director, one or two Executive Office staff, and DWR’s Najam Tariq (described earlier, as one of

DOJ’s 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 to elected officials of the Navajo Nation and the Diné People and their ability to obtain the truth and not be denied their human rights of free, prior, and informed consent.   It destroys all of these.

Can the destruction be countered?

Yes, and it’s not that difficult.  It requires exercising  Navajo  sovereignty for the Tribe  itself, and championing Diné rights and self-determination.  

This will involve the firing  and/or voting out  of the traitors who implement the racist cloud of illegitimate control that so contaminates the Navajo Nation from the 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 Diné and our lawfully established government.  They must  be  removed  if the Diné are to survive as a Native Nation.  We can forgive the insurgents their racist sins, but they can never again be empowered over the Diné People.  Investigations  for collateral and other crimes  must also be initiated—now.”  Christine C. Benally.