Reservation Government Structures
What does “government” mean?
Revised January 30, 2024
The word “government” is unexpectedly difficult to explain. It is a catch-all word that means different things depending on the purpose for which the government was formed. Governmental inner workings and structures grow out of or are designed for their specific governing purpose.
Single function “governmental” entities, like school or land boards, perform to specific limited purpose. Otherwise, they may be multi-function entities that perform to a layer or tier like an instrument in a concert with other tiers organized by purpose, including geographical area, or community size. The closer the tier is to community wishes and aspirations, the more flexible, adaptable and quick that government is, and more resourced and creative it has to be. A governmental tier or layer that floats above geographic areas and communities, whose purpose is to provide a unifying “glue” like the United Nations (member nations) and the U.S. Federal Government (member states), would be more fixed, lumbering, and inflexible.
As a unifying entity floating above geographic communities, the federal government has fixed rather than creative functions. It has to be dependable and accountable rather than dynamic, fixed task-driven rather than evolving. Filled with internal firewalls, it is complexly compartmentalized. The federal government has been likened to a giant sedimentary rock, with layers upon of layers of programs that have built up over time. There are so many federal programs and regulations, and so little coordination between them, that they work against each other. For federal departments to even talk to each other to get a joint project done long-term, there must be agreements because the departments are separate beings (for accountability reasons). Unless empowered separately by legislation, compartmentalized programs are unable to answer as a single being. For the sake of unity, the federal government is cumbersome and inflexible by design. Even in modern times, it has only gained abilities to manage natural resources on public land, not govern distinct communities. Public land management has no expectation of large population increases, nor significant adjustments for human activity that will grow and keep growing.
Such limitations in the toolkit of the federal government means there must be other bodies that perform direct government. A fundamental tool for any government is power to support arrangements of human activity when they use land. The Navajo Nation has not been able to readily support such arrangements, because the U.S. asserts colonizing controls over reservation land under the “doctrine of discovery” and the property clause of the U.S. Constitution allowing it to regulate all federal land.
Formed to provide the “glue” for the union of the United States, the federal government (U.S.) initially generated much of its income through disposal of land. Article 4, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, provided this ability over federal lands. As the U.S. expanded west, the doctrine of discovery provided it exclusive rights to sell, transfer and exchange lands possessed by tribes but not yet settled by Europeans, almost all of it in the West. When treaties were signed which confined tribes to reservations, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the treaties imposed trust responsibilities on the United States to provide “fiduciary,” or “guardian to ward” services, while not requiring the U.S. to perform the functions of an actual government. Trust responsibility services are frequently mistaken for government.
Under the doctrine of inherent tribal sovereignty, tribes “govern” themselves. See the Marshall Trilogy. In its most basic sense, tribes are free to honor and preserve their cultures and traditional ways of life. In practice, the doctrine of inherent tribal sovereignty has been used by the federal government to evade responsibilities of government, including the building of infrastructure that would provide reservation communities with a standard of living comparable to off-reservation communities. It has also allowed the federal government to evade responsibility for destroying fundamental arrangements of tribal life primarily via land regulations that have broken up family patterns and ended matriarchal management. (The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) having added land regulatory tasks to the BIA’s treaty trust responsibilities, softened the increased restrictions by recognizing tribes as “governments” without practical freedoms to self-determine). Historically, the U.S. Army or Indian Agent would designate as the governing body those tribal leaders who were willing to work with them. Able to negotiate and assist in trade and the handling of welfare goods and services, this tribal governing body would help keep the reservation under control. For many years, this was “trust responsibility” on the federal government’s terms, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a small program within the Department of the Interior designated to fulfill this role. Over time, lawsuits would keep raising the minimum required of trust responsibility, without addressing what supports must be given for a tribal self-determined government separate and apart from “trust responsibility,” on a tribe’s terms. As of 2023, Navajo Nation tribal courts appear to have given up trying to empower a self-determined governing framework.
Since 1974, a federal policy of tribal self-determination and self-government appears to encourage tribes to self-determine (tribal sovereignty) without federal funding, and/or enter contracts with the federal government to become paid “delegees” or agents of federal services (considered tribal “self-government” contracts). Legal scholars and even federal agencies themselves have called this a dichotomy of choice for tribes, which creates only confusion. A tribe might either choose a traditional culture type of government without money while the federal government keeps providing treaty trust services; or choose to act as paid federal agents enforcing federal regulations with the burden of treaty trust duties shifted to the tribe. The Navajo Nation has chosen tribal contracting with the BIA, which is no more than a program among many within the DOI. To implement and support the complicated accounting needed for this contracting, the Navajo Nation adopted the highly compartmentalized federal governmental system as the model for tribal government. Under this now tribal system, tasks previously done in a single program (BIA) became heavily compartmentalized yet concentrated in a governmental tier inaccessible to local communities.
The Navajo Nation may now be growing in awareness that the federal government system, by design, lacks capacity to govern distinct communities. Even given the historical low bar, since 1824 the BIA has always bitten off more than it can chew, and it has given the impression of undertaking huge complexities without accomplishing much for human beings. The Office of Navajo-Hopi Indian Relocation (ONHIR) established by Congress in 1974 has given the impression of immense spending and building on the Navajo Nation, but also failed.
Governing means infrastructure. On the Navajo Nation, the first governmental infrastructures were treaty-based forts and trading posts that brought the military, traders, and Indian Agents. After the Indian Reorganization Act (I.R.A.) came jobs and micro-infrastructure building, like small wells, dirt dams, and graded roads through the Civil Conservation Corp, Indian Division (CCC). The CCC simply vanished in 1942. Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act annual money came next after WWII. There have been BIA irrigation and road projects, state highway projects, ONHIR projects, and grant-funded projects, giving the impression that infrastructure is slowly being taken care of by someone. Yet today, 37% of reservation homes, or 18,000 out of 48,000 homes, lack electricity. 30% live without running water. Roads and driveways are mud-ridden. In 2023, the 4,300 Chinle community experienced its worst flood in history when waters topped old CCC berms and dirt dams. In 2016, the Arizona Republic newspaper discovered a Navajo Housing Tragedy, with more than 34,000 tribal families lacking housing, up from 21,000 the previous decade, in spite of billions of designated public housing funds. During COVID, even temporary housing could not be received by local communities from philanthropic groups, due to conflicting land regulations. Diné familial infrastructure–the basis of communal management–is conflict-ridden.
What “government” should mean on the tribal reservation of the Navajo Nation is deeply felt among its people. Diné communities try to explain government by using the story of relationships, k’é, between living beings including Mother Earth, the sun, the stars and the sky, symbolized by moccasins on our feet. All living beings are stewards together. Separately, human beings know what we’ve been given, cared for generation upon generation, and lost. We are aware of profound disorder due to improper relations with land and, therefore, with all beings. We are aware of the profound blessings when caring for the land and land cares for us. These are spoken of again and again at meetings discussing what needs to be done to make government work. Rarely is this understood by those responsible for either tribal or federal government. The meaning of what Diné communities try to explain, almost always in Diné bizaad but sometimes translated into English, is never translated into a governmental system as those tasked with establishing such systems would understand. The very principle of k’é creates a sense of trust that mistakes will be reversed by those in the position to reverse them, and tools (of government) given by those governing have worked elsewhere and will work here. Mistakes of the federal government on the Navajo Nation have long been felt since even before the reservation boundaries were set. Yet, the long-held thought is that the governmental tools themselves must be sound and must be able to work if in the right hands.
Those of us who have worked as judges and lawyers in Navajo Nation government, and lived intergenerationally within reservation communities, see the need to map the systems from which we are expected to choose, especially their origins and purpose. If we see clearly an intended purpose and how a system fulfills it, we may then be free to self-determine our government.
Until the beginning of the 20th Century, the federal government had not undertaken any direct management role over land or communities. Regarding its land powers in the U.S. Constitution, it previously merely transferred, exchanged and sold land. On reservations, it provided basic welfare and trust services while building only infrastructures minimally needed for its own military, agents, and trade. The federal government’s lack of governing capacity was clear in the absence of paved roads in the District of Columbia as late as 1870. In the 20th Century with the establishment of national parks, monuments, rivers and forests, it became a land manager for the first time. In 1916, the Organic Act of the National Park Service was enacted as a living law that could be amended year to year. This was to accommodate the unpreparedness of the federal government to govern its lands. The Organic Act was designed to quickly change as accommodations were needed, and there were multiple revisions across years. Programs managing public lands, and providing trust services to tribal trust lands, are all in the Department of the Interior. A great deal of care and revision has been put into public land laws whose primary purpose is to limit the human footprint while spending within an administrative budget. Swiftly, a “multiple use sustainable yield” idea evolved on public lands to make land management self-sustainable, an idea that has not yet penetrated the Navajo Nation. Federal land regulations–geared to limit the human footprint–view human beings as potential mischief makers, not communal stewards. It is often felt that the management policies for public lands are also used for tribal reservations, with human beings merely an afterthought.
Successful local governments are integrated and agile. Such governments fulfill routine community needs while also fulfilling the community’s vision for wellness and permanence. The skillsets, resources, and inner workings of a local, tribal or community government are distinct from a body such as the federal government which, to this day, has no systemic ability to manage distinct communities. Yet, the Navajo Nation has modeled itself on the federal government since 1989.
Tribal knowledge holders and community members need support to express what government is, because the language that would make k’é understandable to our lawyers has not yet been found. It can only be imagined the extent to which the formation of a Navajo Nation tribal government, reflecting tribal abilities and actual tribal community practices, has been frustrated by a mistaken impression of the federal government’s purpose for existing.
The U.S. Army (Cavalry), was the first known federal “government,” first stationed at Ft. Defiance in 1851. They later relocated to Ft. Wingate, policing the entire reservation until withdrawing completely in 1910.
Purpose: to quell, push westwards and ultimately break the power of Indian tribes in order to clear territory. “Cleared” territory grew to continental proportions, involving immense distances, limited resources and far-flung operations. The military reorganized to a territorial-based administrative structure with designated divisions, departments, and districts, with frequent organization modifications, boundary rearrangements, and transfers of troops and posts to meet changing conditions.
The army appeared to make decisions, even choosing who they would deal with or speak to (a choice that would normally be made by matriarchs temporarily); they could spare or destroy, starve or feed, and at Bosque Redondo, decide what individuals would be placed together and in what arrangement. With the Indian Agent, they decided who could trade outside the reservation. They could sign Treaties.
Below is a brief history of federal Indian agencies and agents 1776-1849. The history stops at 1849 with the relocation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) from the Department of War to a newly created Department of the Interior.
Indians, Land Title, War Department and Purpose of the Union
First Indian Commissioner
In July 1775, the Continental Congress established a standing committee to manage Indian affairs on behalf of the United Colonies, consisting of three departments: one for the Six Nations, one for the Indians of the Ohio country, and one for the southern tribes, primarily to keep them out of the revolutionary war. Benjamin Franklin was the first Indian Commissioner. The commissioners could appoint agents and seize any person inciting the Indians to become enemies to the American colonies. The Continental Congress appropriated funds for subsistence level Indian goods, regulation of trade licenses; and for schoolmasters and ministers. Historic Review of Indians in the United States.
Sole right over Indians
In 1776, the United States of America, came into being under which the newly developed central government shared power with the states. In the Articles of Confederation, the central government was empowered with “sole and exclusive right” to regulate Indian affairs, to wage war and peace, conduct diplomatic relations, requisition men and money from the states, and coin and borrow money. The states were empowered to enforce laws, regulate commerce, administer justice, and levy taxes. (The Indian Affairs Clause from the Articles of Confederation failed to appear in the Constitution).
Needing help in the revolutionary war, in 1778 Congress authorized the employment of Indians in the army “if General Washington thinks it prudent and proper.“ Relations with Indians were dealt with at length in the Albany Plan for Union suggested by Benjamin Franklin in 1754, suggesting a centralized Union that would “make all purchases from the Indians for the crown of all lands not within the bounds of particular colonies,” and make all laws regulating Indian trade, including regulation of the destructive commerce in rum and whiskey “supplyed (to Indians) by the traders in vast and almost incredible quantities” (which Franklin considered a form of genocide). Treaties, the appointment of government agents and superintendents to serve as intermediaries between Native Americans and the government, and raising and arming troops to put down insurrections, are examples of strategies that Congress used to open areas for further white settlement, either by maintaining peace or waging war.
U.S. Political weakness, and western expansion
Reacting to the pressure of white settlers anxious for new land, Congress sought treaties with Native Americans to insure the safety of the settlers, and to obtain clear title for the land. Although treaties were usually negotiated in good faith, Congress found itself politically unwilling and actually unable to halt illegal settlement of Indian lands by white settlers.
Treaties, War Department, and U.S. empty treasury
When the War Department was created in 1780, Indian affairs formally came under the charge of the Secretary of War and so remained until the Department of the Interior was created in 1849. War Department Indian Agents were army officers and sometimes civilians, responsible to pay out tribal annuities supported by two clerks. As Native Americans became dependent for arms, ammunition, and clothing, Ben Franklin noted that there was prohibitive expense in directly managing Indian trade and relations, and such costs should be shifted to the colonies. The Secretary of War, backed by a militia, marched into places as directed by the Indian commissioner for negotiation of treaties. In 1783, the Secretary was ordered by Congress to notify Indian nations on the frontier that the U.S. was disposed to enter into friendly treaty with the different tribes after attempting, and failing, to treaty with tribes in a single convention. In 1787, cash-poor and in response to a report from the Secretary of War, Congress retreated from its more aggressive attitude towards Native American lands, and promised to strive for “peace with the Indians, provided it can be obtained and preserved consistently with the justice and dignity of the nation.” The Treaty era that ended in 1871 resulted in 360 treaties and almost endless confusion.
Indian districts, Indian superintendents, and state Indian commissioners
In 1784, Congress passed an ordinance establishing a northern district of tribes north of the Ohio and west of the Hudson River, and a southern district, of tribes south of the Ohio each with an Indian superintendent answerable to the Secretary of War and serving 2-year terms to act in connection with the authorities of the states. He was empowered to give bonds and transact business at U.S. military outposts, installing deputies to live in vicinities best to facilitate the regulation of Indian trade. In 1787, Congress empowered states to appoint their own state Indian commissioners. In some cases, these positions joined to make treaties. From 1798 to 1834, Indian superintendents, agents, and traders were appointed by the U.S. President, after which they were appointed by Congress. Ultimately, the Indian districts were controlled by their resident Indian agents.
War Department Indian Bureau and organic law for federal Indian agencies
On March 11, 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs was created within the War Department. In 1834, Congress created Indian districts placed under the charge of War Department officers, defined the duties of superintendents and agents, provided for interpreters and employees, and empowered the President to prescribe necessary rules and regulations in what would be the organic law for the later formation of agencies in an unnamed department of Indian affairs. In 1836, the Indian Office became a “bureau” still under the War Department, which prescribed a new set of regulations to govern the business of the Indian office and the duties of the commissioner. There was almost complete military control of Indian affairs. In 1837, Army officers became administrative agents. With westward settlement, an Indian service commissioner position specifically to support curtailment of Indian roaming grounds, was created by Congress in 1839. However, a report against this military-based system was issued by a congressional committee in 1842 (see Senate Report No. 693, Forty-filth Congress, third session).
Department of the Interior
In 1848, Congress recommended the transfer of the Indian office from the War Department to a prospective Interior Department, by reason of the war with Mexico and the acquisition of new territory containing many thousands of Indians.
(Note that in 1846, Mexican territory in New Mexico and Colorado had come under U.S. Army control, which is the first known encounter of Diné with the federal government. Within 3 years, the U.S. Army would attack Dinétah with a force of 400 militia, resulting in the Navajo Treaty of 1850 and the building of 10 forts, beginning with Fort Defiance in 1851. After years of suffering and captivity, Diné were confined to the Navajo reservation by treaty in 1868).
On March 3, 1849, Congress ordered the creation of the Department of the interior. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was transferred from the War Department to that department, upon which Indians passed from military to civil control.
Fore additional reading please see Policy and Administration of Indian Affairs 1776-1890; and Indians in the 1890 Census.
The Continental Congress governed Indian affairs during the first years of the United States – in 1775 it established a Committee on Indian Affairs headed by Benjamin Franklin. At the end of the eighteenth century, Congress transferred the responsibility for managing trade relations with the tribes to the Secretary of War by its act of August 20, 1789 (1 Stat. 54). An Office of Indian Trade was established in the War Department by an act of April 21, 1806 (2 Stat. 402) specifically to handle this responsibility below the secretarial level. It was later abolished by an act of May 6, 1822 (3 Stat. 679) which handed responsibility for all Indian matters back to the Secretary of War.
Government here begins to grow tired of the enormous Expence of Indian Affairs, and of maintaining Posts in the Indian Country; and it is now talk’d of as a proper Measure, to abandon those Posts, demolishing all but such as the Colonies may think fit to keep up at their own Expence; and also to return the Management of their own Indian Affairs into the Hands of the respective Provinces as formerly. What the Result will be is uncertain, Councels here being so continually fluctuating.1 But I have urged often, that after taking those Affairs out of our Hands, it seems highly incumbent on the Ministry not to neglect them, but to see that they are well managed, and the Indians kept in Peace. I think however, that we should not too much depend on their doing this, but look to the matter a little ourselves, taking every Opportunity of conciliating the Affections of the Indians, by seeing that they always have Justice done them, and sometimes Kindness. For I assure you that here are not wanting People, who, tho’ not now in the Ministry, no one knows how soon they may be, and, if they were Ministers, would take no Step to prevent an Indian War in the Colonies, being of Opinion, which they express openly, that it would be a very good Thing; in the first Place to chastise the Colonists for their Undutifulness, and then to make them sensible of the Necessity of Protection by the Troops of this Country.
Mr. Jackson being now taken up with his Election-Business2 may hardly have time to write by this Opportunity: But he joins with me in Respects to you and the Assembly, and Assurances of our most faithful Services. I am, Gentlemen, Your most obedient and most humble Servant.
B Franklin
Underlying these difculties was a fundamental difference between the Indian and European side, a difference of civilizations that was a potential source of misunderstanding in all treaty negotiations. This was the cultural divide between an Indigenous egalitarian society, in which mutual rights and duties were based on kinship, and a hierarchical society, in which mutual rights and duties were based on authority. There was a fundamental difference of civilizations. The difference lay in basic assumptions about society and the moral values—the ethos—that enabled it to function. Whites brought up in the European tradition saw human institutions as being naturally ordered in what has come to be called a “table of organization.” The Indians thought of society in terms of kinship.
The White schema is familiar as a chart depicting the administrative structure of all sorts of enduring enterprises, including centralized governments, standing armies, economic companies, schools, and religious denominations. At the top of the chart is a supreme authority (whether an individual or a group), and lines of command and control, duty and obedience, specialization and rank descend downward in the form of a pyramid,
From this vantage point, Native American political structure appeared to be extremely disjointed, as a result of the Indigenous ethos of freedom of individuals to choose their own course of conduct.
Tho the National Councils have Power of War & peace they can neither raise men nor appoint Officers: but leave it to such as of their own Accord united & chuse their own war Captain, nor has this Captain any Power to compel his Men, or to punish them for neglect of duty & yet no Officer on earth is more strictly obey’d, so strongly are they influenced by The principle of
doing their Duty uncompelled.
The genealogical chart is conceptualized not as a triangle, or a pyramid, but as a circle. As a tribal genealogist explained it to me rather forcefully, the genealogical chart of a clan is not a triangle as I visualized it, which implies hierarchy, but a circle, which implies equality. The clan is an endless cycle of beings, each bearing a name belonging to the clan that is formally
conferred on the young, coming from beneath the ground, living, and returning to earth, releasing the name. In effect, a circular, egalitarian kinship system, in which the rule is voluntary reciprocity rather than duty, is the table of organization.
By the 1840s in America, a transformation was occurring in popular sentiment regarding Indian affairs. No longer were policy and practice in the hands of Jeffersonian deists espousing the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. A new breed of public official took charge, many of them military officers, responsive to the rising tide of evangelical Christianity, impatient with Indian treaties that became statutes binding on all citizens, willing to use military force to transform pagan hunters into Christian farmers. The old “single-purchaser” protocol was
compromised in land cessions that specified the assignment of tracts of public land to railroad companies before the public had a chance to buy it from the government. After the annexation of Texas, California, and Mexican lands in the Southwest in the 1840s and the Civil War, in which some of the southern tribes fought for the Confederacy, there developed an endless round of Indian wars on the western frontier. Neither the United States nor the Sioux and other tribal groups were able to prevent their warriors from violating treaties that had established boundaries after questionable cessions of land.
The Secretary of War administratively established the BIA within the his department on March 11, 1824. Congress later legislatively established the bureau and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs post via the act of July 9, 1832 (4 Stat. 564). In 1849, the BIA was transferred to the newly created Interior Department. In the years that followed, the Bureau was known variously as the Indian office, the Indian bureau, the Indian department, and the Indian service. The name “Bureau of Indian Affairs” was formally adopted by the Interior Department on September 17, 1947.
Since 1824 there have been 45 Commissioners of Indian Affairs of which six have been American Indian or Alaska Native: Ely S. Parker, Seneca (1869-1871); Robert L. Bennett, Oneida (1966-1969); Louis R. Bruce, Mohawk-Oglala Sioux (1969-1973); Morris Thompson, Athabascan (1973-1976); Benjamin Reifel, Sioux (1976-1977); and William E. Hallett, Red Lake Chippewa (1979-1981).
For almost 200 years—beginning with treaty agreements negotiated by the United States and tribes in the late 18th and 19th centuries, through the General Allotment Act of 1887, which opened tribal lands west of the Mississippi to non-Indian settlers, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 when American Indians and Alaska Natives were granted U.S. citizenship and the right to vote, the New Deal and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which established modern tribal governments, the World War II period of relocation and the post-War termination era of the 1950s, the activism of the 1960s and 1970s that saw the takeover of the BIA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to the passage of landmark legislation such as the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Tribal Self-Governance Act of 1994, which have fundamentally changed how the BIA and the tribes conduct business with each other—the BIA has embodied the trust and government-to-government relationships between the U.S. and the tribal nations that bear the designation “federally recognized.”
The 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act (Relocation Act) further created a 3-member relocation commission to administer the Act. In 1988, the relocation commission was abolished and the Office of Navajo-Hopi Indian Relocation (ONHIR)was enacted by Congress in its place as an independent agency governed directly by the Relocation Act. For decades, ONHIR administered lands taken into trust under the Relocation Act for the Navajo Nation. The ONHIR’s unique existence and funding stream has had large consequences reservation-wide, both positive and negative.
As an independent agency, the ONHIR is unlike any other federal agencies and is answerable directly to Congress, receiving annual lump sum payments. It has been allocated immense funds (estimated $500 million) to spend on New Lands, and for street lamps, senior centers, and other small, disconnected infrastructure projects across the Navajo Nation in exchange for the chapters accepting relocatees. In July 1990, ONHIR issued procedures for the leasing of New Lands, including homesite and business leases. As of 2018, ONHIR had 31 employees in 3 offices in Flagstaff, Sanders and Chambers, AZ. As of 2023, it is “winding down” operations as the Navajo Nation presses for its continued operation.
For almost 50 years, the ONHIR supplanted the BIA as a source of immense federal resources practically without strings. The ONHIR also provided a direct communications and legislative link to Congress. It has risen in prominence as the BIA’s presence has diminished.
Portions of the relocation law establishing the ONHIR also came to be widely imposed across the reservation under tribal law, despite being far more restrictive than any previous laws (e.g. the relocation law prohibiting livestock from relocatee homesites and limiting them to one acre grew misunderstood as applying to all homesites).
Governing Conditions:
While sometimes called the “BIA Phoenix office” by NPL residents, the ONHIR has no relation to the BIA and lacks BIA internal control standards. It has greater independent power and none of the BIA’s budgetary and oversight constraints. Its newness, independence, and immense budget has given the ONHIR unmatched regional influence and presence. For many years, the ONHIR displaced the BIA as the go-to office for funding for capital projects in return for a chapter’s approval of some homesites for a relocatee. To encourage existing chapters to receive relocatees, the Act heavily funded chapter infrastructure development, and ONHIR technical advisors drafted lease templates for the chapter’s use for the relocatees. Due to the trust placed in the ONHIR as a federal entity able to provide infrastructure funding without undue red tape, Navajo Nation chapters have advocated for its continued operations even though the ONHIR itself has asked for termination due to fulfillment of its mission.
Evolved Conditions–Unnecessary prohibition against keeping livestock on homesites across the reservation
To discourage relocatees from remaining on the Big Reservation where every land not used was considered “customary land” belonging to someone, the Relocation Act prohibited the raising of livestock for relocatees who chose to relocate to existing Navajo Nation chapters on the Big Reservation.
The ONHIR drafted template homesite lease forms for chapter use for the relocatees limiting homesites to one acre and prohibiting livestock. Over time, these form s were used for all homesite leases, even for homesites of families who long lived in the area. Officials began applying the Navajo-Hope Land Settlement prohibition against livestock and limiting size of homesites, to everyone, and not just relocatees. Soon, it was forgotten that the forms originated from the ONHIR to implement a particular provision only for a small group. The forms soon came to be used reservation-wide for everyone, under a general impression that they are required by law, and that land shortage is severe.
As of 2023, the Navajo Nation has a three-branch governmental structure put in place in 1989, whose long-term purpose is unclear. Below that structure are tribal chapters intended to locally govern, but which serve largely advisory functions and are largely unfunded, meaning that their governmental purpose is unfulfilled.
Federally-owned land in the United States
This page was formulated relying on research by and discussions with students from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, Environmental Law Program and Land Use Law Center, with special thanks to our project law extern, Ben Bovi, and Kelley Rutledge.