A Navajo Newspaper Tests the Boundaries

It all started with an anonymous letter.

The typewritten sheet of paper was dated Dec. 19, 1995, but the writer must have hesitated before mailing it because the envelope was postmarked Jan. 4, 1996. The letter--signed, “Navajo voter and concerned educator”--contained an explosive allegation. The writer claimed to have seen the first lady of the Navajo Nation, Regina Hale, beating her 14-year-old stepdaughter outside the presidential residence. “I almost stopped to say something but I was too shocked, I guess.”

Marley Shebala read the letter at her desk in a windowless corner of the Navajo Times newsroom. Although she had only been with the paper for two years, Shebala was considered the most tenacious reporter on the nine-person staff. She had been picking up rumors about Regina and Albert Hale for months. Word was that the marriage was in trouble, that Regina had moved out, that the president and his beautiful press secretary were spending a lot of time together. Now came this letter.

Located in an ugly, weed-bordered strip mall in downtown Window Rock, the Navajo Times is a scruffy rabbit warren of metal desks, rickety swivel chairs and obsolete computer terminals. The Times, which comes out every Thursday, has a circulation of 17,500. That’s not a lot on a reservation of 250,000, but it still makes the Times one of the two largest Indian-owned papers in the country. The messiest office at the Times belongs to the man Shebala took her letter to, Tom Arviso Jr., the paper’s director.

Tall, rangy, with an affection for football, the occasional beer and pickup trucks, the 40-year-old Arviso grew up on the Navajo reservation and has worked at the paper for 12 years; he has held the top job since 1992. There is something of the good ol’ boy about him. His preferred dress is jeans and a T-shirt, and he punctuates his sentences with “man.” Not known as a tough line editor--the writing at the Times is wildly uneven--he is valued by his reporters for his judgment and coolness under fire. In the unruly world of tribal journalism, these qualities are highly prized.

Arviso agreed with Shebala that they didn’t have a story as long as Regina Hale’s accuser remained unidentified. But maybe it was time to call her and see if she would go on the record about her marriage. As it turned out, Regina Hale was more than willing. She had heard about the anonymous note and wanted to tell her side.

So on a cold, knife-edged January night, the two journalists drove to a mobile home in a small valley 10 miles north of Window Rock. Gathered around a Formica-topped kitchen table, Arviso and Shebala listened to the first lady pour out her wounded pride. Yes, she slapped her stepdaughter, but only after the girl called her a bitch during an argument over money. It was one more proof of how messed up the family was.

Far from being the abuser, she said, she was the abused. Her husband was carrying on an affair with his press secretary. The woman had turned her two daughters against her. She opened a binder containing pictures of the aide and her husband, taken in one of those dime-store photo booths. They had loopy grins on their faces and his chin rested on her shoulder.

Overwhelmed by it all, she had moved out. After she left, her husband changed the locks at the presidential residence. One day, she managed to get back in and found him and the press secretary at the dinner table. She demanded to know why she couldn’t get back into her house. “[The press secretary] was going to say something, but I said, ‘You don’t say anything.’ I grabbed her hair. I dragged her.” The president’s security men broke up the fight.

Regina Hale talked on and on, Shebala taping everything. They sipped sodas and Kool-Aid, but the mood was far too tense to eat. It was after midnight when they stepped out into the frigid night, which to Shebala seemed blacker than usual. She and Arviso looked at each other. They were sitting on something huge. No question. Possibly the biggest scandal to hit the Navajo reservation since former leader Peter MacDonald was removed from office in 1989 in the wake of conspiracy and fraud charges that later sent him to federal prison for 14 years. What they had just heard could tear the tribe apart.

Maybe, Arviso suggested, they should have a prayer done for protection and guidance.

The debate that Arviso had with himself over the next few days is one that numerous newspaper editors have had to confront. “Is it really a news story?” he wondered. What did Hale’s private life have to do with the performance of his public duties? Was there any way to bring the first family’s problems into the open without turning it into a spectacle?

But Arviso had a problem that most editors don’t have to worry about: Albert Hale, the man his paper was investigating, the president of the Navajo Nation, possibly the most powerful Indian in North America, was his boss.

Like 95% of the newspapers in Indian Country, the Navajo Times is owned by the tribe. There are fewer than a dozen independently owned Indian newspapers in the United States. Most of the 300 reservation publications serve as newsletters reciting tribal accomplishments. Then there are the comparative few, like the Navajo Times, that try to assert their autonomy even while the government controls their budgets.

It’s a thin line to walk. An Indian reporter working on the reservation quite possibly has the toughest job in American journalism. For one thing, the 1st Amendment does not extend to the quasi-sovereign tribal governments in the United States. In addition, state freedom of information acts, which allow citizens access to government documents, and sunshine laws, which guarantee access to public hearings, do not apply on the reservation.

The odds are so stacked against Indian journalists that many give up. If they stumble on a good story, they may not be able to report it. If they report it, their editor may water it down. If their editor publishes it, tribal authorities might close the paper. “It can be like operating in a dictatorship,” said Loren Omoto, a spokesman for the 650-member Native American Journalists Assn.

As Arviso agonized about the article, he couldn’t help but think that his situation was ironic. He had lived through the paper’s last crisis in 1987, when the Times endorsed Navajo Chairman Peterson Zah over his rival, MacDonald. The day after the election, which MacDonald won by a slim margin, the paper’s editorial page was draped in black. A month later, MacDonald sent armed police to shut the paper and fired the staff.

A single father of three, Arviso painted houses for a living and watched as a succession of Anglo yes men were brought in to run the Times. It sickened him to see his paper reduced to mouthing the opinions of the administration. Because he was one of the few trained reporters on the reservation, he eventually was rehired.

When Hale took office in 1995, he kept Arviso on staff, marking the first time an editor had survived a change of administrations. A lawyer by training, Hale is part of the new, college-educated generation of Native American leaders. At public forums before the election, he promised not to interfere with the Times.

But soon after he entered office, his aides started calling up and trying to order stories. They even suggested where Hale’s photo should be placed. Arviso resisted, and the relationship turned chilly. Still, it wasn’t a crisis. This article, if it ran, was different. Hale would react badly. The only question was how badly. Arviso decided there was only one way to find out. He went to see the president.

Hale, Arviso says, was direct. “He told me, ‘Do not run that story.’ ” Furthermore, the president informed him, his wife had changed her mind. She no longer wanted to see the story published.

Arviso continued to vacillate. The Navajo language does not contain a word for “journalist.” You are either a storyteller or a gossip, and to be labeled a gossip in Navajo is a grievous insult. Publishing this story would be the ultimate intrusion. Arviso was also hearing rumors that there was a bigger scandal: Hale, it was now being whispered, had taken the press secretary on trips paid for with tribal funds. Now that was a story, but he didn’t have it. At least not yet.

Deadlines are posted on the wall of the Times newsroom: Wednesday at 7 p.m. for reporters on a breaking story. As the hour approached, Shebala told Arviso the story would soon be ready--”then it’s up to you.” Arviso hadn’t slept for days and looked it. Regina Hale called Shebala at 5:30 p.m. and said she did want the article published. That clinched it.

The lead story in the Jan. 18, 1996, Navajo Times carried the headline, “Image Is Not Everything.” By midafternoon, it was all anybody on the res could talk about.

Tribal Newspapers’ History of Struggle

The country’s first tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was founded in 1828. Its editor, Elias Boudinot, promised his paper would “always be open to free and temperate discussion on matters of politics, religion and so forth.” A crusading newsman, Boudinot was arrested for exposing the activities of the Georgia state militia, which was harassing the Cherokees to drive them off their lands.

After President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Boudinot came to believe that the only way the Cherokee Nation could survive was to leave Georgia. The tribe, though, was bitterly divided, one faction urging migration to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, the other pledging to stay.

Boudinot was forced to resign as editor. After the Trail of Tears in 1839, in which as many as 4,000 Cherokees died in their six-month-long march West, dissidents in the tribe murdered him.

Cherokee editors no longer take their lives in their hands when they write critically about tribal authorities, but this summer Principal Chief Joe Byrd fired the entire staff of the Cherokee Advocate. Editorial director Dan Agent was told that the paper did not publish enough “positive news.” He believes that the reason had more to do with the paper’s coverage of the tribe’s constitutional crisis.

After tribal marshals seized documents from Byrd’s office in February--an action that led to charges of diverting more than $23,000 in tribal and federal funds to pay an employee to work on President Clinton’s reelection campaign--the chief removed the marshals and lead prosecutor. In June, Byrd seized the tribal courthouse in a predawn raid. A federal grand jury and the FBI are now investigating, and everyone on the paper except Agent has been rehired.

In his authoritative history of Indian journalism, “Pictures of Our Nobler Selves,” Mark Trahant, former editor of the Navajo Times and now editor and publisher of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Idaho, lays out the questions that have vexed tribal editors from Boudinot to Agent: “Does a tribal newspaper serve its community by printing discourse? Or does it aid the enemies of tribal government by revealing a community’s weakness?”

Once, such questions were more academic than they are now. When tribes were uniformly poor and operating under the thumb of the federal government, the need for a watchdog press may not have been quite so pressing. Two developments changed that. One is the independence that tribes gained 23 years ago. The other is casino gambling. Both brought power and money into Indian Country, with the attendant problems.

As recently as the 1960s, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs was in de facto control of most tribal governments. The Navajo Times was founded in 1957 as a BIA house organ. Passage in 1974 of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act granted the tribes greater authority over reservation funds. But it did not necessarily bring additional safeguards for journalists. Although the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 incorporates the protections of the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that tribes have jurisdiction over the enforcement of civil rights.

Richard La Course, associate editor of the Yakama Nation Review in Toppenish, Wash., says only 68 of the 480 tribal codes have language protecting free speech.

Rarer still are tribal laws providing reporters access to public meetings and records. When, for instance, the Navajo Times heard a police report had been filed over the slapping incident between Regina Hale and her stepdaughter, the paper tried to obtain a copy. Tribal police refused to verify even the existence of the report.

The arrival of casino gambling, which began in 1979 when the Seminoles in Florida opened a high-stakes Bingo parlor, generates $6 billion a year for 186 tribes. “The advent of gambling,” said Tim Giago, publisher and owner of Indian Country Today, “has created a host of good and bad things.”

It has helped some tribes achieve a measure of economic security. The 500 members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Connecticut, for example, grossed $600 million last year on the slot machine operation at their Foxwoods Resort Casino. Just because a tribe has newfound income, though, doesn’t mean that its newspaper has improved.

“The Pequots put out a very glossy paper, using paper I couldn’t afford,” Giago said, “but they’re strictly a house organ.”

Giago’s newspaper is one of the few independent Indian newspapers, a 32-page broad-sheet that carries Indian news, by Indians, across the nation. Founded 16 years ago, it has a circulation of about 20,000 and, according to Giago, makes a profit. Giago, who helped found the Native American Journalists Assn. in 1984, has become one of the best-known Indian journalists in the country, and his paper reflects his contrarian personality.

His only national competition is News From Indian Country, a tabloid owned by Paul DeMain, the current president of the association. More intimate than Indian Country Today, each issue contains four pages of obituaries and an insert called the National Pow-Wow Directory, which includes poetry, listings and an herbal-health column. Published in Hayward, Wis., the paper has a circulation of 7,000 and is distributed in 40 states.

“If you’re a native journalist today,” DeMain said, “you have a good opportunity.” A number of tribal journalists have done groundbreaking work in recent years. Since 1988, the tiny Native American Press/Ojibwe News in Minnesota has helped put eight people in jail for theft of tribal funds, money laundering and other offenses. In 1991, Karen Lincoln Michel, then on staff at the La Cross Tribune in Wisconsin, exposed officials of the Ho-Chunk Nation who were offered bribes in exchange for their votes on a pending casino.

Still, the difficulties that tribal papers have faced over the past 20 years are depressing. Although no one has made an official count, the number of Indian reporters and editors who have been harassed has not abated. In recent years, at least a dozen papers--including newspapers for the Comanches and the Hopis--have closed because of pressure from officials. Almost all have started up again, but invariably with more malleable staffs.

“If a paper exceeds its budget, it’s shut down,” Giago said. “If a paper gets itself in trouble with lawsuits, they shut it down. If it’s too persistent, they shut it down for that.”

Even when journalists do not get fired, they face censorship.

In 1996, Roy Ibey, editor of the Sho-Ban News, which serves the Shoshone-Bannock tribes in Idaho, learned of a mass layoff in the finance department. Tribal leaders would not allow him to publish the story. When a credit union was robbed, tribal police refused to release any information to the paper, citing a tribal privacy act.

In 1993, when Tom McKay, editor of Through the Eyes of an Indian, a weekly serving the Blackfeet of Montana, wrote about shoddy workmanship in a tribal housing program, officials changed the locks on his leased building. When he went to an outside printer, a tribal judge forbade him to write about the contractor. He appealed to the state’s congressional representatives but was told that tribal sovereignty prevented them from taking action. He shut his paper.

The NAJA has grown so concerned about censorship that it sponsored a forum called “Owned by the Tribe” at its annual conference this summer. The room was packed to overflowing.

At the conference, the organization gave its highest prize--the Wassaja Award for courage and service--to two journalists who stood up to tribal leadership and published controversial stories. One was Linda Powless, a Mohawk who founded the Turtle Island News, the first national native newspaper in Canada; she was jailed twice for refusing to leave public meetings that authorities wanted closed. The other was Arviso and the Navajo Times.

Story’s Impact Forces President to Take Leave

As Arviso expected, the Regina Hale story landed with concussive force. Hale sent a statement that he insisted be displayed prominently on the front page. Pleading for sympathy, he took a swipe at the paper: “These are private matters that I know the Navajo People understand should be kept out of the public arena.”

In response, tribal council members demanded to meet with Hale. After the session, which took place in a ceremonial hogan, he announced he would take a leave to straighten out family matters.

As the Times pursued whether Hale had used tribal funds improperly, the council launched its own investigation. An audit, which uncovered $147,928 run up on 100 trips, showed “many violations” of travel policies. Hale gave up his tribal American Express card, and the council cut his $55,000 salary in half until he repaid more than $20,000.

The Times followed each twist and turn of the story. When the president filed for divorce and served the first lady with a restraining order, the Times ran a front-page article that quoted Regina Hale as saying her husband had told her to “quit talking to the media.”

Hale fired Arviso’s immediate supervisor, the head of the tribe’s economic development department. The official reason was the department’s lackluster performance in generating new business. Arviso didn’t buy the explanation for a minute.

When Hale’s new press secretary filed suit claiming she had been let go because she was 2 1/2 months’ pregnant and unmarried, the Times bannered the story on Page 1.

Hale’s next press officer, Ted Rushton, the former editor of the Gallup Independent, aggressively attacked the Times’ credibility. After Arviso won his award at the NAJA convention, Rushton put out a press release pointing out that the Times had failed in the other awards categories. This, he said, reflected the paper’s “decline in news standards.”

The paper’s popular cartoonist, Jack Ahasteen, regularly lampooned the president, depicting him as a pirate captain forcing his wife to walk the plank, or as a sad-sack Tonto to his Anglo advisor’s Lone Ranger.

When a recent Ahasteen cartoon mocked the ignorance of 11 foreign tourists who died in a flash flood, Hale issued an apology. Only partly blaming the cartoonist, he asserted, “The real fault is with the immature editor and publisher who allowed it to be used.”

So it went for 20 months. The Times went after Hale. Hale went after the Times. As if they were characters in a tribal allegory, each side has nicknames for the other. The administration calls Shebala the “fly,” who buzzes around picking up gossip, and Arviso the “badger,” who burrows into a hole to hide from trouble. Arviso refers to Hale as the “coyote,” for his ability to wriggle out of trouble.

But to almost everyone’s surprise, Arviso has not been fired. Every week, it seems, he has heard rumors that the ax was about to fall. The uncertainty has worn him out.

“You can have an outer shell that nothing bothers you,” he said one afternoon over lunch at the Navajo Nation Inn, “but deep inside, it does bother you. I don’t want to say this fight is good versus evil, but that’s what it comes down to.”

What has truly surprised him, though--what has really hurt--has been the criticism he’s received from his peers.

“The fact of the matter is the Navajo Times is owned by the tribe. The tribe pays the salaries and foots the bill for the newspaper,” Giago wrote in Indian Country Today in July. If Hale believes that the newspaper “is not fair and unbiased, as the leader of the Navajo Nation and all of its enterprises, he does have the legal right to do something about it.”

Powless, the other winner of the Wassaja Award, is also critical of the Times’ coverage. “I don’t understand why we have to mimic the worst of mainstream journalism,” she argued during a public debate at the NAJA conference.

Schisms have even opened on his own staff. Bill Donovan, the only Anglo writer at the Times, says the paper’s obsession with Hale has obscured more important issues. Unemployment on the reservation has gone from a horrific 36% to 48%. Crime is soaring. More and more teenagers are joining gangs like the Dragons and the Cobras.

Besides, Donovan says, what Hale is accused of is not egregious, especially compared to a past leader like MacDonald. Hale’s problems may be sloppiness, a matter of not keeping receipts, more than anything. “For the first time, a leader is paying back [money], and we’re complaining.”

Shebala, though, is convinced that the Times handled the Hale story correctly and takes offense at any suggestion that Native Americans have an insufficient appreciation for free speech. From Iroquois talking circles to the Navajo gathering of the chiefs, numerous tribes have deeply imbued traditions of free speech that go back hundreds of years. But she acknowledges--in fact, she is proud--that an Indian journalist operates in a different cultural climate than other reporters. As Navajo journalists, the staff at the Times sometimes violates the first law of reporting: Do not get beat.

Shebala recently heard about a new conflict on the “partitioned lands,” the center of a nasty dispute between the Hopis and Navajos. The Hopis had denied a permit for a Navajo sundance ceremony. Shebala was ready to accompany Navajo police to the site when her menstrual cycle began. By custom, she had to stay home. “In a woman’s time of the month,” she said, “a woman is not supposed to go around ceremonial sites.”

For Navajos, one of the most important stories of recent years was the reported visitation of deities to two women in a remote corner of the reservation. The women were supposedly given a message, but they didn’t feel the time was right to share it, so the Times never carried the account.

“The ladies asked us not to print anything,” Arviso said. “It was a big story, but it was against our principles to run it.” What about papers in Arizona and Utah, which gave the incident large play? Some things are more important than getting the story out, says Arviso. “First and foremost, you’re a Navajo. You don’t give that up to become a doctor or lawyer.”

Increased Respect for Traditions

When Hale took office in 1995, one of his goals was to increase respect for traditions, so with the summer session of the Navajo Nation Council set for late July, he decided to reenact a tribal ritual. He borrowed a speckled horse and rode 45 miles from his hometown of Klagetoh to Window Rock. He and the other council delegates spent a night singing leadership songs and listening to a story about the creation of the horse.

The riders, two dozen strong, completed their ride on the Monday morning that the council was scheduled to begin. Tourists with cameras clogged the narrow, weedy streets to catch a glimpse of Hale, dressed in Levis, a purple shirt, a black cowboy hat with a dream-catcher pin stuck in the back and a turquoise necklace at his throat. He bent over the neck of his horse to present the agenda to Council Speaker Kelsey Begaye, a large sweating man in a brown suit. Camera shutters snapped and chirped like insects.

The scene was a living postcard, the picture of a proud and independent people pausing to honor their past before taking their next step into the future. It is this image that Hale would like to project to the world--and it is this image, he says, that the Navajo Times is threatening in its obsession with scandal and gossip.

In Hale’s mind, he has shown extraordinary restraint, considering he could order Arviso to put whatever he likes on the front page. He hasn’t, he says, because he respects freedom of the press. “I never told him, ‘Don’t run this.’ I said, ‘Exercise better judgment.’ I expect he would show good judgment, and it hasn’t been the case. The paper is part of [the] economic development [department]. If we’re in the paper showing we have a problem and biases are shown, we’re going to scare [investors] away.

“People are telling me, ‘Look, I don’t buy the paper anymore. It’s turned into a rag sheet.’ All the paper is doing is tearing people down. That’s not the Navajo way. You’re not supposed to be a rumor-monger.

“One of the things I hear is, ‘The paper belongs to the people.’ Of course it does. But who gets the blame if something goes wrong with the paper? The president of the nation. If I’m not getting movement toward goals, I’ll step in and take actions that are necessary.”

Three days earlier, women in green and yellow chiffon dresses stood with faces uplifted, like tropical birds waiting to be fed. Rain misted down and turned the parking lot outside the Red Rock Convention Center in Gallup, N.M., as black as a new tire.

It was the first rain in weeks, and Shebala pronounced it a blessing from the holy ones on Arviso’s wedding day. As the rain grew bolder, darkening the pink sandstone hills to rose, Arviso stepped to the microphone at the head table. Two hundred guests sat at long tables overhung with streamers and purple-and-white balloons.

“Because I enjoy it, I want to introduce you to my wife,” he said, clutching the hand of a smiling, auburn-haired woman. “Dana. Mrs. Arviso. Mrs. Tom Arviso.”

He spotted Shebala in the crowd and his face wrinkled with intensity. “We do kick butt, man, and we do it in the right way,” he shouted, jerking a fist in the air. “We stick up for one another because we believe in what we do. The support from the Navajo people has made us No. 1”

The crowd, this crowd, his crowd, applauded loudly.

The solution for the problems at the Navajo Times, most people agree, is to cast the paper loose from the tribe and let it sink or float, as it will. The paper makes money now, but costs such as utilities and the telephone are not included in the accounting. The Times also needs a new printing press. Despite the uncertainty, the council has voted for privatization, without a timetable.

But there is no guarantee Arviso will be around to see it happen. He is thinking of moving to Los Angeles or Phoenix. In part, it is out of concern for his wife, who only returned to the reservation a few years ago. Laid off last year from her job in the tribal personnel office, she has been unable to find other work.

“The fact she is not able to get on anywhere is directly related to our relationship,” Arviso said. Hale’s chief of staff, Ernest Begay, denies this.

Also, she has never felt completely comfortable on the reservation. “I’m a city person,” she said. But it’s more than that. Although her clans are Navajo, her habits mark her as an outsider in ways she could never have guessed. She’s been criticized for smiling too much. “They say I’m too happy,” she said.

Tom Arviso shakes his head at this. At his core, he believes that there’s a special Navajo way of life. It’s the pinon pine and the juniper and the narrow canyons that etch the reservation like exposed veins. Badgers and coyotes are also part of it. “If you don’t live it,” he said, “you’re lost.”

But there is another side to this. “There’s a saying among Navajo people: ‘We are our own worst enemy.’ ”

Back at the reception, a deejay puts on the newlyweds’ favorite song, “Me and You.” While this sloshy, end-of-the-night country love song plays, thunderous explosions go off outside. Green and red blossoms are growing in the sky. The rodeo next door is holding a fireworks display. But Shebala insists that it is yet another sign, another blessing on Tom and Dana. Maybe even on the Times.