The record, read closely · issue articles

The layer closest to the people

≈ 7 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines

D · Draft — not verified   Every quote is verbatim from a candidate’s own turn. Quotes are their claims, not this site’s findings. Statements about the Local Governance Act’s text are cited to the Act or to a named source. How we verify →

Companion page: where the candidates stand on this, one by one →

Measured across the record, chapters come up in every single one of Cal Nez’s interviews — all 41 where his questions can be identified. No other subject is universal. Twenty-seven of the 42 candidates discussed them substantively. His plainest recurring question is a teaching question, asked of Andrew Curley and Zachariah George and others in nearly the same words: “what’s the difference between certified and non-certified chapters?”

It is the right question, because the answer decides how much of its own money and land a community may run — and because almost nobody outside chapter government can answer it.

What certification actually is

OFFICIAL SOURCE

Chapters govern under Title 26, the Local Governance Act, adopted by Resolution CAP-34-98. Under it, chapters must adopt and operate a five management system — accounting, procurement, filing, personnel, and property — and 26 N.N.C. § 102 charges the Office of the Auditor General with reviewing those policies. A chapter that passes gains authority over local matters: site leases, contracts, appropriating its own funds. Christine J. Benally describes the bargain exactly: certification came “because the chapters needed to prove that they could abide by those, account for all the funds.”

Title 26 is also one of the five Titles never printed in the published Navajo Nation Code. Its text is posted separately by the Division of Community Development. Scattered, not hidden — but a chapter official governing under it cannot find it where a person would look.

The unfunded-mandate question

Andrew Curley states the theory of the Act and then names its flaw in the same breath. The point of the Local Governance Act, he says, is a finding that a chapter “can do this kind of stuff and make decisions on your own. That’s the local governance act. That’s its intent.” But: “I think Window Rock has had a hard time letting go of power to the chapter governments. Part of it has to do with fears of money and mismanagement.” Then the question this article exists to hold open: “Is LGA an unfunded mandate? Are we not paying people enough to try to do the things, the tasks that are” required of them.

Twenty-seven years after CAP-34-98, that question has never been answered in public with numbers.

Certification cuts both ways

Here the record splits, and the disagreement is the most useful thing in it.

Certification as liberation. Curtis Yanito argues the Nation strangles the chapters that earn it: “the way they are treating the chapters, certified chapters, what they’re doing is they’re taking all the resources away from them.” Lavonne Tsosie says the chapter-manager program oversteps regardless of status: the ASC has “no authority trying to run these chapters or telling the chapter officials how their agenda should be… Just because a chapter is not certified does not mean that you’re going to tell the officials how to run their meetings.” Marsha Greyeyes centers her platform on it: “Local Governance Act, empowerment for chapters, decentralization, community control over development.”

Certification as a gap in oversight. Lewnell Harrison, who says he investigated a chapter, describes the other edge of the same blade: after certification, “these certified chapters they hire their own legal advocates to give them legal advice, they hire their own CPAs, they don’t go through auditor general’s office anymore… It sounds like a good idea, but in actuality” — and he stops there, in the interview, on the word actuality.

FINDING Two candidates describe the same fact — that certification moves a chapter out from under central review — and read it in opposite directions: as self-government, and as an accountability gap. Both readings are consistent with the Act. Whether certified chapters remain subject to Auditor General review, and in what respects, this project has not verified against Title 26’s current text. It is on The Consolidation, unfinished, and it is a fair question for any candidate.

The government’s own answer to that disagreement

OFFICIAL SOURCE

Neither candidate had to guess. The Navajo Nation Department of Justice says something directly on point in its own quarterly report to the Council: its White Collar Crime Unit continues to highlight that a lack of certified chapter oversight creates opportunities for theft, embezzlement, and other crimes. That is the Nation’s own prosecutors, in a public document, describing the gap Lewnell Harrison stopped short of naming.

It does not settle the argument — Curtis Yanito’s point about resources being pulled from certified chapters can be true at the same time. But it means the oversight gap is not a candidate’s opinion. It is a finding by the office that prosecutes the crimes. And it raises the obvious question for any candidate: if DOJ has been saying this in writing, who read it, and what changed?

What the record shows about the chapters themselves

Candidates describe real conditions, not abstractions. Andrienna Lister, from a certified chapter without a manager: “we’ve got so much corruption there… we have ASC in there that is on our Wells Fargo bank account, and we are a certified chapter.” Relinda M. John describes the recovery work as her job description: helping audited chapters “get out of the sanctions… get through the five management systems so they can get certified.” Joan Gray counts hers plainly: “we have three certified chapters.” Shaquille Begay counts his: two certified, two not.

And Zachariah George names the condition beneath all of it: “Even at the chapter house, it’s so hard to get a quorum sometimes.” His conclusion is not despair — it is a plan: go around “to the 110 chapters and making flyers, radio ads… it can be done for a good purpose.”

What nobody said

FINDING

Not one of the 42 candidates said how many chapters are currently certified. Several counted their own. Nobody counted the Nation’s. This project went looking for that list and could not find it published anywhere — not on the Division of Community Development’s site, not the Auditor General’s, not the Council’s.

Twenty-seven years into a law whose entire purpose is to devolve power to certified chapters, a voter cannot learn whether their own chapter is certified without asking someone. That is a page on a website. It does not exist. It is the cheapest item on What Should Be Public, and one of the most consequential.

And no candidate mentioned the training. Under 26 N.N.C. § 1001, an elected chapter official is statutorily required to attend one training session on taking office — on ethics. The competence training that lets a chapter run contracts, leases, and appropriations exists as support from the Division of Community Development, not as a requirement. Whether the training should match the power is a live reform question: the Council’s Naabik’íyáti’ Committee held a work session in June 2024 on four models of Title 26 amendments.

And it is on the November ballot

Article XVIII of the proposed constitution would reconstitute the chapters as local governance entities with municipal-style ordinance powers. Whether that supersedes the Local Governance Act, and what happens to certification already earned, is a question we have written down for the draft’s author. Anyone voting on November 3 is voting on the chapters, whether or not they know it. Read the draft before you decide either way.

Open items across the whole site, sorted by who owns them: The Work →

Up a level: What runs through all of it →

A note on the law here. Section numbers are cited to the Navajo Nation Code. The most widely used published edition (Westlaw) is current only through February 11, 2014, so a citation may not reflect the very latest amendment; a signed change is also not the same as one in effect. How we handle the law →