The record, read closely · issue articles

The law says the language shall be taught

≈ 6 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines

B · From the record   Statutes below were read in the published Navajo Nation Code, which is current only through 2009; later amendments may exist and are unverified. Candidate quotations are verbatim and are their claims, not this site’s findings. How we verify →

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

Education reaches substantive discussion in 38 of the 42 interviews — the second-most-covered subject in the entire record, behind only the economy. Thirty-three of the 42 candidates speak about it at length. Most of what they say is autobiography: the school they went to, the degree they earned, the teacher who mattered. That is not evasion. On the Navajo Nation, education is a personal story, because so many of these stories involve leaving.

Underneath the stories is a law almost nobody mentions.

Title 10 already commands most of what candidates ask for

OFFICIAL SOURCE

The Navajo Nation Education Code — Title 10, much of it enacted in 1984 — is not a vague aspiration. It contains, section by section: local control of schools through school boards (§ 106), parental involvement (§ 107), Navajo and Indian preference in school hiring (§ 108), education standards (§ 109), curriculum (§ 110), education in the Navajo language (§ 111), education in Navajo culture and social studies (§ 112), professional training for educators (§ 113), special education (§ 114), and school counseling (§ 116).

Section 111 is worth reading slowly. The Navajo language, it says, is an essential element of the life, culture, and identity of the Navajo People, and the Nation recognizes the importance of preserving it to the survival of the Nation. Then the command: “Instruction in the Navajo language shall be made available for all grade levels in all schools serving the Navajo Nation.” It is to include, to the greatest extent practicable, thinking, speaking, comprehension, reading, writing, and the formal grammar of the language.

Section 109 sets what schools are for, including competence in English and knowledge of American culture and competence in Navajo language skills and knowledge of Navajo culture — and the development of both Navajo and United States citizenship. That sentence is forty years old.

What the candidates said

Andy Nez, who sits on the Health, Education and Human Services Committee, is the only candidate in the record who cites the statute at all. He describes a provision under Title 10 requiring every student to receive an hour of Navajo language instruction.

FINDING We checked. The published Code’s § 111 does not state a sixty-minute requirement; it requires that instruction be made available at all grade levels in all schools serving the Nation. A specific daily minimum may exist in a later amendment, a Board of Education policy, or a regulation — none of which we can read in one place, because the Code stops at 2009. This is not a correction of Andy Nez. It is a demonstration of the problem: a delegate on the education committee and a voter reading the published law cannot presently confirm the same sentence.

Christine J. Benally, whose father was a Navajo Code Talker, wants immersion programs. Jerilynn Yazzie asks the question that hangs over the whole subject — “don’t all of our schools teach the Navajo language?” Debbie Nez-Manuel wants the cultural components reinforced. Jordan Begay maps the terrain most people miss: on the Nation there are Bureau of Indian Education schools, grant schools, and schools “running curriculums that are driven by state standards.” Marcella Yazzie wants trades in the schools — welding, mechanics — alongside financial skills.

Who actually runs the schools

Jordan Begay’s list is the key to the article. Schools serving Diné children answer to different masters: the Bureau of Indian Education; grant schools run by local boards; and public districts in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah operating under state standards. The Navajo Nation’s own Title 10 speaks to “all schools serving the Navajo Nation” — but a state-run public school district takes its orders from a state capital.

FINDING This is a seam, in a classroom. A Navajo law commands instruction. A school district answers to Phoenix or Santa Fe. Nobody is standing where those meet, and no candidate in the record described who enforces § 111 against a school that does not comply — or whether anyone has ever tried.

The waiver almost nobody knows about

Section 108 requires schools to include, as a preferred qualification, knowledge and familiarity with the Navajo language, culture, and people. And then, in the same section: the local governing board may waive that requirement by a formal vote.

Which means a public record exists, somewhere, each time a board votes to waive it. This project could not locate any published tally of such waivers. Nobody counts them.

What nobody said

FINDING

Not one of the 42 candidates said how many schools serving the Nation currently offer Navajo language instruction at every grade level, as § 111 requires. Nobody named the office that checks. Nobody cited a compliance report, because this project could not find one. Thirty-three of the 42 candidates discussed education; none could tell a voter whether the Nation’s own forty-year-old language law is being obeyed.

Teacher pay, retention, and housing — the subject the site’s promises ranker lists and that fourteen candidates touch — almost never appears as a specific proposal with a number attached. Scholarships come up in eleven interviews, always as a promise to fund more, never as an account of how many students are funded now.

The law is on the books. The children are in the classrooms. The connecting document — a report saying who taught what, to whom — does not appear to exist.

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