The record, read closely · issue articles
The law that was supposed to build the economy
≈ 6 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines
D · Draft — not verified Every quote is verbatim from a candidate’s own turn in their interview. Quotes are their claims, not this site’s findings. Where a claim about the Act’s text has not been checked against the Act itself, this page says so. How we verify →
What Cal asked. “Are you familiar with the Navajo Business Opportunity Act?” — his most consistent question, present in 39 of the 41 interviews where his questions are identifiable.
His theory. The law to fix the economy already exists and is not being made to work: “all the answers are there in order to address the Navajo Nation economy.”
The count. 39 of 42 candidates discussed the economy and the NBOA substantively.
Measured across all 42 interviews, the Navajo Business Opportunity Act is the single most consistent instrument Cal Nez raises — present in 39 of the 41 interviews where his questions can be identified. More than any other named law. His own view of it is blunt: “all the answers are there in order to address the Navajo Nation economy.” And his sharpest question, put to Andy Nez, is the one this article exists to answer: “how would you really make the Navajo Business Opportunity Act work?”
Fourteen of the 42 candidates engaged with it substantively. They do not agree. That disagreement is the most useful thing in the record about the Navajo economy.
What it is supposed to do
The candidates describe it consistently. Cornelia Carm Wagoner: it “allows Navajo business owners to have first opportunity and contracting.” Eugene Badonie calls it “a piece of law… that grants authority to the Navajo Nation business people to have the first crack at any funding of Navajo Nation that is put out there.” Shaquille Begay: it allows “a Navajo-owned business to give first preference.” Jamie Henio states its purpose — it “was created to expand economic development and self-sufficiency and to give… 100% Navajo owned businesses the opportunity to bid for contracts.” Joan Gray puts it plainest: “where we should have been hiring our own people.”
Approach: expand it
Titus J. Nez wants it enlarged, and ties it directly to Cal’s pie: “I think we would look at the Navajo Business Opportunity Act and actually expand that… that’s what I would say is Navajo money, Navajo economy, Navajo economics.” He names the obstacle in the same breath: “a lot of our laws have loopholes. A lot of them are vague.” Melinda Arviso Ciocco sees it as revenue policy that already carries an outreach duty to small businesses. Relinda M. John uses it in her own business, and says she has been telling small vendors it exists — which is its own finding about how well known the law is.
Approach: it leaks — the front company problem
Jamie Henio read the Act and found what troubled him in the definitions: the Act itself defines a front. He describes outside companies putting a Navajo name on a business that is not truly Navajo-owned, and the ownership percentages that make it possible. Eugene Badonie describes the same practice more bitterly, from memory of the era it began: Navajo people holding one or two percent ownership, in his words, “prostituting their Navajoness” to outside firms. He goes further than anyone else in the record and rejects the preference approach outright: “I don’t think I really agree with the Navajo Nation Business Opportunity Act.”
FINDING Two candidates, from opposite directions, describe the same failure mode: a preference law whose benefit can be captured by a company that is Navajo on paper. Whether the Act’s current text still permits this, and what the ownership thresholds now are, this project has not verified against the Act — the Act sits in Title 5, and post-2009 amendments are unchecked. That verification is on The Work.
Approach: it doesn’t reach the people who need it
Jerilynn Yazzie makes the most concrete argument on the page, and it is about who the law was never built for: the Nation, she says, “needs to change the guidelines and regulations to benefit someone who can receive NBOA action, like our local burrito lady, our local seamstress… our local food people can be a source of catering. But none of that is for us and is not meant for us.” Her charge is procedural, not ideological: “The process is too long. It’s unclear.” And people cannot wait for the Nation to pay: the local burrito lady, “getting and receiving contracts through NBOA, she’s going to have to wait a long time to see our money.”
This is the seam, in economic form. A right that exists, a door that opens too slowly for the person who needs it most.
Approach: it stops at the edge of the Nation’s own contracts
Greg Bigman raises the limit that decides how much the Act can ever accomplish. Ask business regulatory whether the NBOA applies to private entities, he says, “and they’re gonna say, no, it only applies to Navajo. But this is a law across the nation.” His examples are the big employers — federal facilities that answer “we’re federal government,” and utilities and industries operating on Navajo land.
FINDING If the Act reaches only the Nation’s own contracts, then its power is bounded by the Nation’s own budget — which returns this article to the money, and to the loop this site keeps finding: a preference law can only distribute the pie it is given. Making a second pie is a different question.
What nobody said
FINDING
Not one candidate, in any of the 42 interviews, described how a Diné person actually reads the Navajo Business Opportunity Act — where to find its current text, what the ownership thresholds are today, or which amendments have changed it since 2009. Jamie Henio came closest: he read it “a while back.” Vince James asked the question that should have opened the whole conversation — “what diagram was utilized to get to this point of that Navajo Business Opportunity Act?” — and it went unanswered.
A law nobody can read is a law nobody can use. That is not a coincidence between this article and the one about the Code. It is the same finding, wearing work clothes.
TAKE ACTION
The question for every candidate
“The NBOA already exists. Name one specific change — a definition, a deadline, a payment term — that would let a Diné person with a small business actually use it this year.” Vague answers praise the Act. Specific answers name a clause. Their full interviews: the candidate pages. What the Act is supposed to do, in plain language: the NBOA issue page and the lesson.
Up a level: What runs through all of it →