Civic Academy · The Obstacle Map
The Runaround
≈ 8 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines
D · Draft — not verified Not line-checked against the Navajo Nation Code. How we verify →
The barriers people hit — and the tactics behind them. Every community knows the feeling: the answer is always somewhere else. This is the growing map of the mechanisms that stall progress — so they can be named, understood, and fixed.
Naming matters: you can’t fix what you won’t name. The Runaround collects the recurring patterns that surface interview after interview — not to blame any person, but to map the machinery. Each pattern links to the lesson that explains it.
Bottlenecks
One seat, one signature, one office everything must pass through — so a single vacancy stalls hundreds of cases. Example from the record: the Ethics & Rules complaint pipeline runs through the director/presenting officer seat. Ethics & Rules, explained →
Loopholes & workarounds
Rules with gaps that let obligations slip — and informal workarounds that quietly become the real system. Hidden Obstacles → · When candidates say the law isn’t followed →
Jurisdiction tangles
“That’s not our department” — federal, Nation, state, county, and chapter authority overlap, and problems fall in the seams. Who’s in charge? The jurisdiction guide → The sharpest tangle: the Nation generally can’t criminally charge non-Indians — but federal prosecutors can, and theft from tribal organizations is a federal crime. The chart shows the door.
Manipulative mechanisms
The rhetorical runaround: evading the question, promising the sky, guilt by association — the distortion tactics the League of Women Voters taught generations to catch. Did They Answer the Question? →
Made-up rules & intimidation
When the written law is inconvenient, the tactics multiply. Name them:
- Made-up rules — a form that doesn’t exist, a policy that “changed yesterday,” a deadline nobody published. Counter: ask for the rule in writing — real rules have citations; invented ones evaporate.
- Blatant disregard — the written rule, the deadline, even a court’s stay is right there, and it’s simply ignored, daring you to make enforcement happen. Both tactics end at one question: who enforces the answer?
- The quiet non-renewal — instead of firing (which requires just cause under the NPEA), the contract just isn’t renewed: no notice, no reason, no paper. Done systematically, it’s at-will employment by another name. Counter: ask in writing — and a pattern of non-renewals doing terminations’ work is itself evidence for ONLR.
- The secret accusation — discipline built on complaints you’re never shown, from accusers you’re never told about. Counter: ask in writing what exactly is alleged and by what document. A refusal, in writing, is evidence.
- The procedural ambush — your hearing’s rules revealed only at the hearing; your witness suddenly “not allowed.” Counter: ask in advance, in writing — witnesses? representation? documents? — and keep the answers. A rule that appears only at the hearing travels with any appeal.
- Lawyered intimidation — threats on legal letterhead meant to frighten, not to state a claim. Counter: a threat that can’t cite its law is a tactic, not a case — show it to your own counsel (DNA-People’s Legal Services) rather than obeying in fear.
- The gatekept form — having to ask HR (or the very office you’re complaining about) for the complaint form itself — identifying yourself before you’ve filed, inviting delay and pressure. The policy question: shouldn’t every complaint form be downloadable online, by anyone, anonymously? Where it isn’t, that’s a choice.
- Intimidation, plainly — security called on a records requester; warnings that pressing the matter will cost you or your relatives.
Loyalty coercion & bullying
Silence demanded as loyalty, fear used as management, K’é twisted into “you owe me your silence.” It runs on three fuels — fear of losing what the employer controls, loyalty over performance, and no venue where complaints land on the merits. Bullying: culture, not incidents →
Displacement pressure
Making the fight itself unlivable: when someone contesting a decision loses their footing — housing, income, standing — while the case is still being heard, the process punishes before any ruling. Moving, distance, and disruption quietly decide cases that were never decided on the merits. Fair systems freeze the harm until the answer is in. At its most deliberate, it’s weaponization: take the housing and the person has to leave the area — and a case that’s never grieved, never filed with ONLR before its deadlines run, is a case won by eviction instead of on the merits. If this is happening to you: file first, move second if you must — deadlines don’t pause for displacement, but a filed case travels with you. Why people stay silent →
Process fog
Procedures nobody can see — where a request goes, how long each step takes, who has it now. Fog isn’t always anyone’s fault, but it always serves whoever benefits from delay. Transparency & Reporting 101 →
This map only grows one way — from what people have lived:
Add to the map
Community knowledge — this map grows from lived experience
Been given the runaround? Name the obstacle — what you were trying to do, where it stalled, and what you were told. Patterns emerge when relatives compare notes. Submit through Participate or put a fix in the circle at Submit Your Proposed Solution.
Nonpartisan, as always: The Runaround maps mechanisms, not people. It never grades or accuses any official.
All lessons · Play: Whose Job Is It? →
Play: Which Jurisdiction Is It? →
Companions: The Right Door · — dated checks of the official doors.
What the whole map points to
Every obstacle here survives for the same reason: somewhere, the venue for justice is too slow, too weak, or too easy to ignore. Displacement pressure only works if the case drags; made-up rules only work if nobody can appeal them quickly; intimidation only works if reporting leads nowhere. That’s the pattern the interview record keeps pointing to — and it’s why the structural questions on this year’s ballot are not abstract. Who decides your case, how fast, and who enforces the answer? Take that question into the Government Reform Mission and to every candidate.
“Can it really not be done?” — the impossibility ledger
“It can’t be done” comes in flavors: real legal walls, real resource gaps, jurisdiction confusion — and deflection wearing law’s clothes. This ledger takes each “can’t” the community reports and researches it into three columns: the claim as heard · what’s actually true (sourced) · what it would take (nothing — it’s already allowed · a chapter resolution · Council action · a referendum · a genuine federal wall).
Content form — volunteers research and de-identify; only verified rows publish
Every obstacle on this map has a cause. The root problem & the to-do list →
Where authority changes hands: The Seams →
Why almost nobody uses § 3767
B · From the record A recorded episode of Politics on the Navajo Nation. Quotation from a machine transcript, not yet checked against the recording.
After Cal Nez interviewed the Office of Ethics & Rules, three community members from Teesto asked to come on the programme and answer.
Mona Seamon, Laura Clelland, and Lula Stago — the last a retired school principal — described their own experience of the ethics complaint process.
Asked why people stop coming to chapter meetings, one of them answered:
“You get a complaint that the community people don’t come to meetings. It’s because for many, many years they have gone to the chapter to ask for what they need and they were labeled as troublemakers. So it’s better that they just stay away and try to manage their life.”
That sentence names no one and accuses no one. It describes a chill.
It also explains a great deal. Why chapter meetings are empty. Why almost nobody testifies at the budget hearings held at all five agencies. Why the Auditor General’s line never gets funded.
And why a retaliation provision that has existed since 1988 is almost never invoked.
Council candidate Jamie Henio, an attorney, told the same programme that people are “scared to say anything because they’re being told, don’t do that, you’re gonna lose your job.” Three women from Teesto described what that fear looks like from inside it.
They came in response
They did not appear at random. They asked to be heard after Cal Nez interviewed the Office of Ethics & Rules itself — its Interim Director and staff — and after his interview with the office’s former Director.
That is what a right of reply looks like when it runs the other way. An office gave its account. Community members answered on the same programme.
TAKE ACTION
This page shows what is. Here is what comes next. The fixes this record points to are written down, one by one: What Needs to Happen Now. The open items, each waiting for an owner: The Work. Observation is step one — these are steps two and three.