HOW WE WORK · THE OPEN QUESTIONS
What we don’t know
≈ 16 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines
Every page here carries a verification level. This page carries the rest — the questions this project cannot answer, what it would take to answer each one, and what we refuse to guess at in the meantime.
The rule
We will not publish a number without the rule that produced it, or a claim without the document that establishes it.
When we do not know, this page says so, by name.
The urgent questions — two different elections
Two votes are coming, and the questions below belong to different ones. Questions 1, 2, 4 and 5 are about the November 3 referendum on the proposed constitution — read it yourself in the August 7, 2025 working document. Question 3 is about the July 21 primary, and has nothing to do with the referendum. Everything after these five is about the law and the offices, and appears on no ballot at all.
REFERENDUM 1. Which draft of the constitution is on the ballot?
The draft reviewed for this site is 48 pages. Other sources describe a 113-page proposal.
Why it matters: everything the site says about the referendum — that it expressly supersedes Title 26 (§ 1803) and reaches Titles 1 and 2 only through its general clause on inconsistent laws, that the word “procurement” does not appear, that a President must not have “violated” the ethics law while a Justice must not have been “convicted of violating” it — rests on the draft we read.
What would answer it: one call to the Office of Navajo Government Development. “Is the 48-page draft the version going before voters?”
Until then: we do not publish a comparison of current law against the proposal. Constitution 101 says so on its face.
The next open question cuts even closer to the records this site relies on:
REFERENDUM 2. Would adopting the constitution preserve or delete 2 N.N.C. §§ 223–225?
The bidding requirement, the twenty-percent change-order cap, the filing duty, and the public’s right of access all live in Title 2. The draft does not name Title 2. It expressly supersedes only Title 26 (§ 1803, page 44 of the draft), and otherwise supersedes or amends all Navajo Nation law “inconsistent” with it. Whether §§ 223–225 are inconsistent with a constitution that never uses the word “procurement” is precisely the question. What would answer it: an attorney. This site does not assert an answer, and will not.
What would answer it: an attorney. This site does not assert an answer, and will not.
And one question with a date attached:
JULY 21 PRIMARY 3. Has the Navajo Election Administration certified the candidates?
An “Official List of Candidates” dated April 24, 2026 exists on the NEA site. We have not been able to read it. The site no longer claims any candidate is “certified.”
REFERENDUM 4. Two numbers for the same right — which is intended?
In the August 7, 2025 working draft, §605.A (Article VII, p. 10) says laws by initiative require at least 50 percent plus 1 of the popular votes, in a regular scheduled election or a special election. §1107 (Article XI, p. 24) says laws by initiative require at least 52 percent of the popular vote, in a regular scheduled election. Both grant the same right; both say such laws supersede legislative enactments. Read the sections yourself in the hosted draft. Every other threshold in the draft is used consistently — 52% for recall, 66% to abridge rights, 66% of at least 60% of registered voters to amend — which is why this pair stands out, and why it looks like a drafting artifact rather than a design. We do not know which number is intended. We have written the question down for the draft’s author.
REFERENDUM 5. Would the Nation’s enterprises change hands?
§1024.A (p. 23) would bar the Navajo Nation government from directly owning, creating, managing, operating, or investing in business instrumentalities — corporations, LLCs, partnerships, enterprises — that compete against Navajo citizens in the marketplace, while permitting insurance programs, incentives, grants, and guarantees. §1024.B says entities currently owned by the Nation shall be transferred and owned by living Navajo Nation tribal members for their collective benefit, with profits directed to infrastructure, language and culture revitalization, and limited scholarships, and a dividend distribution system implemented. Whether this reaches NTUA, NTEC, Diné Development Corporation, and the Gaming Enterprise, and by what mechanism, is not stated in the text we can read. We do not know. It is question two for the author.
Half the presidential field never sat with Cal
FINDING
All 42 interviews are transcribed and every count on this site uses all 42. But the 42 are not evenly spread across the two races. Nine of the sixteen presidential candidates were interviewed. Thirty-three Council delegate candidates were.
That matters most where readers will lean hardest. If you are comparing candidates for President, this site can show you what nine of them said and is silent about the other seven — and silence here is an artifact of who sat for an interview, not evidence about anyone. Their names, and whether they were interviewed, are all on the candidate pages, listed on equal footing. The six written questions are open to every candidate in both races; answers publish verbatim as they are verified Answers publish verbatim only when confirmed through the candidate’s own public channel — the rule., which is the one way this gap can close before July 21.
Questions about the law and the offices
These appear on no ballot. They are the gaps a voter meets after the election, whoever wins.
Three numbers nobody publishes
FINDING
And one dataset the Nation already holds. Under the NPEA, every covered employer files quarterly reports with the Office of Navajo Labor Relations. Four times a year, the Nation receives the evidence of whether Navajo preference is working. We could not find a published summary of any of it.
The Department of Justice reports to the Council quarterly, in public, in detail. The Judicial Branch publishes caseload reports. But we could not locate anywhere: how many complaints the Office of Navajo Labor Relations receives, how many cases the Labor Commission decides and on what grounds, or how many ethics complaints are filed and how they end. Those three offices touch the people who have been wronged by their own government. Their numbers are the ones a voter most needs, and the ones nobody prints. What should be public →
What law requires a disability accommodation on the Navajo Nation?
FINDING
Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which covers employment, expressly excludes Indian tribes. Searching the published Navajo Nation Code, we could not locate a provision requiring an employer to provide a reasonable accommodation for disability, nor any duty to report accommodations. The NPEA’s reporting duty concerns Navajo preference; the word “accommodate” in that Act concerns Navajo cultural and religious traditions; and “disability” in Title 15 appears in Workers’ Compensation.
We do not know whether such a duty exists in a resolution, a personnel manual, a plan of operation, or an ONLR regulation — none of which we can read in one place. This is the question, stated plainly: what law requires an employer on the Navajo Nation to accommodate a worker’s disability, and who enforces it? Anyone who can name it should tell us. The full working →
Which federal workplace laws actually reach the Nation?
FINDING
Federal posters hang in workplaces across the Nation. Some of the laws they describe do not reach the Nation as an employer. Title VII excludes Indian tribes; ADA Title I excludes Indian tribes; and in Donovan v. Navajo Forest Products Industries (1982) the Tenth Circuit held OSHA does not reach a tribal enterprise on the reservation, because it would abrogate Article II of the Treaty of 1868. Other circuits apply a different test, and the Navajo Nation lies in two of them.
We do not know which federal workplace laws a Navajo Nation HR office believes it is subject to, or why federal notices are posted where the underlying statutes may not apply. That is a question with a real answer, held by the Division of Human Resources and the Department of Justice. The full working →
Questions for the drafter
The proposed constitution’s working draft is credited to Harrison Tsosie. As we read the draft, this project keeps a running list of questions only its author can answer — the two above, plus what happens to the Local Governance Act under Article XVIII, how Article XI relates to an election code the public cannot read, where the codification duty of 2 N.N.C. § 221(A) lands under a new legislative house, and whether a plain-language and Navajo-language version exists before November 3. None of these are criticisms of the draft. They are the questions a careful reader asks. If the author answers, his answers will publish here verbatim, in full, unedited — the same rule this site applies to every candidate.
What would answer it: a call to the NEA. Ask two things: is the April 24 list the certified list, and was anyone removed?
The law we have not read
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| 15 N.N.C. § 601 et seq. | Every deadline on this site comes from an attorney’s published commentary, not the statute. People rely on these deadlines. |
| Navajo Nation Privacy and Access to Information Act — 2 N.N.C. § 81 et seq. | We now have the citation, from 12 N.N.C. § 309. Still unread. The Nation may already have a records law as strong as FOIA. Why this matters → |
| Title 10 · CO-53-25 | Education and veterans are two of Cal’s seven. The candidate questionnaire cannot reach them until someone reads these. |
| Title 26 in full | One candidate says certified chapters no longer go through the Auditor General. A separate resolution appears to have centralized chapter oversight. Both may be true. We do not know. |
| Whether § 840(A) says may or shall | It is the difference between a right to a budget hearing and a courtesy. |
| The current tribal sentencing cap | Our source predates the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010. We do not publish the number. |
What we are paying for damage control — versus prevention
Nobody has done this arithmetic. It can be done.
One of the five lenses asks: does this prevent the harm, or clean up after it? Applied to the budget, it becomes a question with an answer.
The prevention side — the Auditor General, the Office of Ethics & Rules, internal audit, compliance, training. Every one is a line in a published budget.
The damage-control side — outside counsel, special prosecutors, litigation, settlements, receivers, restitution. The Council’s own resolutions record a “Department of Justice Fixed Cost Litigation Fund.”
We do not have these figures. But they are not secret:
- The FY2026 Comprehensive Budget ($603.7 million, Legislation 0195-25) is published by the Council.
- The Budget Instruction Manual and planning base amounts are published by the Office of Management & Budget.
- Contracts — including contracts with law firms — are filed under § 224, and § 225 says access to them “shall be provided to the public.”
- The Judicial Branch publishes budgets and expenditures every quarter.
The data exists. Nobody has assembled it.
The question worth asking, once someone has the figures
For every dollar the Navajo Nation spends after something goes wrong, how many does it spend to stop it going wrong?
Nobody can answer that today. It would take a volunteer, a published budget, and an afternoon.
The record we have not checked
- Forty-one interviews exist. Twenty-four are transcribed. Every count on this site comes from those twenty-four. Seventeen interviews are in none of them.
- No quotation has been checked against video. The transcripts mangle proper nouns — preference becomes “preface,” Buu Nygren becomes “Blue Niagara” — and they do not preserve Diné Bizaad at all. Where a candidate answered in the language, the recording is the only faithful record.
- 102 pages on this site say, on their face, that nobody has checked them against the Code. They carry a D badge.
- Ethics & Rules case counts. The former Director says the office went from 176 open cases to 146 — roughly thirty closed — under an interim director who is not a barred attorney. The counts are checkable in Law and Order Committee records. Whether they were closed improperly is not.
Material we hold and will not publish
A recorded Cal Nez episode features three community members from Teesto describing the ethics complaint process. It contains allegations about identifiable officials and an office.
They are unverified. No right of reply has been sought. They appear nowhere on this site, and they will not until both are true.
The three speakers are Mona Seamon, Laura Clelland, and Lula Stago, of Teesto. The machine transcript spells all three incorrectly. The recording remains the authority, and corrections are welcome.
One sentence from that episode is published — a description of why people stop coming to chapter meetings. It names no one. Read it →
A candidate’s name we cannot confirm
This site spells her Andrienne Lister. The interview file Cal Nez supplied spells her Andrienna Lister. She does not state her own name in the recording, and the transcription software garbles every mention of it.
We have not guessed. The Navajo Election Administration’s certified list is the authority. Until someone checks it, we do not know which is right — and a candidate’s name is not a detail.
What we will not guess
Some things are not gaps. They are refusals.
- How many candidates “knew” a law. The questions were never standardized, and coverage was uneven in all 42 transcribed interviews (recomputed July 9, 2026) — health care was asked in 36; veterans in 20; land in nine. A count would punish people for questions they were never asked.
- Whether any candidate is better than another. Not by score, not by ranking, not by adjective, not by implication.
- Any allegation about a living person without independent verification and a right of reply. Not by adjacency.
- Filing deadlines we cannot cite. The Right Door guide publishes a deadline only with the rule attached, and says so where it has none.
Found something? Read something?
If you have read a statute, pulled a budget line, watched an interview, or hold a document that answers anything on this page — tell us what it says and where you found it.
Every question answered here moves a page from D toward A. That is the whole job.
Related: How we verify · The Root Problem · The Seams · The Covenant
Where the interviews come from — and where they do not
Every candidate interview used on this site is from Politics on the Navajo Nation, hosted by Cal Nez. No other programme’s interviews are used, in any count, on any page.
This is a rule, not a preference.
- The work is not ours. This archive exists because one journalist recorded the record and shared it.
- Mixing hosts destroys comparability. Every count on this site depends on the same person asking. A different interviewer is a different instrument.
- Other broadcasters hold rights in their own work.
Material from other programmes has been offered to this project and deliberately excluded. Every file in the archive is checked automatically for a host marker before any analysis runs.
And five Titles are not in the published Code at all
The volume lists them. It does not print them.
A · verified page by page in the Navajo Nation Code Annotated
The published Code Annotated opens with a table of contents naming Titles 1 through 26.
Twenty of them are printed. Five are not.
| Title | What it governs | In the volume? |
|---|---|---|
| Title 3 | Agriculture and Livestock — grazing permits | No |
| Title 8 | Decedents’ Estates — wills, inheritance, probate | No |
| Title 11 | Elections | No |
| Title 16 | Land | No |
| Title 26 | Local Governance Act — all 110 chapters | No |
| Titles 1, 2, 4, 5, 5A, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17–24 | Government, commerce, courts, education, fiscal, health, labor, law and order, taxation… | Yes |
What that means, in plain words
A Diné person holding the published Code cannot read the law that governs their grazing permit.
They cannot read the law that governs their land.
They cannot read the law that governs their chapter.
They cannot read the law that governs who inherits when a relative dies.
And twelve days before a primary, they cannot read the election law.
Why this explains what the interviews showed
Andrew Curley calls land reform the number one issue on the Navajo Nation. He researched it at the Diné Policy Institute. The law he is talking about is not in the published Code.
Lewnell Harrison says certified chapters no longer go through the Auditor General. Nobody can check him. Title 26 is not in the published Code.
Of the 42 candidates on the record (as of July 2026), one — LaVonne Tsosie — cited sections of Navajo law on tape: Title II §102 and the §164 review process.
Three others cited Section 17 — a federal provision. Title II is one of the Titles that IS published. The pattern holds: people cited the law they could read.