This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Correction:Plaintiffs suing Utah over the Navajo Trust Fund allege the fund is owed $150 million. However, the state argues the amount owed is significantly lower and that the federal courts could determine Utah owes the fund nothing. A story Sunday misrepresented this dispute.
MONTEZUMA CREEK - As a young boy, Mark Maryboy scampered over a narrow footbridge of wooden slats and steel cable that spanned not only southern Utah's San Juan River but also the deep chasm between his Navajo Nation and a foreign Anglo world.
He crossed the bridge to attend the white man's grade school and high school. He later crossed it to pursue a college degree and a business career. And, in a historic step, he crossed it to become the first American Indian in Utah elected to a county commission.
But Maryboy always returned to the Navajo side of the river. He combined four terms on the San Juan County Commission with four on the Navajo Tribal Council. His constant goal: help his impoverished people.
Every day he's at it, racking up miles upon miles over long hours in his Dodge pickup. He roves the vast expanses of Navajo land - from the rutted roads of Utah's remote Navajo Mountain to the more urban settings of Shiprock, N.M. - visiting tribal members, looking for ways to improve their lives and livelihoods.
He listens to schoolteachers. They need more resources. He listens to village elders. They need more water. He hears out Navajo seniors. They want more programs.
The 50-year-old Maryboy also confers - as he always has - with spiritual leaders. On a recent day, he journeyed up a gravel road in Aneth to a new sweat lodge. There, he visited mentor/medicine man Robert Whitehorse, who took note of his apprentice's colorful vest and bolo tie.
"When Mark first went in there [San Juan County Commission], they tried to make a puppet of him," Whitehorse recalls. "They didn't know anything about Navajo culture. But Mark showed them."
READING, 'RITING
AND RACISM
The house Maryboy grew up in - south of Bluff near the Utah-Arizona line - had neither electricity nor running water. His parents, like many in their generation, spoke only Navajo. In fact, his clan often traded stories about Anglos and their ways - people and paths best avoided.
"White people once roamed Navajo land but were struck by lightning that carried them back to where they had come from," Maryboy explains of his native lore. "But it was known that one day they would come again and that would bring consequences."
As a third-grader, he remembers trekking with his brother many sandy miles each day down a narrow canyon and across the Swinging Bridge to Bluff Elementary, where they were among the first Navajo kids enrolled. His earliest memories still sting and bear out his parents' reluctance to embrace white culture.
"I was playing with a white boy at recess," he recalls. "I saw a little dog and picked it up. I was petting it, and the boy cussed me out and said, 'Don't hurt that puppy, you savage.' "
His school years in Bluff and later in Blanding, where he attended high school, were marked - and marred - by name-calling and frequent fights.
But those bouts toughened him for later battles with the Anglo government in Monticello, Utah, as well as the Navajo Tribal Council in Window Rock, Ariz., where he fought for basic necessities for tribal members between Rainbow Bridge and the Four Corners.
Maryboy's efforts the past two decades have helped bring electricity, running water and medical care to southeastern Utah's oft-forgotten Navajos. Nonetheless, some still lack modern conveniences and continue to face stiff challenges in education and employment.
It was Maryboy's late father - he died in 1978 - who envisioned his son leading Utah's hard-luck Navajos to better times.
"Two of my brothers were in Vietnam when I graduated from high school [in 1974]. I wanted to join the service but my father said I should go to the university and work in the white man's world. Then I could come back and help my people."
'HAVE A DREAM'
Alone in the vastly white world at the University of Utah - with English as his second language - Maryboy struggled. But he studied tirelessly, knowing he could not fail his people.
"I was taught never to give up. I had to focus," he says. "My dad always said, 'Have a dream. Dreams have a purpose.' "
He graduated from the U. in 1978 with a major in history and minor in business. And once he landed a job at Kmart in Salt Lake City, Maryboy found himself moving quickly up the management ranks.
"The folks in Salt Lake didn't care about my skin color. Their main interest was my production," Maryboy remembers.
Back in Monticello, the U.S. Justice Department was suing San Juan County after the federal Voting Rights Act was amended in 1982. The legal tussle yielded an agreement in 1984 that divided the county into three districts, setting the stage for a Navajo to be elected to the commission.
Utah's tribal elders summoned Maryboy and urged him to run.
"I was excited and happy," he remembers. "I was ready to fight for our people."
But none of it came easily - even decisions such as which political party to join. In the end, the Navajo elders chose to be Democrats because the donkey is respected among their people as a trusted beast of burden. The Republican mascot, on the other hand, was foreign to them, and the elephant appeared to be none too bright.
Interestingly, Navajos have much in common with conservative Republicans, Maryboy explains. They generally abhor abortion, oppose the teaching of evolution and would prefer to have religion observed in schools. However, they are against the death penalty and hold that everyone has a right to Earth's bounties.
The Navajo people - or Diné, as they call themselves - hold sacred four mountains from which medicine men gather minerals and herbs. The number four also plays a central role in many Navajo ceremonies, which, along with the medicines, give strength and guidance.
"My father told me, serve four terms but no more," Maryboy says. "More than that and something bad would happen."
'BLACK' POWER
Maryboy's four terms on the San Juan County Commission - particularly the first half-dozen years - were the subject of much press and the stuff of legend-making. His sword-crossing with the late commission chairman, Cal Black, the undisputed kingpin of San Juan County politics, spiked tensions across southern Utah as Maryboy fought for funding for roads, sanitation and water for Utah's Navajos.
"No one would speak up for the Navajo," says environmentalist Ken Sleight, who then headed the San Juan Democratic Party. "That's what I like about Mark. He's a fighter. He never pounds the table, but he puts his point across very deliberately."
Nonetheless, Maryboy and Black exchanged heated barbs that stoked a political firestorm.
"When Cal Black was pushing me, I had to tell him to back off. I'm one Navajo who won't put up with that BS," Maryboy says. "You have to remember, these guys are hard-core conservative Republicans who are not sympathetic to poor folks. They thought it was the fault of the people to be in that situation."
Navajos saw their treatment by San Juan County officials as blatant racism. But Anglo county leaders say the disharmony was spawned not by bigotry, but misunderstanding. Their contention: Navajos simply had not bothered to learn how county government works.
Laws are not clear on whether federal, state, county or tribal governments are charged with providing services to Utah Navajos, explains former Commissioner Bill Redd.
"Reservations, theoretically, are sovereign governments. Yet they aren't," he says. "The Navajos think the county government is theirs, just like they think the tribal government is theirs."
Redd, who replaced Black, calls his predecessor a "good man" whose dynamic personality ran head-on into the unyielding Maryboy.
Black - who retired from the commission in May 1990 with inoperable cancer and died a few months later - told The Salt Lake Tribune that it was Maryboy who was the racist.
"Commissioner Maryboy said he was taught to hate white men. I wasn't taught to hate anybody."
A HIGHER POWER
What Black and his contemporaries likely did not understand, however, was that Maryboy brought with him Navajo spiritual power and the blessing of his elders, who had sent him forth to redress the sins of omission by the Anglo government.
"There was always a council with the elders the whole time I was in the County Commission. Many of the talks went back to the times when Navajos were in wars with pioneers," Maryboy says. "A lot of the council was intertwined with sacred ceremony."
Those rituals never loomed larger than during the summer of 1990, when San Juan County Attorney Craig Halls asked the Utah Attorney General's Office to investigate Maryboy on allegations of double billing on travel receipts.
"They were trying to embarrass me, trying to get me to shut up," Maryboy says. "I was told by the medicine men and the stargazers that the storm would pass and to stay brave."
In the end, the attorney general refused to bring charges, and Maryboy agreed to repay $278 to San Juan County.
Frictions soared when Sleight, Navajo elders and other Democratic stalwarts determined to run a Navajo for every county post up for grabs in 1989. The campaign aimed at getting tribal members to the polls was called "Niha-Whol-Zhiizh," meaning "It's our turn."
The Anglo community erupted, Sleight recalls. After all, 56 percent of San Juan's population is Navajo.
"If the Navajos would come out, they'd take over the county," Sleight says. "The whites are so afraid of that."
The Democratic-Navajo plan fizzled. Maryboy won a second commission term, but was the only Indian elected.
NO-MAN'S LAND
Historically, Utah Navajos were ignored not only by the county and state governments but also by the Navajo Nation.
"It's like a no-man's land," Maryboy says of the narrow Utah strip that is home to 7,000 of the Navajo Nation's 300,000 citizens. "We are like the stepchildren."
San Juan County officials long believed Utah Navajos were primarily the responsibility of the tribe. The Tribal Council, on the other hand, held that their Utah kin could fend for themselves after a 1933 federal mandate awarded them 37.5 percent of royalties from the rich oil fields near Aneth on Utah's portion of the reservation.
But between 1933 and 1990, the Utah Navajo Oil Trust Fund was plundered of $150 million, according to a Utah legislative auditor's report. The Navajos' lawsuit against the state is still pending.
During his first term on the County Commission, Maryboy saw that Utah Diné needed more political clout with the Navajo Nation. In 1990, as he entered his second commission term, Maryboy also sought and won a spot on the Navajo Tribal Council.
He would go on to win two more commission terms, and he now is in the last year of his fourth term on the Tribal Council.
During the 12-year period in which he played this dual role, Maryboy enjoyed his greatest success, says San Juan County Administrator Rick Bailey.
"There was a learning curve [for Maryboy], and he realized the county couldn't fulfill every one of the issues he would like to have seen," Bailey says. "But he's been able to make a lot of things happen by funneling Navajo tribal funds through county programs."
Maryboy not only used the county and tribe in conjunction but also played them off one another when the need arose.
In 1999, when San Juan officials dismissed Donna Singer from the County Health Department, where she oversaw services for the Navajos, Maryboy persuaded her to help him launch a medical service that would be owned by Utah Navajos.
With Singer and tribal funds, Maryboy established Utah Navajo Health Systems. Then he ramrodded tribal legislation that allows the agency to keep its profits, rather than return them to Window Rock.
"People weren't getting good quality health care, and they had no say in it," Maryboy says. "Now, we're doing just the opposite."
The Utah Navajo Health Systems clinics grew so successful that Blanding officials invited Singer to open one in their town, where the majority of patients are Anglos.
The health-care agency maintains a full-time staff of 124 and serves more than 10,000 patients.
"It's a huge success," Singer says. "It's an example of what the Indian people can do."
NEXT STEP
Maryboy's involvement in similar story lines is repeated across Utah's Navajo strip - from roads and school bus routes in Aneth and the aquatic center in Montezuma Creek to the new school in Monument Valley and just about everything in between.
In Indian country, he is embraced as a leader with vision. Some hope he someday will run for president of the Navajo Nation.
During a recent trip, he was greeted warmly at Bluff's Navajo Senior Center, where he updated folks - in their native tongue - on the status of tribal legislation.
"He has worked very hard for us in a lot of ways," director Betty Sampson says. "We're really thankful for him."
They're also grateful down the road at Montezuma Creek Elementary, where Maryboy serves as a living example of the potential within Navajo kids.
"The biggest challenge my children face is people not having high expectations of them," Principal Rebecca Venally says. "Through models like Mr. Maryboy, we teach them to have high expectations of themselves."
These days, as chairman of the Navajo Nation's Budget and Finance Committee, Maryboy spends much of his time in Window Rock politicking over how to divvy up the $130 million tribal budget.
But the seasoned Navajo leader is ready for his next step. Heeding his father's wishes, he will not seek a fifth term on the council. Instead, he might move on to something else, something different - maybe rodeoing as he did in his youth.
"Some people might think I'm a little old for riding broncs. But I've been running and working out and think I can still do it," he says. "I like the challenge."
The bridge awaits.
BORN: Dec. 10, 1955, in Bluff,
Utah.
GRADUATED: San Juan High School in 1974; University of Utah in 1978, majoring in history and business.
MARRIED: Roselyn Maryboy in 1980; they have a daughter, Blaire Bell Maryboy, 17.
ELECTED: San Juan County Commission, 1986-2002; Navajo Tribal Council, 1990-2006.
APPOINTED: National Indian Education Council in 1994 by President Clinton.
ADDRESSED: United Nations in 1996 for declaration to protect indigenous peoples.
SELECTED: Navajo Nation Council delegate of the year in 1998.
COMING MONDAY:
Utah's Navajos dream of changes that could improve their lives if they win a lawsuit against the state.