DNA, early champion of Indian rights, to shutter 3 locations

Organization, suffering from budget shortfall, has provided legal services to Native people for 50 years

For 50 years, DNA — or, in Navajo, Dinébe’iiná Náhiilna be Agha’diit’ahii — has provided free legal services to lowincome people in three Southwestern states and won groundbreaking cases in Indian law on behalf of its clients.

Now, facing years of financial shortfalls, it is planning to shutter three of its nine offices — in Crownpoint, Shiprock and Monument Valley, Utah. Some staff will move to remaining offices, and others will be laid off.

DNA provides free legal services in areas such as consumer fraud, public benefits, wills and estates, taxes, housing evictions and domestic violence.

Santa Fe attorney Richard Hughes, who once worked for DNA-People’s Legal Services, called the loss of the offices huge because DNA has “provided Native people with a way to have their voices heard on important legal issues.”

The loss of Crownpoint is especially sad, he said, because it serves Indian holders of land allotments who “have distinct problems because of the status of their lands,” he said, adding, “To lose access to legal advice and representation is tragic.” Allotted land is held in trust by the U.S. government.

Santa Fe City Councilor Peter Ives, a member of the DNA board, confirmed the planned office closures.

DNA is “certainly a bastion of hope

for many [who live in] areas across the Navajo Nation and other native populations that suffer significant poverty and unemployment,” Ives said this week. “They have a host of needs, and DNA is there to try to make sure their needs are met if they involved legal issues.”

The organization, established in 1967, provides legal assistance to nearly 4,000 people annually in northwest New Mexico, northeast Arizona and southeast Utah. It already has had to turn away one of every two people seeking help because of limited funds.

“We have been spending a little more than we have coming in, in grants,” Ives said.

Ives said expenses exceeded revenues by about $300,000 in 2016. The shortfall was $124,000 in 2015, according to DNA’s tax return filed with the IRS. Out of a total income of $4.9 million, expenses were just over $5 million. DNA received $3.9 million in government grants and paid out $3.6 million in salaries.

The layoffs due to the office closures will include 12 full-time employees and four part-time workers. Also, two full-time staff members will convert to part time.

Ives said DNA is waiting to see the budget for the federal Legal Services Corporation, from which it receives major funding. The Trump administration has been trying to zero out the corporation’s budget.

DNA also has been exploring the possibility of securing other grants and “upping the game of private fundraising,” but that has proven difficult, he said.

The likelihood of cuts in federal grants is strong because “these days it’s very hard to persuade Congress to give poor people access to lawyers to challenge big companies and government inequity,” Hughes said.

Among DNA’s other funders are the U.S. Department of Justice, the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the Native American Rights Fund, the states of New Mexico and Arizona, the Hopi Tribe and Equal Access to Justice New Mexico.

DNA was the first Indian legal services program in the country, spawned others and produced some of the best-known Indian law attorneys in the U.S., many of whom enlisted out of the top-ranked law schools in the country.

Paul Frye, now an Albuquerque lawyer, joined DNA after Harvard University because “it looked like a great challenge, and it was clear that people without legal support were going to be pushed around, primarily by energy companies.”

While he was working in Crownpoint, DNA started a class-action lawsuit that led to invalidation of the federal government’s claim to ownership of the minerals beneath Indian allotments, which cover about 700 square miles in the San Juan Basin.

And in the mid-1980s, Frye worked with Hughes on a case that led to invalidation of uranium leases on Navajo allotments due to a violation of federal trust duties.

In another case brought by DNA, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1973 that the state of Arizona did not have jurisdiction to impose income tax on Navajos living and working on the reservation.

DNA represented members of the Navajo Tribal Council against Navajo Nation Chairman Peter MacDonald, who had pushed through a Friday evening resolution appropriating $70,000 for his legal expenses in a criminal case against him in U.S. District Court in Phoenix. He was later convicted of corruption-related crimes and other offenses.

The organization also was involved in legal cases that resulted in reform of the way educational resources were allocated in school districts that serve Indians.

In a recent guardianship case in a Navajo court, Ives said, DNA ensured that a parent could obtain care for an adult child with severe disabilities.

Hughes described his workload at DNA in the 1970s as “a little of everything,” with an emphasis on environmental work. The Navajo Nation opposed a proposed coal gasification plant in the Four Corners area. He also represented former uranium miners suffering from asbestosis or lung cancer. “Those were heady times,” he said. Pay at DNA is low, Hughes said. “The fact that good quality lawyers will work for those kinds of salaries is miraculous. You can’t keep good people in positions like that for very long,” he said.

Santa Fe lawyer David Gomez, who spent a year with DNA in the 1990s, said the organization’s remaining staff is going to be flooded with cases as a result of the office closures.

“To lose one third of your offices during a 50thanniversary year is not a story you want to be telling,” Gomez said. “But [DNA] has survived hard times and will survive this.”