Officials worry USU lawsuit gives Navajos wrong message
Churro sheep seem unlikely candidates to be in the middle of a lawsuit, but at Utah State University, that is exactly where they are.
In a continuation of a long-running and well-publicized conflict, USU has filed a lawsuit in the 3rd District Court to collect the assets of the Navajo Sheep Project (NSP), which is directed by Professor Lyle McNeal of the Animal, Dairy and Veterinary Science department.
One of the key questions at issue is whether or not the NSP is still functioning. According to Robert Barclay, assistant attorney general and university counsel, who is handling the lawsuit for USU, and documents on the Utah Chamber of Commerce Web site, the NSP is no longer a functioning corporation. According to McNeal and others, the NSP is functioning just as it has in the past.
The story began in 1979, when McNeal came to USU with a flock of 30 churro sheep. He had discovered a few years earlier that the churro sheep, which have been the traditional sheep of the Navajo Nation, had almost disappeared from the Navajo Reservation. By McNeal’s estimate, the sheep population was down to a few hundred on the reservation, from a high of considerably more than 100,000. McNeal said he began a breeding program with the goal of reinvigorating the churro population on the reservation, thereby righting some of the historic wrongs that whites had committed against Navajos.
In McNeal’s first few years at USU, the NSP grew and prospered. McNeal initially kept his flock on a field just below Romney Stadium and took frequent field trips to the Navajo Reservation with his students. According to Alvin Whitehair, a Navajo graduate student in the department of Natural Resources, McNeal has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on the reservation.
“You can go to almost any community down there, and people will tell you that Doc [McNeal] has done a lot for them,” Whitehair said. “If that lawyer doesn’t believe it, he can come down to the reservation with me. I’ll show him that the project is still going on. Those sheep not only help the culture, they help the ecosystem because of the fact that they can graze on invasive weeds and plants that other sheep don’t eat.”
Whitehair also said churros are extremely useful to Navajos because of their high tolerance for temperature extremes and the fact that churro ewes take good care of their lambs, which some other breeds do not. churros are also valued for their long, coarse hair, which is used by Navajo weavers.
“Sheep are a huge part of our culture,” Whitehair said. “If a white person was living somewhere like China and they wanted something to make them feel at home, they might have a big T-bone steak. For us Navajos, we’d slaughter a sheep.”
According to Barclay, the university just wants to know the actual status of the NSP.
“This isn’t anti-Navajo. We just want to know what’s going on,” Barclay said. “All the indications are that this corporation is involuntarily dissolved. As far as we know, McNeal is acting as if the project’s assets are his personal property. He has said that he didn’t know he needed to file papers [to retain the NSP’s corporate status] – well, that’s just passing the buck.”
Problems between McNeal and the university came to the fore in 1989, when USU told McNeal the project would have to start paying one-quarter of McNeal’s salary because of the amount of time he spent on it and the fact that he was producing neither academic publications nor grant money. In the summer of 2000, McNeal won a lawsuit against the university to collect back pay and was awarded $44,000.
By 1997, USU was no longer willing to be a part of the NSP and struck a deal with the NSP to tranfer the assets of the program to a non-profit corporation, which continued to bear the NSP name, for a fee of $50,000. According to McNeal, this deal was struck without his knowledge by one member of the NSP’s board of directors – a member who is no longer with the NSP. He claims that much of the NSP’s money came from private donations, not the university, and hence, the university was not owed money.
Barclay said the NSP had 10 years to repay the $50,000, but it was brought to his attention that the NSP was no longer a corporation. Barclay added that Utah statute requires a creditor to file a lawsuit within two years of a corporation’s dissolution in order to collect any assets. In this case, it appears that the NSP corporate status expired in 1999, which, according to Barclay, is why the university filed the lawsuit now.
McNeal has a different explanation.
“It’s a grudge match, an ego thing,” McNeal said. “Barclay lost the case this summer, so now he’s suing the NSP. Whatever happened to our mission to serve people, to help the underserved?”
A number of USU officials seem to be concerned that the Navajo Nation will perceive USU’s lawsuit as an attack on Navajos. Eric Olsen, director of High School/College Relations, has made a concerted effort to recruit Navajos, and he is worried about the possible fallout from a lawsuit.
“It is a concern of mine,” Olsen said. “We recruit down there. We usually have a booth at the Navajo Nation fair in Window Rock. I’m worried about how this lawsuit will come out in the press.”
Professor Robert Gilliland of the Agricultural Systems Technology and Education department echoed those sentiments.
“I’m sorry it’s going on, sorry that it’s going to send a negative impression to Navajos,” Gilliland said. “It looked like it might be over with. I know from what I’ve seen of the NSP that it’s been a good program – reaching out to the Navajo culture in a good way.”