think I have, to the Ford Administration, to the Carter Administration, and to the present Reagan Administration.

If my lack of statement is offensive, I do apologize to you.

Mr. Watkins. Mr. Chairman, Senator McCain, it is apparent that I didn't make myself very clear. I was in Tucson at a board of regents meeting, Senator McCain, and I did not leave there until Saturday night, and I had to leave Sunday to come to Washington. I did not have your information, but I will make this statement.

If you will look at some of the statements I have made as chairman for three years, I have said over and over if you will please give us the money, we will go out of business, and those are still my sentiments. You give us the money, and we will quit this agency, shut it down.

Senator Mccain. Thank you, both. Just let me reiterate I meant my comments in no way as a criticism of the position you have chosen to take. I was pointing out that people who come before the Senate have always guaranteed committees on which I sit the assurance that they will provide their personal opinion when asked. If you don't choose to do so, that is certainly your privilege to do so.

Mr. Atkinson. Well, Senator

Senator Mccain. I don't want to beat the issue to death here, Hawley. I want to thank all three of you, and I appreciate the work you have done on behalf of the relocation effort.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman. I thank you very much, Senator.

Because of the importance of the problem before us and the amendments that have been submitted by my two distinguished colleagues, I will now announce that the record will be kept open until the close of business of January 15 next year which should give all interested parties sufficient time to look over the measure, look over the amendments, discuss the matters with your colleagues in OMB and the Administration, and come forth with your analysis and your recommendations.

In submitting your views on the amendments, I would hope that in addition to the official Administration position, if you do have personal views, you would include them.

Mr. Atkinson. That will be done, Senator.

The Chairman. Because the three of you have had more experience in this matter than any member of the OMB. They are completely divorced from what is happening out there, and you people have been there and you have lived with this problem for a long time.

We very much want to hear your personal views, not necessarily one from a bureaucrat who has never set foot in Arizona. So, we value your thoughts, sir.

Mr. Atkinson. Thank you very much, Senator. They will be forwarded to you.

Mr. Watkins. You are very gracious, Senator, and thank you. That will be done.

The Chairman. All of us have many questions we would like to submit to you for your careful consideration and response, but I have just a couple more now. One is on the quality of water.

This committee has received numerous calls and letters suggesting that the water in that area, particularly the Rio Puerco River, is contaminated and polluted by nuclear particles. Do you have any information to give us as to the quality of the water that is available to the people in the new lands?

Mr. Atkinson. Senator, I think we do have. The wells which we are putting in with, of course, the Indian Public Health Service, are far deeper than the waters that flow in the Rio Puerco. We are not using any of that water for either residential, culinary, or stock purposes or for range purpose. All of the water that we are using has been and will be tested by EPA to meet the EPA regulations, and we think they will exceed them.

No decision will be made by us without the Public Health Service first telling us if that water is safe. I think the waters that flow in the Rio Puerco do have some contamination in them and we would be at fault for using those waters.

Ms. Massetto, would you like to comment on that?

Ms. Massetto. No; thank you.

The Chairman. Before proceeding, is it your testimony that the water that flows in the Rio Puerco is unfit for human or animal consumption?

Mr. Atkinson. No, sir; that is not my contention. I know that those waters have some contamination in them today. What lies in the future for that degree of contamination I cannot know.

What I can assure you, though, Senator, and the members of your committee is that the water that we are supplying to relocatees is not from that source. It is from deep within the earth from other geological strata.

Now, I am not expert beyond that except to assure you, Senator, that the waters we are using and the wells we put down for our relocatee families and for their livestock has not been contaminated to any degree where it would be at all harmful to livestock or to individual families.

The Chairman. Will you give us a report as to the number of times the waters in the Rio Puerco have been examined and tested?

Mr. Atkinson. Yes, sir.

The Chairman. And the number of times you have tested deep well waters?

Mr. Atkinson. Yes, sir.

The Chairman. And the results of such tests.

Mr. Atkinson. Yes, sir; that will be forwarded to you immediately

The Chairman. Furthermore, will you advise us as to whether the results exceed or are less than the requirements set forth by EPA?

Mr. Atkinson. Yes, sir.

[Material to be supplied appears in the appendix.]

The Chairman. With that, on behalf of the committee, I thank you very much for assisting us today. We will be submitting questions to you at a later date for your consideration and response.

Mr. Atkinson. Thank you very much, sir, for the opportunity to appear before you and the graciousness which you have extended to us.

The Chairman. Thank you, sir.

Now, we have two very distinguished citizens. One is the Chairman of the Navajo Nation of Window Rock, Arizona, the Honorable Peter MacDonald, and the other is Chairman of the Hopi Tribe from Kykotsmovi, Arizona, the Honorable Ivan Sidney.

I would like to have both of you come up here, if you will.

For those of you who have said this is impossible, I want you to see the two chairmen sitting together. I expect that by 5:30 this afternoon, everything will be resolved.

Well, in order to make this very democratic, how about going alphabetically. Mr. MacDonald, M comes before S. It is good to have you here with us again.

STATEMENT OF HON. PETER MacDONALD, CHAIRMAN, THE NAVAJO TRIBE, WINDOW ROCK, AZ

Mr. Macdonald. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

I would like to express my sincere appreciation for having us here today to talk about one of the most important problems facing the two tribes. I know that the tragedy of relocation is something that we are talking about here, and we want to put an end to that.

I was told that a typical American moves once every two years. The families we are talking about in the 1882 area have lived on the same spot on the same piece of land for generations. The only way of life they know is what they are doing today, and they have been doing this for many years.

We of the Navajo Tribe have tried to bend over backwards to cooperate to work out something, even though we know the law is unjust. We have had numerous meetings with the commission. We had almost weekly meetings with the affected families.

We have had meetings with the BIA who are now over in the new lands, even though, in many instances, they say in one instance that they have jurisdiction and don't need the Navajo Tribe's approval and they can do whatever they want to. On the other hand, they say "Why don't you approve this, Mr. Chairman, before we go on." We constantly continue to fight over who has jurisdiction.

It got to the point where I even got a piece of paper drafted and said why don't we put our thoughts on this piece of paper as to how we are going to cooperate, because I feel very bad that the process of moving people from one place to another is happening without the Navajo Nation's input and involvement.

So, Mr. Chairman, I have prepared a statement which I want to submit to the committee, but I would also like to take a little time here to bring certain points home.

The Chairman. Mr. Chairman, may I assure you that you have all the time you need and want. I will be here all night, if you want me to.

Mr. Macdonald. Thank you very much, sir.

The Chairman. I just cancelled a trip to New York for that purpose. May I also assure you that your full statement and that of Chairman Sidney will be made part of the record.

Mr. Macdonald. Thank you. I hope that my colleague, Chairman Sidney, will be patient here while I just take things off my heart.

Mr. Sidney. Mr. Chairman, I will just make him nervous.

Mr. Macdonald. You know, we are all talking about how it is that the relocation up to now, Public Law 93-531, has not worked. This is the 13th year that we have been trying to perfect this law. Today, we are here to talk about the reauthorization of the work of the commission.

I believe the performance of the Relocation Commission, however well intentioned they may be, has made a more terrible situation than we started out with earlier. I would like to briefly talk about that performance, since that is the key issue in evaluation of S. 1236.

Everything is so bad. I know that you members of the committee sense this just by listening to your questions and also hearing the responses from the commission. As you said earlier, Mr. Chairman, they are the people who have had the longest experience with this work.

They can't even give you a figure that they can agree upon as to how many people are really affected, what their needs are, where they are, what they are doing, what their problems are. It has been this way for a number of years, and I don't know that it is ever going to improve.

This makes me wonder how it was back in 1800 when we had no telephones and no way for Indians to come here and testify before the Senate or the House. You have people coming back here and telling Congress how bad the Indians were, what they are doing. Consequently, many bad laws were made.

Even with today's modern technology, we cannot get a clear answer as to how many people are involved here and what the costs are. So, it really bothers me that we are playing with the lives of many thousands of innocent people.

I have a great respect for the commission, Mr. Hawley Atkinson, Ralph Watkins, and Sandy Massetto. However, we all know that reports come in, some audits have been made which all goes to tell us that the work that they have been charged with has been "botched up," in the words of Congressman Yates.

So, to make this commission more efficient by amendments to this reauthorization bill is very important.

I could go on and say many things about some of the shortcomings and things that have really fallen through the cracks, but, basically, there is not enough planning. There is not sufficient time devoted to really understand what we are talking about here in terms of economic development, putting people in alien environments, and so forth.

The same is true with the BIA which lately entered into this program by trying to move people from HPL into so-called new lands. As I said earlier, they came in like gangbusters and said we are going to move Navajo, we are going to build houses, and are going to put them in there.

And they did. They built a house, they put the road in, and discovered that they forgot to look for water. So, after they built the house and the road, there was no water nearby that house and that

One of the ideas that we had

Senator Mccain. May I interrupt for a second?

Ms. Massetto. Sure.

Senator Mccain. I just want to make the record clear. The land was acquired for the purposes of acquiring additional land for the relocatees. Is that correct?

Ms. Massetto. That is correct. In fact, there was a lot of discussion on that at the time that the land was acquired that this would not generally be a Navajo piece of land. It would be developed for the purposes of the relocatees.

Senator Mccain. And so far, there have been no plans developed by anyone for relocatees to be placed on that land.

Ms. Massetto. That is correct, Senator.

Senator Mccain. How do you explain that?

Ms. Massetto. Part of the reason for the lack of use of moving people to that area is the fact that people just generally didn't want to move there. The other part was that as the coal is mined, people would have to be moved from one place to another so that really the only sites available for people to go to would be this community that, at some point in time, would be developed.

Well, it isn't developed yet, so there really isn't anyplace for these people to go to.

Senator Mccain. Whose responsibility was it to develop such a place?

Ms. Massetto. The commission's.

Mr. Atkinson. I didn't hear that question, Senator.

Senator Mccain. I said, whose responsibility was it to develop that area so that relocatees could be placed there, and Ms. Massetto said it was the commission's.

Mr. Atkinson. Sir, if any relocatees had requested to move to that land—I don't think we have ever had a relocatee family who did, we would honor that request. We move or relocate those families to a site of their choosing. If a family or an extended family had chosen to move to the Paragon Resources Ranch, sir, we then would have made the proper arrangements.

Senator Mccain. Well, may I ask, did the commission recommend the purchase of the Paragon Ranch?

Mr. Atkinson. Senator McCain, the Navajo Tribe chose that, and the commission was overtly active in supporting the Navajo Tribe's request for the Paragon resources. There were many reasons for that.

In the original law, the Navajo Tribe was given the privilege of selecting 250,000 acres of BLM land in northern Arizona. They selected that 250,000 acres of BLM land, and then the Department of Interior or the Government would not give them the land which they selected.

So, we ourselves, these three commissioners, were not going to see that happen again to the Navajo Tribe. They were promised something in a public law and then not given it. So, when they selected the Paragon Resources Ranch, we used every resource at our command to enable the Navajo Tribe to obtain that land which they have.

Senator Mccain. Does that explain the fact that we purchased the Paragon Ranch for the purpose of providing a place for the re