Mark Trahant
Special to ICT
The Navajo Times building was hardly more than a shack in 1983. The floors had buckled (probably years before) and reporters had to be careful where they stepped or they might end up in a hole. I had just been appointed editor and I was trying to recruit folks to work on the tribal weekly.
Educator Robert A. Roessel Jr. started writing me letters about what the Navajo Times could become. In those letters he told me, I know a little about what I am suggesting because my son is a journalist.
So a few weeks later his son, Charles “Monty” Roessel, showed up to ask about a job. Then he noticed the state of the building, the working newsroom as a shack. Monty was working in a more conventional setting, as a photojournalist at the Tribune in Greeley, Colorado. He specifically sought a job as a photographer.
We went to lunch, talked about journalism, and the philosophy of news, and I told him I had a better idea. He should come to the Navajo Times as the managing editor. He tried to shrug it off. Photography was his calling, not editing. I said something along the lines of we need Navajo journalists … and what better way to set the standard.
Monty did just that. He led the newsroom and helped create an atmosphere that led to the Navajo Times publishing a daily newspaper (something that had never been done before). And he was really good at recruiting talent. What had been a largely non-Indian staff was transformed into a staff that was largely Navajo (and even more important, fluent in the Navajo language.)
No matter what his official job, Monty was always the photographer. He kept his cameras close in case there was something worth shooting. And because the Times was a small newsroom, we always found a story he could tell visually.
Years later, when he was working in government, I asked him if he still kept his cameras close. He laughed and said he sometimes slipped his Leica camera out because it was quiet and he could take pictures without notice.
After the Navajo Times, Monty and I found projects to work on as freelancers. We pitched stories to Arizona Highways and we went to Laguna Pueblo for New Mexico Magazine for a story on their baseball league. Our dream was to get one of those multi-year assignments at National Geographic. Monty got his National Geographic byline long before I did (and then Geo Germany magazine and National Geographic Traveler). We later laughed because when I finally did get an assignment from National Geographic, I had less than a week to write the piece, not the year we had both imagined.
Monty was prolific as a writer. He penned children’s books, history books, and academic papers. He is the author of “Songs from the Loom: A Navajo Girl Learns to Weave,” in 1995. In 2002, he worked with Arizona State University Historian Peter Iverson on an important work, “Diné: A history of the Navajos.” In 2007 Roessel published his second children’s book, “Kinaaldá: A Navajo girl grows up.” And, most recently, an academic work, “Self-Determination as a School Improvement Strategy” for the Journal of American Indian Education.
Starting in 1997 Monty shifted his professional focus to education. He asked me to serve on the committee that helped him shape his master’s degree work, a critical photography project that examined the work of Laura Gilpin on the Navajo Nation. One of his findings was amazing: people told him that they didn’t like it when outside photographers wanted them to dress up for a photoshoot. But when he went to take pictures, they did the same thing. He asked them why? Why not be their everyday selves? One answer is because it was expected, they didn’t want the outside world to think less of what they looked like.
Monty was extraordinarily private for a journalist. The last time I visited with him in person, he described his health challenges this way. “Mark there is something going on with me … “ Then he very briefly talked about his cancer (which was then in remission). He really preferred to talk about his vision for Diné College.
That’s why I was especially proud of Monty for taking on the presidency of the college. We had talked over the years about the importance of investing in talent and making sure that young people had every opportunity. He expanded far beyond hiring reporters and editors to make sure that every student had access to a university education and one that took Navajo philosophy to heart and made it so.
In 2020, Monty was elected as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is a big deal. The academy was founded by John Adams, John Hancock, and other American Revolutionaries. Members are elected to “cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”
Universities have committees that figure out the best approach so that their faculty will be selected. And when it happens, news releases are churned out promoting the institution almost as much as the person elected. Monty did not have that institutional support because no tribal college had ever been included.
“You see the names of presidents from Harvard, Stanford, ASU and then you see Diné College on that list. It shows that tribal colleges are every bit as good as any institution of higher learning,” Roessel told ICT when he was elected. “It makes me so proud to see our name, not mine in particular, but our college’s name.”
Monty may be the first Academy fellow to represent a tribal college – and it’s legacy that will not end with him.
Mark Trahant is the former editor of ICT (and the Navajo Times). He lives in Phoenix and is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.
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