<p>Princeton</a> Alumni Weekly: The poet as politician</p>
<p>. . . the Navajo Nation's that is.</p>
<p>Here's an interesting bit of news I had missed. </p>
<p>The Navajo Nation held its presidential election last fall. Ben Shelly has been elected President while poet, playwright, medicine man and politician Rex Lee Jim '86 will be the new Vice President.</p>
<p>"Jim author, playwright, and medicine man is unusual in the degree to which he keeps one foot in the traditional world and another in the wider world beyond it. He lives 15 miles by dirt road from the tiny village of Rock Point, Ariz., in a camp that lacks running water, yet he makes about 10 trips a year to Geneva, Switzerland, on United Nations business and more trips abroad as a representative of the Carter Foundation. He sits on the Navajo Nation Council, the tribes legislative body, where he chairs the public-safety committee. He campaigned every day in a uniform of dark sportcoat, dress pants, black lace-up shoes, and white dress shirt (along with Navajo jewelry), prompting the Navajo Times to write that he could easily pass for a professor on the elite eastern campuses he once roamed. Unlike any of the other candidates, he also wore his long hair in a traditional bun called a tsiyee. Though he is soft-spoken bordering on reticent, on the stump he declaims forcefully in fluent Navajo. Before the press conference at which Shelly and Jim made their first appearance as a team, the two candidates prayed together in a hogan, the traditional, round, mud-roofed Navajo dwelling. Then they posed for the standard political photograph with their clasped hands raised. . . . (continued)</p>