Nellie Kirk: Child welfare pioneer dies

By Kathy Helms
Dine Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — Nellie Kathleen Kirk of Shiprock was a pioneer, plowing new ground in the area of child welfare and social services at a time when only the Bureau of Indian Affairs had programs to deal with dependent and neglected children.

The wife of former Navajo Nation Chief Justice Virgil Kirk Sr., Nellie, 87, passed away Sunday, just one day after their wedding anniversary. Virgil and Nellie were married 55 years, and according to their son, Virgil Jr., there was never a dull moment.

"My dad, who was traditional, and my mother, who was Christian, made a good match. They had worked together really good as far as working with people and the community. He was a police officer first, then became a judge and then a chief justice. She was a teacher first and then a social worker," Virgil said.

In the Kirk household there was no sitting around the dinner table making meaningless chit-chat. "All my life, since I was a little boy," Virgil said, dinner was served along with a side dish of major tribal issues for discussion.

"My particular childhood memory is that I never had it easy with them and the same with the rest of the family. We always had to come third or fourth among everybody else. We had to see things harder and more difficult than the rest of the people because we felt like we needed to feel what everybody else was feeling," Virgil said.

Now a member of the Navajo Board of Education representing Shiprock Agency, he is picking up where his family left off in service to the community.

"I acquired all this wealth of knowledge that I have from both of them, right in front of the kitchen table every day. It wasn't boring. They would talk about issues and my eyes were like a Ping-Pong. I never put my thoughts in. I let them talk and I listened to them," he said.

Nellie was born Feb. 27, 1920, into the Deeshchii'nii Clan (start of the Red Streak People Clan) for the Tsinaajinnii Clan (Black Streak Wood People Clan).

"She came from a home in Kinlichee," her son said. "Her mother, Caroline, had a large number of sheep and paid for her education over at Ganado Mission School. She did that with all her children. They were all educated and had real good backgrounds and foundations in education."

Nellie graduated the mission school in 1938, received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Education from Northern Arizona University in 1943, and went to work for the BIA as an elementary school teacher at the Kinlichee Boarding School before earning her Master's in social work from the University of Oklahoma in 1950.

But it wasn't just students Nellie was teaching, according to her son. "She had to go out and teach the teachers who were coming in and teaching the Navajo children. She had to show the teachers how Indian children and families were functioning and how to deal with the social problems."

Unlike now, he said, there were few Navajo teachers. "They were mostly non-Indians coming from off-reservation. She taught them Navajo, she taught them the culture and how the family structure was."

When she began her career in social work in the 1950s, there were many sleepless nights in the Kirk home.

"My dad and her would sit up till 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning talking to each other, and then maybe an hour or two hours' sleep, and from there he would get going in his work, dealing with being a judge and hearing his cases, then talking to her and them working things out together," Virgil said.

Nellie dealt with many cases of child neglect, according to her son. "She had to pick up children in the middle of the night. They didn't have those nice air-conditioned Suburbans with tinted windows like they have now. She had it rough and hard.

"They had an old Dodge pickup with a stick shift and a very tight clutch. She'd get these calls asking for service because the police had picked up some children, so she had to go take them to foster care in the middle of the night," he said. "They used to log in their mileage and keep track of their expenses on a little clipboard on the dash of the truck," the fed's system of accountability.

Nellie also had a passion for writing. "That was her specialty," Virgil said. "Most were narratives of what exactly was going on with the condition of children, mentally disturbed children due to neglect, and also children that have handicaps."

But her writing abilities were "beyond description," he said. "If I wanted something corrected and the right type of grammar, I'd go to her and say, 'Mom, I need my grammar straightened,' and, boy, she'd just get her red pen out and, say, 'This is not right,'" or more pointedly, for his benefit, she'd say, "This ain't right!"

Nellie was a crusader for children's rights and had a role in ensuring those rights were protected under what was to become the Indian Child Welfare Act.

"She was involved heavily in that big federal law," Virgil said. "Children were being taken out of the reservation in non-Indian families in different parts of the United States, and they weren't getting permission from the Navajo Nation kind of like what's going on in Africa with Angelina Jolie.

"She was instrumental in getting together with that to make sure that these children were brought back and placed with Indian families. She was very concerned about that," he said.

She worked for the Navajo Nation Division of Social Services from 1981 to 1983 following her retirement from BIA in 1977. "After that, she committed herself to many other aspects of donated time. She used to pro tem the chapter meetings when there was no chapter secretary. She would raise her hand and take notes," Virgil said.

In an interview with her granddaughter, Virginia Oglesby-Kirk, Nellie said, "The women in my family have held their own and are the backbone of their families. They have been the pushers and still are. "I have had a very satisfying life with my parents, siblings, husband, co-workers, supervisors, and my community. I have given, and likewise, they have given me much to satisfy my dreams and my desires."

Funeral services for Nellie Kathleen Kirk will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday at Desert View Funeral Home in Shiprock, after which, she will be buried beside her husband in the Shiprock Veterans Community Cemetery.