Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News
Nakai’s job is to focus on the Native American communities in the Salt Lake City office’s jurisdiction, which reaches as far north as Montana. She grew up on a reservation in Arizona and has been with the Bureau for almost 30 years. She said when she learned about efforts to formally include Navajo in the FBI’s language translation offerings, she couldn’t say no.
“I feel like it’s a social responsibility,” said Nakai, whose father taught English and Navajo in their home when she was growing up. “I immediately thought, ‘I need to do this.’ And I went back to my early years when my father said, ‘You need to speak your language.’ And this was one of those times when I needed to do this.”
Public affairs personnel at FBI Headquarters immediately saw the value of translating materials into Navajo.
“I was thinking about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons initiative and our investigative publicity posters and realized that we translate these into other languages, so why not Navajo now that we have official resources?” said Courtney Miller-Hileman, who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and served as chairperson of AIANAC. “We asked Frank (Fisher) if he was interested, and he ran with it.”