Title:Hoya Highlight: Bidtah Becker (SFS’93)

Chief Legal Counsel for the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President

Professional Title and Organization:

My current title is Chief Legal Counsel for the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President. Although that is my title today, I’ve been around so long, everybody just knows Bidtah can probably answer questions about natural resources or water. I’m the go-to institutional memory!

Finding Your Way to Georgetown

Where did you grow up and were you a member of the Navajo Nation as a child? What led you to choosing Georgetown University?

To become an official member of Navajo Nation, your parents fill out enrollment papers. My parents filled out my papers when I was a baby, so I have been a member since I can remember. We moved around and then landed back in Albuquerque—the nearest large city to my mom’s home on the Navajo Nation. I consider Albuquerque my hometown, but I’ve been living on the Navajo Nation since 2002. It’s also home for my kids, who were born in a bordertown called Gallup, New Mexico, before growing up on the Navajo Nation.

Georgetown won the basketball NCAA championship when I was in eighth grade, so that definitely put the school on my radar! In high school, there was a couple named Joan and Fred Hart and they were both Georgetown graduates. Fred had come out in the late ’60s to teach at the University of New Mexico Law School. They were huge recruiters for Georgetown, so if you wanted to go to Georgetown, you talked to Fred and Joan! They were also constantly recruiting kids of diverse backgrounds. My dad was a lawyer, so when they heard about my interest, they brought me into the fold and were very persuasive in getting me to Georgetown. It was the 1980s, when a lot was happening in Central America, so I was very interested in international relations. Georgetown was a great place to study that.

Your Time on the Hilltop

What was your major at Georgetown?

I majored in International Politics and the U.S. in the World Affairs, and held a certificate in Latin American studies. For my thesis, I compared indigenous issues in Nicaragua and the United States.

What was your favorite class or who was your favorite professor at Georgetown? Why?

There were so many! My first faculty interaction was with the Latin American Studies folks, who were so interested in my background. In particular, Professor Dodd was this spritely, active, very excitable history professor—I remember him wanting to speak with me about Albuquerque. Another friendly face was Professor Wagner.

Of course, the theology professors are always super influential. I had a new professor named Julia Lamm who, I will always remember, insisted that we use gender neutral pronouns. At the time that wasn’t common, and there was something very comforting about being in a place like Georgetown where you had a female professor who insisted on it. I had a theology professor named Kate McQuin who taught a Religion in America class and she would liken spirituality to the Star Wars-type “force,” which helped bring it down to our level as students. She was very popular and a great professor.

There was also an economics professor who contacted me later because his son was doing a school project on Native Americans, and I always appreciated professors who were willing to connect at the personal level. Lucy Maddox taught a Native American literature course that was technically an honors course but she let me in because I am Native American. It was a great course. She was a real spitfire and had a very different point of view from some of the professors I studied with in the School of Foreign Service.

What is your favorite Georgetown memory?

I remember laughing a lot—genuine belly laughter. One classmate has said that he hasn’t laughed as hard as when we were all young in the dorm.

This question makes me emotional! As you are going through this very transformative college journey with your classmates, there are some things that only they will ever understand about you. My first-year roommate was from the South Side of Chicago, and I was from New Mexico, which are very different, but we always stayed close. When we saw each other after returning after that first year, we just couldn’t stop hugging with genuine emotion. We did not room together again, but we will always have this relationship and, even if we don’t talk often, that relationship still exists. I visited her a few years ago and it was like no time had passed. So I think those deep emotional bonds you create with your classmates, those are some of my favorite memories.

How has Georgetown shaped you?

It really is the “people in service to others” that has stuck with me. There is no better way to serve people, in my opinion, than through the government. ” Sometimes bureaucracies prevent things from getting done, and there are reasons for that. But especially in my community, this bureaucracy is set up to help people improve their standard of living, get scholarships, and in my case, help the Nation secure water rights and develop water so that we have clean drinking water on the reservation.

I did not realize how unique “men and women in service of others” was until I took somebody from the Navajo Nation to campus. I took him to campus because we were in DC for Nation business, and we learned that we were around the same age and both Hoya basketball fans. When we came to campus, he asked me “what does that mean, men and women in service to others?” and I think that was the last thing he, as a police officer by training, had expected to see when he stepped on campus.

Interacting with the Jesuits was also an important part of my time at Georgetown—we lived on a floor with a Jesuit. He had read our personal essays [of dorm members] and he made us feel right at home because he knew something about us. Interacting with the Jesuits, and realizing that they wished so much for us to have holistic, fulfilling, productive lives, you really felt that when you were at school and wanted to live up to that hope, that vision.

Career Information and Reflections

To what do you credit your career success?

People believing in me! I have so many stories I can point to and say that a person reached out to me and believed I could do what they were asking. Being willing to catch the footballs people are throwing at me and learning how to harness their faith in me has been hugely helpful.

What led you to choose the career path you’re on? And what brought you back to the Navajo Nation?

My coming-back-home process started as a freshman at Georgetown with all these professors who wanted to talk to me about New Mexico. In these conversations I realized that I’m from a really special place. Sometimes it takes an outsider to tell you that. Then I went to Nicaragua and I did healthcare volunteer work with a Nicaragua-based agency working on the West Coast in an indigenous community. This experience solidified for me the idea that there is nobody better to serve the Navajo people than Navajo people.

When I first came back to the Navajo Nation, the Department I was working in was under scrutiny. When I arrived, a movement to push certain lawyers out had started to trail off but they were trying to figure out what to do with the water lawyer position. The lead water lawyer was one of four people getting pushed out, so they needed a Navajo to do water work. I raised my hand and volunteered. Politically they needed a Navajo, and secondarily they wanted someone who had some knowledge in the space, and since my Dad worked in water, it made sense. It was truly a crisis that led me on this path.

Now looking back, I am so thankful. I love dealing with water because unlike other fields of law, Mother Nature is in control and I like that we’re talking about and working with issues that are in many ways outside of our human control. We have to learn to work with Mother Nature in the work I do.