Kendall Cumming has been appointed Superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Pima Agency, which has headquarters at Sacaton, Arizona, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Philleo Nash announced today. The new superintendent succeeds Minton J. Nolan, who died in January.
For more than two years Cumming has served as Superintendent of the Jicarilla Agency at Dulce, New Mexico. He will be succeeded in that post by Ralph B. Armstrong, Jr., who has been Assistant Superintendent of the Nevada Agency, Stewart, Nevada.
Cumming was born at Nogales, Arizona, in 1925, and attended the University of Arizona. In 1950, he received a master's degree in range ecology and went to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a range management assistant at Chinle, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation.
In the years that followed, he was assigned to positions of steadily increasing authority at other locations on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations. He was stationed at Fort Defiance as field land operations officer for five years before being named superintendent at Jicarilla. In his new post, Cumming will administer a wide range of Federal programs to an Indian population of approximately 6,300 scattered on four reservations.
Armstrong, a native of Asheville, North Carolina, graduated from North Carolina State College at Raleigh in 1940 with a B.S. in agricultural engineering. He joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1949 as a soil conservationist with the Navajo Agency at Window Rock, Arizona. Prior to that, he served for 2 years with the Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture at Tucson, Arizona. After two years of Army duty, he returned to the Indian Bureau in 1953 as soil conservationist at Mexican Springs, New Mexico. He later served as land operations officer with the Navajo Agency at Fort Defiance, Arizona, and later the Pima Agency at Sacaton, Arizona. In 1963, he came to Washington, D.C. as a participant in the Department of the Interior's manager trainee program, returning to the field service a year later as assistant superintendent of the Nevada Agency at Stewart. As superintendent at Jicarilla he will supervise Federal services for about 1,400 Apache Indians residing on the reservations.
