Interior Solicitor Leo M. Krulitz announced today he has named Claudeen Bates Arthur a Field Solicitor for the Window Rock, Arizona, and Office, which provides legal service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the Navajo Indian Reservation.
Ms. Arthur, 36, is now an attorney in the Division of Indian Affairs in the Solicitor's Washington Office. She will begin work in Window Rock on August 14, replacing Dale H. Itschner who was transferred to the Portland, Oregon, Regional Solicitor's Office.
"I know of no more challenging legal assignment in the Department and of no one better qualified to meet it that Ms. Arthur," said Krulitz. "Her background experience and proven legal talent make her uniquely suited to the Window Rock post and I'm delighted she's available to fill it."
The Window Rock BIA office, Krulitz said, is the largest outside Washington, D.C. with over 5000 employees and an annual budget in excess of $130 million to serve the Nation's largest Indian tribe and the largest Indian reservation.
Ms. Arthur, a Navajo was born in Ganado, Arizona, and attended elementary and high school at the Navajo Methodist Missionary School in Farmington, New Mexico. She was a 1960 National Merit Scholar.
After receiving her Bachelor of Science degree in biology in 1965 from New Mexico State University at Las Cruces, she was a caseworker for the New Mexico Department of Welfare in Farmington, the taught science and English at her old high school for three years.
Ms. Arthur entered the Arizona State University Law School in 1971, earning her juris doctor degree in 1974. She was awarded an American Indian Lawyer Training Program fellowship and worked as an attorney in Shiprock, New Mexico, before starting her own general law practice on the Navajo Reservation. She left private practice to join the Solicitor's staff in Washington in the fall of 1977.
She is a member of the State Bar of New Mexico and the Bar of the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. District Court of New Mexico and the Courts of the Navajo Nation. She and her husband, Harris, have three children.
