As a young child, Bill Frazier didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he knew it would involve working with Mother Earth. Feeling the cool moist soil run through his fingers felt like the most natural thing in the world.  

“The projects that interested me when I was growing up always involved digging in the dirt. And now I see how my heritage, and what my grandfather and elders taught me, tied me to the land,” said Frazier, a site manager for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Legacy Management (LM). 

“The land is sacred,” Frazier said. “You’ve got to treat it with respect.” 

That deference to nature is heavily influenced by Frazier’s background. His family lived in Navajo Nation, the largest American Indian reservation in the United States. November is Native American Heritage Month and,for Frazier, having a whole month that acknowledges his ethnicity is significant. 

“As a Navajo, it does resonate with me,” Frazier said. 

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed a joint resolution of Congress designating November as a month dedicated to honoring and celebrating the contributions of the first Americans.  

“It’s nice to have that recognition,” Frazier said. “It just shows that we’re included and part of the fabric of the United States of America — it’s nice to be part of the community.”  

For many American Indians, the importance of community cannot be overstated. Neither can the connection to the land, said Frazier, who was raised where his ancestors lived and taught that the sanctity of nature was a way of life, as taught through the Navajo concept of “Hózhó.” The philosophical principle of “Hózhó” — loosely defined as “walking with nature” in Navajo — embodies the time-honored tradition of maintaining a balance between harmony, beauty, and order.  

“It's in all things — what you do, not just the environment, but how you live your life and your behavior,” Frazier said, noting it’s fitting that today he works for LM, the federal office tasked with a mandate to monitor and maintain cleaned up areas where the Manhattan Project and other Cold War efforts left behind hazardous materials, such as chemical and radioactive waste.  

But when he was first approached with the job offer, he was taken aback. 

“It’s not something that I ever pictured myself doing,” Frazier said. “I worked in design and construction and now I’m a site manager.”  

He and his brother had followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming civil engineers. Early on in his career, Frazier was given the opportunity to travel extensively. But when LM offered him a job based in Grand Junction, Colorado, and he learned that some of the sites LM manages are on native lands, he knew he was exactly where the universe wanted him to be. 

The serendipitous fact that his career trajectory landed him in LM is not lost on him, and Frazier sees his role as a site manager as not just a job but a calling. 

“Being a Native American and working for the Office of Legacy Management, where we have the responsibility of environmental stewardship, is restoring that balance with nature,” he said.