gpeery,
Thanks for getting in touch and sorry to hear you’re having trouble here, but hopefully I can help. When making changes to your template files, you should always be doing template overrides (as described in the themer’s guide) and not editing the files directly in the plugin folder, since updating the plugin will cause your changes to be overwritten.
In order to make your changes again, you’ll need to override the wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/views/month/nav.php file to remove the navigation references, or an easier alternative would be to change your style settings to Tribe Event styles (Events->Settings->Display screenshot), which will only display the navigation links below your content.
Give those suggestions a try and let me know if it does the trick for you. Thanks! 🙂
-Casey-