Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Life on Navajo Land
My wife and I recently visited Page, a small town in the north of Arizona at Glen Canyon Dam. The Navajo Reservation surrounds the area and extends some 150 miles south all the way to Flagstaff and east for hundreds of miles covering much of the state of New Mexico. This arid land is rich with minerals – but much of it remains untouched.
The natives live in small enclaves scattered along the state roads that cut through remote territory. Those within a mile or two of the main roads have power, thanks to the generosity of the Rural Electrical Authority. Housing stock is supplied by funds from the local housing authority (the tribe) via HUD. The land is, of course, owned by the collective. Jobs and water are scarce and welfare is not.
Page used to be buoyed by the Navajo Generating Station, a large power plant that burns local Navajo coal and takes advantage of the electrical distribution system used to deliver hydro-generated power at the dam. Federal regulations have doomed the station and thousands of Navajo who worked in the power plant and the related coal mines will soon be unemployed.
All that is left is tourism: Lake Powell and its surroundings, Horseshoe Bend Overlook, and the recently discovered (’80s) Antelope slot canyons. At about $80 or more in cash per person, the tribes push 5,000 tourists through these canyons every day. That’s a lot of money and somehow I doubt the majority is making its way to the collective.
Some Navajos make trinkets and jewelry to sell to the tourists. Rough structures are scattered along the main roads for this purpose, and 90 percent of them are abandoned. Old abandoned trailers, mud hogans, and rough buildings are also scattered along the roads, traces of previous family enclaves now vacant.
On Indian land, you pay very little for housing since you have very little; and no one wants to occupy old abandoned buildings, especially when you can get a new double-wide from the tribe. So previously used housing, once vacated, is left for the elements to slowly reclaim. All these people have are their stories and their legends, a kind of collective of cultural and prideful despair.
There is also an undercurrent of resentment aimed at the rest of America. Reservation dwellers are entirely dependent on federal money for subsistence, housing, and healthcare, yet there is no real sense of gratitude. Perhaps there needn’t be. But one has to wonder when the generosity, and its precursor, the guilt, will run out. Teddy Roosevelt wondered the same thing more than a century ago.
Legal confusion regarding the applicability of state and federal law had once allowed certain entrepreneurial tribes to run bingo parlors and small-time gambling operations; this niche has now been exploited to include Vegas-style casinos. But the Navajo Nation in Page has not yet tapped that potential. The nation does boast three casino operations but they are in remote places and their profits are spread thin across such a large and needy populace.
Life on this Indian reservation is difficult. Jobs are few, money is as scarce as water, chronic health issues are common, substance abuse is solace, and yet pride defies it all. Despite the best intentions of those who try to help, nothing seems to change. The latest setback is the closing of the Navajo Generating Station and the coal mine that feeds it.
And so it goes.
Published in General
Fair warning to anyone expecting to be taken care of by the Federal government.
Identity politics can be this poisonous.
Not that the US isn’t complicit. We have left several wars with nations divided, in perpetual cold civil-war. The de facto dual-citizenship of many Amerinds leaves them divided within the individual. Or so it seems to me – I’m not one and this is merely my impression from what I have read by sources Amerind and other.
The Dine People are fascinating to me. (The name “Navajo” was thought to mean “thief” or”sharp knife.” So while there is the “Navajo Nation,” their college is “Dine College.”)
When I ran for office in 2012, I traveled to campaign in the Chapter Houses in Coconino County. There are some angry Dine people, but I found them to be almost always a gentle, kind and humorous people.
There are very, very few jobs on the Rez, the common nickname for the Reservation. There are jobs with the government, tourism, artisans and subsistence farming. Many people enlist in the Armed Forces. The poverty rate is huge. Substance abuse is common, especially with alcohol which they have a genetic weakness towards.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ B.I.A. initials are sometimes referred to as “Bossing Indians Around.”
Sovereignty is extremely important. And therein lies the problem. Contracts entered into must be enforced in tribal court. Service of Process must be done by a process server who is licensed by the tribal courts.
Exactly. They are not Americans.
Reservations are a farce so long as they receive any assistance from the United States. If they truly want to be free, then they must choose one way or the other: eliminate the reservations and be Americans like any others or else be foreigners in pocketed nations completely responsible for themselves. The pretense between is killing them.
Some Navajos make trinkets and jewelry to sell to the tourists. Rough structures are scattered along the main roads for this purpose, and 90% of them are abandoned
Twenty years ago, my daughter and I visited the reservation, driving in from the interstate to a famous old trading post that has been there for 100 years, I think it was the Hubbell Post.
https://www.nps.gov/hutr/index.htm
I was interested in a Navajo rug/blanket. I was shown into a room about 20 by 12 with a stack of rugs 4 feet high. I bought one for $3500 that included the name and photo of the weaver. Sadly, I have lost the tag. It is now framed and hangs in my home.
Living room
The Navajos were taught to weave these blankets and rugs by missionaries in the 19th century. I don;t understand why the coal power plants are closing down. The global warming hoax?
No longer cost competitive v. gas.
In my opinion, the United States allowing the “Indians” or “Native Americans” to retain the pretense of sovereignty was and remains one of the cruelest things done to them. The pretense of sovereignty has prevented them from flourishing the way every other ethnic group has.
I try to remind people that the B.I.A.’s treatment of Indians is what the federal government’s treatment of the entire American population would be if the “Progressives” have their way – the people are to be treated as little children in need of direction by the “adult” experts and elites who have no idea what the lives of the people are really like.
Yes. Just like all coal fired plants.
Spot on. That’s the problem – we’ve not let them become Americans. One might say we’ve made it too easy for them to avoid becoming Americans, but that amounts to the same thing.
I learned only recently that weaving was introduced to the Navajo relatively recently (in the grand scheme of history). So much for my mistaken notion that whatever the American Indians are doing now is a reflection of centuries-old traditions.
No. The global warming hoax, in this instance.
Mrs. Tabby and I have noted that among the tribes in New Mexico (usually called “pueblos”), the prices of things the tribes make vary considerably depending on whether they have succeeded in getting the white tourists to think of their products as “art” suitable for museum display.
Pottery from a tribe that somehow got their pottery designated “art” was priced ten times very similar pottery that was produced by other tribes. We still haven’t figured out who or what distinguishes “art” pottery from “craft” pottery.
In truth, though, those that tried to assimilate were not treated very well. In reading the history of US-Indian relations, I thought that was the tragedy. Not that they were defeated-there was no way that once Europeans came to North America that the aboriginal peoples were not going to be displaced, but that once they were defeated they were still seen as less than human by many. And there were systematic attempts by the US Government to assimilate Indians into American society, starting with George Washington, including eliminating their languages and rituals. It is a sad history.
Mmm. And the heavy-handed indoctrination of Indian children should be a cautionary tale as well.
Same story Chinese and others had. The difference was we paid American Indians to remain defeated and dependent. If we’d just treated them the way we treated other minorities, poorly but without free stuff, they’d have adjusted as have almost everybody else did, at least before we became a welfare state.
This a profound observation.
That’s the situation for every immigrant group in history. Italians, Irish, Chinese, Cuban, etc — they were all treated harshly at first. Thomas Sowell wrote a book about it.
Healthy subcultures don’t bemoan their victimhood. They defy unjust discrimination and build themselves up in spite of it. American blacks were on the right track before Democrats got a hold on them. Now everyone is part of the Left’s nanny state.
Agree. I had written a post about Edwin Curtis, the one who took the famous photographs of the Native Americans. He had this quote:
“Our sins of peace…have been far greater than our sins of war…In peace, we changed the nature of our weapons, that was all; we stopped killing Indians in more or less a fair fight, debauching them, instead, thus slaughtering them by methods which gave them not the slightest chance of retaliation.”
Many Indian reservations suffer from problems with their ownership of land. The problem is that too often land was divided up among tribal members at one time or another, and those owners of the different parcels never transferred their land to someone cleanly. Their land is then divided among their children, who then each divide it among their children, who then divide their share among their children, ad astra.
My memory tells me that Sandra Day O’Connor took note of this plight and said the situation is irredeemably hopeless and will never be fixed.
What happens is that sometimes a parcel of land is valuable, but no one can sell the land because too many people own it (sometimes thousands), many of whom can’t be found, or refuse to sell.
Creating reservations was a huge mistake by the federal government. Rather than treat them as though they were owed anything, we should have simply required them to buy land like anyone else, and get jobs. If they didn’t conform to society, that’s their problem. A generation or two would have had problems but their issue would have eventually melted into the pot.
Instead, we had do-gooders in DC who did stupid things like put a Quaker in charge of the Comanche and too many other idiocies. Now we have perpetual poverty in the reservations.
What’s truly amazing is that most of the tribes that are on reservations were nomadic and had no rational claim to any land at all. Sadly others that were peaceful and tried to assimilate were treated unjustly.
It’s time to start revoking the farce of the reservations, time to stop pretending that the Indians were sovereign.
It’s time for the reservations to be freed from the hopeless mess they’re in and put them on the market so the land can be developed where possible.
And then there is the farce that Indians get special rights regarding their parental rights. To terminate the parental rights of regular Americans in Texas requires only proof that is “clear and convincing.” If an indian is accused of being a bad parent the standard to terminate his rights is “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
I’m kind of old fashioned and I think we should have at least the same rights as the people we’ve conquered.
I agree wholeheartedly.
But I view this as politically impossible. It just can’t be done.
It just seems to me that the only way this issue can hurt a politician would be if he tried to fix it. So he’ll leave it. Simple. As I often say, I hope I’m wrong.
What do you think?
Why is the only industry tourism? Why doesn’t anyone open a factory? Where I used to work in Indiana, we bought parts from a Tribe in Mississippi. I admit I don’t understand the economic forces unique to reservations, but it seems like there would be other ways to make money than tourist.
It’s the only solution so we can’t dismiss it as impossible. I don’t have a clue how to go about it.
There are several factors, in my opinion, that have harmed Indians. First, one is evolutionary. Wheat was unknown in the western hemisphere. The fermentation of wheat to alcohol was a very early phenomenon in Eurasia. Beer and bread appeared almost simultaneously. It did not happen in the western hemisphere and Indians have no physiological adaptation to alcohol.
Two, there were Indian tribes, especially among the Iroquois Nation, that were well adapted to assimilation. Dartmouth College was founded to educate their children. They were agrarian and settled in houses that even had glass windows in some instances. They were harmed by the results of the French and Indian War, which France lost and which opened the Ohio territory to settlement. The Plains Indians were latecomers to America and had not developed beyond hunter-gatherers. They were poorly adapted to reservations.
Third, it has been pointed out that lack of any property rights in reservations prevented the development of modern agriculture or economics. I have known Indian people who have prospered but not on a reservation.
The problem is that if you have a dispute, the matter must be resolved in tribal courts, and they tend to be biased in favor of “the little guy” which means that the company loses its investment.
Actually, grapes and figs were probably first before wheat. They have yeast on their skin naturally. After learning about yeast, early man probably experimented with many other foods to see what would make alcohol using the yeast.
You’re right, but I like to hold out hope. If no one talks about it and no one tries, then it’s impossible. Only by breaching the topic, slowly, here and there, will it eventually take root if it has any merit.
We need to call in @thereticulator. He is one of Ricochet’s Indian experts.
I wish I could remember which reservation I saw a TV news program on, where they have standard property rights rather than the tribe collectively owning the land. The Indian farmers there were much more successful than Indian farmers on reservations without private ownership of land.
Reservations were always a silly idea. It is as if a tribe were a Westphalian-style nation that would use available land resources in the way the fixed European peoples do. The ancient tribal way of life was already doomed when horses, guns, steel, alcohol, and machines became available.
Happily living a pre-Columbian mode of life in a big patch of desert or other undesirable land was never going to happen when (a) one knows that there are better tools and methods out there and (b) the feds provide cash and foodstuffs to maintain a minimal participation in the wider economy outside the res. A cultural vision that does not do well in the light of perspectives shaped by modern science and technology combined with a limited (inadequate) economic participation in the modern world is a recipe for stagnation and despair.
I know that many tribes struggle to preserve language, a sense of history and identity. I applaud that but there needs to be larger vision how that is going to work in the modern world and how to generate an outlook shaped by something forward-looking rather than stylized nostalgia and sustained whining about adverse outcomes on long-lost battlefields. Selling mocassins made in China to tourists is not an answer.
When I was a kid, I recall reading a story about Mohawks gravitating to dangerous work on skyscrapers as a way of expressing physical courage in a new, constructive way now that the tribal warrior option was gone. Gotta like that. That is an adaptation that works.