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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
We have an ironic situation in Arizona. We have two Indian Reservations that lie directly in the growth patterns of subdivisions.
The Pima-Maricopa Reservation is located only two miles east of downtown Scottsdale. They agreed to the Pima Freeway being built on their land, and have erected a huge series of retail stores on the Scottsdale border from Wal-Mart to Home Depot. They also have the winter home of the Arizona Diamondbacks on their land, along with Scottsdale Community College. They also have two huge casino’s. In some 20 years, this Reservation will be completely surrounded with suburban developments.
The Gila River Tribe went a bit different way. The new stadium for the Arizona Cardinals should have been built on their reservation, but there was a series of very unfortunate statements made against them, and the legislature was not respectful to them. When it came time to build the South Mountain/Ed Pastor Freeway, this tribe refused for any of it to be built on their land. This forced the demolition of many Anglo homes, and the creation of two huge cuts through South Mountain, because the freeway could not be diverted a half mile south to skirt the mountain. In response, in the planning of Interstate 11, the highway planners intend to wholly go around the Gila River Reservation. This could have all been done so much better on all sides.
The town of Maricopa is a far flung suburb on the other side of the Gila River Reservation. This is a larger reservation. But in the next 100 years, it will be surrounded by suburban developments.
There are also several reservations near Tucson, but I will leave it for other members of Ricochet who live near Tucson to address them.
When they wanted to sell land by the parcel rather than by the huge tract, they were laughed at and pressured into selling huge tracts. When they wanted to own their reservations outright, they were laughed at and pressured into letting the government manage them.
This was back in the days when most people didn’t get “jobs.” The concept of making one’s livelihood with a “job” was a novel concept for most people.
I didn’t use the term “like anyone else,” because they wanted collective ownership, and not individual ownership. Forcing them into a system of individual ownership would have destroyed them, as we saw with the Dawes Act of 1887 and others like it, which were a way to take away their land and culture while pretending that we just wanted them to be “like anyone else.” Nowadays some tribes are trying to buy back some of the land they lost under those allotment acts. As far as I can tell, they are buying the land on the free market, but are also engaging in lawfare and applying other pressures to get people to sell their land back to them at favorable prices so they can make their reservations whole again. In other words, it’s the same process used to take their land in the first place. Turnabout.
But if we want to renege on the arrangements we made with Native Americans, maybe we don’t have too much room to complain about those who want to renege on the 2nd Amendment.
I’m not sure I know which reservation that would be. The reservation here in Calhoun County, Michigan was one that the Indians used their savings to buy. This goes back to the Jackson removal era. The people here signed a final treaty in 1833 in which they agreed to give up their land and move west. But they were reluctant to go. In 1840 when there was a military roundup and a forced march to the west, some evaded the roundup, some fled to Canada (where some of their descendants still live), and a few escaped along the route west. A few of the latter came back and with others who had evaded or escaped the roundup, decided to buy their own reservation, a 140-acre tract. But given that they still didn’t trust the courts or know how to use the legal system to their advantage, they put the land “in trust” with the governor of Michigan. The governor at the time was willing, but that was a novel legal concept, and even up to the 1990s (when they sought and obtained federal recognition) it wasn’t clear just what it meant.
After they got federal recognition they got a casino (not without local controversy). I visited the reservation in 1998 when they had a dedication ceremony for new gravestones for two of the leaders who founded the reservation back in the 1840s. I had run into a couple of the elders at the local library when we were all trying to use the same archival materials; they were descendants of the ancestral founders and were looking (unsuccessfully) for more information to put on those gravestones. So they put up gravestones with what information they had, and I went to the ceremony, as the public was invited. The last time I drove through their reservation, it was very different. It’s now very prosperous looking, thanks to casino income.
But I don’t know that there is any individual ownership here; I highly doubt it.
The place to start is with corporate welfare. If we cannot rid ourselves of government subsidies and subsidized loans for businesses, we’re not going to have any standing to eliminate any other form of welfare.
I hate it, but you are right. Indians invented identity politics, the first and perennial victims. The amount that they receive per capita from the federal government is remarkable and yet they have nothing. They are also neo-Marxists – wards of the state without property rights. If they remain, they can’t own a home. If they find success and leave the rez, they are sell-outs, apostates, apples. The bar for life is set so low, failure is almost guaranteed.
What politician wants to be the one who stops enabling? These people are addicted to subsidy. Withdraw the subsidy and the withdrawal will be noisy, even violent, just another war on the red man.