Author: Cindy Yurth

At its closest hearing yet to the San Juan Generating Station, the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission on Monday got an earful from nearly three dozen employees of the threatened plant and its accompanying coal mine, who pleaded with the PRC to keep it open.

The New Year’s holiday was a little lean for some tribal employees who got their paychecks late thanks to payday falling on New Year’s Day, a bank holiday.

In the early spring of 2018, I was assigned to do a story on a Navajo dance troupe who was marking the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of 1868 by performing at the historic homes of Andrew Johnson, who was president when the treaty was signed, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who signed it on behalf of the U.S. government.

For the Navajo Nation, the decade closed with two intersecting graphs that will certainly shape the 2020s and probably beyond: the tribe’s economic power — largely dependent on natural resources — took a calamitous hit just as its political power hit a new high with a victory in a gerrymandering case in Utah and the election of a Native Congresswoman in New Mexico.