Friday, March 29, 2024

Editorial: What to do with $554 million? Fertilize the grassroots

Editorial: What to do with $554 million? Fertilize the grassroots

CHINLE

Once again, no one is asking me what to do with the $554 million settlement the Navajo Nation recently won from the federal government.

I don’t blame them. I’m not Navajo, and I’ve lived on the reservation less than 10 years.

However, I’m one of only a handful of people who has visited all 110 chapters. I’ve seen the places most in need, and I’ve met the people who, with no money, very little help and hardly a nod to their existence from the government or the media, have been quietly making a difference in their communities for years.

So, even though nobody has asked me, I am going to give my opinion. Take it or leave it.

If it were my $554 million, or $410 million or whatever it will be once the lawyers and the mandatory set-asides each take their bite, here’s what I would do. And actually all these ideas combined will leave plenty left over for everyone else’s ideas.

1. Build Chilchinbeto, Tonalea, Cameron and Chichiltah chapter houses. Please. They have gone without for far too long, and it’s tough to make local government work when you don’t even have a place to meet.

2. Fund the existing domestic violence shelters! The painfully few currently operating on the Navajo Nation — Amá d—— Alch’n’ Bighan in Chinle, Home for Women and Children in Shiprock and Tohdenasshai Women’s Shelter in Kayenta — have been limping along on grants, private donations and a few crumbs from the tribe (always about six months late) for years, merely on the courage of their founding mothers and a handful of brave underpaid staff and volunteers. They have saved countless lives.

This year, President Ben Shelly vetoed their funding because of irregularities in the Shiprock home’s contract that have already been addressed many times over in the courts. Why punish the other shelters? For that matter, why punish Shiprock, which was going along just fine until the nation decided its contract for its beautiful new shelter — which was almost completed at the time — was void because of a bidding irregularity seven years prior?

In 2011, when the Navajo Nation Supreme Court ruled in its favor, the tribe promised to finish the building with its own contractor. But there it sits, vacant and vandalized, while the victims are crammed into a hodgepodge of rundown trailers. So who is really being punished here? The abused women and children, of course. Talk about handing a drowning man an anvil.

3. A few years ago, Thoreau Chapter endured a rash of teenage suicides. The people did not throw up their hands. They did not have an endless series of anti-suicide conferences. They acted.

Today, the Thoreau Community Center they created is a safe, cheerful space where kids can come and hang out, have a snack, use the computers or read a book from the library. There are trained adults available to counsel them. The suicide rate is down.

But the center operates under the constant threat of having to close its doors. The grants it works with expire, and it doesn’t get a dime from the nation. Again, a handful of committed staff and volunteers keep it going from crisis to crisis.

This place operates on a shoestring. Thirty thousand dollars could keep them worry-free until the end of the year, which is probably about one day’s worth of interest on $554 million.

Or we could just keep going to funerals and lamenting about the sorry state of youth on the rez.

4. Speaking of youth, they are not just sitting around getting depressed, as much reason as they have for that around here. A few years back, Graham Biyaal and some of his friends in Shiprock developed the Northern Diné Youth Committee. Its sole purpose is to make Northern Navajo a better place to live. They embark on beautification projects, haul wood to elders and anything else the community asks them to do.

Know how they raise their funds? Through spaghetti dinners and Navajo taco sales. Nothing wrong with that. But how about throwing these kids $10,000 or so, and seeing what else they can do? Again, it would be a pittance compared with the size of the settlement. But it would be a nice affirmation for some kids who took it upon themselves to do right by their community.

5. In my last editorial about this subject, I mentioned animal control, and I still think it’s a huge need on the rez. But even more, we need to prevent the problem of starving, diseased animals roaming the nation. Fund the Navajo Nation veterinary clinics. Chinle’s doesn’t even have an X-ray machine, and you sometimes have to wait months for a spay appointment.

There are Navajo people who love their animals and would pay for their care, but there’s simply no place to take them. One clinic in Tsé Bonito, one in Shiprock and a half-time one in Chinle are not enough. The recently acquired mobile van is nice, but we need a truly massive spay-neuter effort, along with castration for the feral stallions and injectable contraceptives for the mares.

There could be a veterinarian hired just for animal sterilization until we get the problem at least somewhat under control. Then fund the animal shelters and hire operators who will make sure that they’re clean, welcoming and humane — and watch the volunteers show up to help. If you can’t conceive of this happening on the reservation, you need look only as far as Kayenta Township, which made a commitment and opened the wonderful Kayenta Animal Care Center. A hybrid of a veterinary clinic and an animal shelter, it is partially self-funding. And it cost less than $100,000 to build.

6. Fix the shockingly neglected irrigation system in Tsé Daa’ K’aan and put Navajo farmers back to work! The chapter has already spun off a nonprofit to find grants to do this, so allocating the money either to the new nonprofit or the chapter would have the same effect.

All these things I’m suggesting could be done for a total of less than $5 million, or less than one percent of the half billion the tribe is currently sitting on. The thing they have in common is that committed people from the respective communities have already prioritized them and rolled up their sleeves. Because the infrastructure is there, they could start working on the problems immediately. Shovel-ready, as Obama used to say.

And all of them have to do with quality of life. Roads? Yes. Water lines? Of course. We could spend the whole $554 million on that kind of thing, and hardly make a dent. But those things are not all that people need to lead happy, fulfilling lives.

The spirit needs to be nourished as well.

About The Author

Cindy Yurth

Cindy Yurth was the Tséyi' Bureau reporter, covering the Central Agency of the Navajo Nation, until her retirement on May 31, 2021. Her other beats included agriculture and Arizona state politics. She holds a bachelor’s degree in technical journalism from Colorado State University with a cognate in geology. She has been in the news business since 1980 and with the Navajo Times since 2005, and is the author of “Exploring the Navajo Nation Chapter by Chapter.”

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