Letters: Where are Lizer’s loyalties?

A question for all Diné (Navajo): Is the Navajo Nation going to accept the continued “representation” of Myron Lizer, Navajo Nation vice president, Republican GOP member and ardent Donald Trump supporter — many of whom actively participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, failed insurrection attempt that left five dead in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States of America?

Lizer recently stated that Trump was “just warming up,” a repeated white supremacist threat to launch another insurrection. Does this sound familiar?

On July 20, 1989, Peter MacDonald and his followers did the same thing and two Navajos died as a result of this act of insurrection against the Navajo Nation. Law enforcement reports indicate the riot was watched by MacDonald from a van overlooking the (executive) building in real time. Trump also watched from a safe distance and, like MacDonald, did nothing even when he could.

Not only has Lizer been silently complicit in this failed Trump coup d’etat but he also has misled the Navajo people by supporting the “big lie” that the 2020 U.S. elections were stolen — a preposterous QAnon/MAGA cult conspiracy claim — and by failing to uphold his oath of office to carry out his responsibility to the Navajo Nation to protect and serve our great Nation. And the rest of us who witnessed this extreme white supremacist violence are expected to accept the aftermath of their historical blunder of storming America’s capitol building while Congress was in session.

“Misprision” is a crime when someone knows a felony has been committed but fails to report it to authorities; civil law requires that citizens report the crime or face criminal prosecution. Complicit in his silence, Lizer has not renounced the despicable fake “Christianity” that made the U.S. Capitol a deadly crime scene, compliments of the QAnon/MAGA mobsters, while the “leader-in-hiding,” Trump and other GOP Republicans, incited the mob on the wrong side of history as they invoked the name of Jesus Christ who was also killed by a mob incited to violence.

As proponents of the failed Donald Trump insurrection that provided the “American carnage” that Trump predicted in his 2016 campaign speech on the Capitol mall, prior to the radicalized and deadly seditious attempted January 2021 coup d’etat, the Republican GOP has become the Gang of Putin. The Electoral College and popular vote both declared the Biden/Harris ticket the (obvious) winners with official certification.

Those who usurp their public office for their own benefit do not deserve to represent their “constituency,” especially when they do all they can to steal elections in the republic of America. The more so when the insurrectionists are carrying the defeated Confederate and Nazi flags seeking to establish a fascist theocracy that borders on high treason and will never work in America, the “melting pot” of the world.

Currently leading the next wave of congressional obstruction — with the most committee chairs — is the Republican GOP ilk through the unconstitutional anti-American “filibuster rule” and by blocking the Democratic “organizing resolution” that will allow the new White House the ability to get a jumpstart on rebuilding America.

With the lack of good faith by the Republican GOP and the massive blue wave, the Navajo Nation must act quickly and in light of the certified 2020 U.S. election, use the leverage that comes with the traditional support of the Democratic Party who now control the White House and the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Lizer’s presence at the 2020 Republican Convention demonstrated where his loyalty lies and in the announced event in the days of violence yet to come — a direct result of the hatred, racism, division, and violence they actively embraced while making another preposterous claim to be “Christians.”

Even the more so dangerous for the “Children of the Holy Ones” while thousands of innocent immigrant children remain in Trump’s concentration camps across America. Truly, Many Abandoned God Almighty (MAGA).

Mervyn Tilden
Kinlitsosinil (Church Rock), N.M.

Indigenous perspective on lockdowns

This is an indigenous overview to the opinion letter of Dr. Joseph Angel de Soto of Tsaile, Arizona (“Lockdowns were unnecessary,” Navajo Times, Jan. 21 issue).

First, our gratitude to Dr. de Soto for sharing his experience, statistics, expertise, and to conclude Navajo Nation deserves better. It has been 152 years since release of our ancestors from Fort Sumner captivity. Imagine for some their profound experience of disjointed psyche that triggered bodily malfunctions and immune function breakdown at cellular level. Is it possible our generational pre-existing medical and health conditions to have originated when our imprisoned ancestors were brutally maltreated by the U.S. government and continued thereafter?

Dr. de Soto mentioned a published paper in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, with its “conclusive evidence” that shutdowns or lockdowns do not work. Note, one time we, the indigenous, were labeled as “something else” by the dominant society. Yet within their countless studies or researches, indigenous are pressed into their same cookie-cutter templates. Such biased publications by distant outside societies always dictating to us as who they think we are only reveals they have not recognized our uniqueness and perseverance as human beings.

Their foreign journal assertion seems to have run its course within their predetermined groove of thought, of which we have seen before in what our tribal president once implied about his own people overseas.

He insinuated our Navajo Nation is very similar to the state of Israel, a foreign war-mongering nation, with frivolous claims without regard to our horrific history and one-way toxic relationship with the U.S. government. It is not rocket science to understand the differences in shutdown, lockdown and quarantine. Shutdown, viewed as closures of businesses, affect livelihood and services for citizens.

Obviously, our lockdowns do not serve their intended purpose because the healthy and unknowingly infected are now in proximity of each other for an extended time. Another problem with lockdown is communication. Some citizens do not listen, thus may befit a viral delivery system.

And quarantine is to separate the infected and isolate them from the healthy herd. Our problem lies in challenge to identify the unknowingly infected, and without communication, back tracing, cooperation, and proper protocol, it is like tiptoeing through a field of landmines. The common primary intent with closure, standstill, or separation during a pandemic is basic survival, to disengage from possible viral infection of the masses.

Yet we experienced outright resistance from the few, influenced with absurd notions of being deprived of their rights, liberty, and freedom of this or that, and refuse to practice proper protocol. Now with foresight we await another wave, not by wind but human carriers — the possible consequences from careless conduct in spending sprees of the tribal government-issued hardship checks.

Yes, social distancing, masks, temperature checks, and common sense do contain the spread of COVID-19, if exercised and maintained appropriately. Our older generation is very aware of varied-quality levels of services rendered by the federal government. For us, Indian Health Service, an accomplice in dispensing habit-forming poisons for profit-driven pharmaceutical companies. We’ve long been aware of indigenous patients used for training and experimental purposes by underperforming fame-seeking trainees. This is not to say all are the same, there are some exceptions.

Perhaps to point out such outside incoming doctors and scientists could be fatal, for they do have our lives in their hands. The former federal political administration considered “herd immunity,” whereby proposed violence was to let out sheep flocks within wolf territory without a sheepdog or shepherd, just to see what happens. Such contention only revealed their ignorance to prudence and foresight; a cult mass suicide. In war and peace some of our indigenous gave allegiance and service to the U.S. government.

We secured our certificate of obedience in disciplines, in turn deprived us of originality and intuition. Our assimilation with their economics resulted in consumerism, materialism, and sheer laziness. Our farming and agriculture food production now infested with GMO, and sheepherding a divine dying art.

Within our imitative political system, at times our few public servants consumed with get-rich quick schemes, lose focus on public service — the ability to account and respond to the needs of the people. And our empowerment rituals exchanged for forever waiting with a begging bowl. Through it all, in the name of progress and security of the federal government, we watch as they disturb and desecrate the delicate balance of nature.

As we hold back our tears, it seems in every way our culture and tradition quietly fades as outsiders covertly attempt to exterminate us from Mother Earth.

Robert L. Hosteen
Beclabito, N.M.

Thank you for your votes

Thank you to relatives and friends in the Fort Defiance community for coming out and letting your voices be heard on this important day, regardless if your candidate made it or not.

I look forward to working with you for the good of our community as a newly elected chapter official. I would like to take the privilege of thanking my family, the Gonnies, of White Cone, Arizona, for their strength and reverence, as well as my children, the Tracys and Dennys of Window Rock, for their love and support. Working together has always been guided by the vision and values of our elders, the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform and the aspirations that we have for our children. Let us meet that responsibility with wisdom, courage and with beauty.

I would like to extend my congratulatory wishes to each and every elected member. Thank you for your courage to run for office and your desire to serve our Diné people. Lastly, let us persist to work together to end this virus so that we may continue living in this ever-changing world. Ahe’hee with gratitude.

Grace J. Tracy
Secretary/Treasurer
Fort Defiance Chapter
Fort Defiance, Ariz.

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