Letters | Proud parents celebrate children’s perfection

Proud parents celebrate children’s perfection

Editor,
We are the parents of LT and Mercedes Tsinijinnie of Ganado, Arizona. We would like to share our children’s accomplishments of completing a whole year of perfect attendance with Ganado Unified School District.

This year, our son, LT, graduated and completed 13 years of perfect attendance. Our daughter, Mercedes, completed 8 years of perfect attendance from the 7th grade. Overall, we have five children and all together we have completed 60 years of perfect attendance. Our three older sons have also completed their education with 13 years each.

There is not a lot of recognition for our Navajo children, so we are reaching out to you to show you that our children have goals that they have met and they have been using it in the real world.

Today, our three older boys are doing great with their careers and attendance has never been an issue to them, as they have moved up in their career ladders.

Lincoln, our oldest, who just recently passed away, graduated from Chinle High School and at a young age of 33 had his own licensed business “Lincoln Heating and Cooling” here on the Navajo Reservation in the state of Arizona.

Levi, our second oldest, graduated from Ganado High School and is the only Navajo who is a manager at Home Depot in Flagstaff.

Logan, our third oldest, graduated from Holbrook High School and is in the Army as a helicopter mechanic in Fort Lewis, Washington.

LT, the fourth oldest, graduated from Ganado High School in May 2024 is a leader to his Native Club and has brought many awards and recognition to the school.

Mercedes, our youngest daughter, is promoting from the 7th grade at Ganado Middle School. She is a runner in cross-country and track and field.

LT and Mercedes have met Ganado Unified School District’s high expectations for our children’s learning. We know that we also have many hopes and dreams for our children’s success in school and beyond. To make sure those hopes and dreams are realized, we have made a commitment of making sure our children attended school every day for all 13 years from kindergarten to the 12th grade.

The evidence is clear: Children with good attendance are more likely to be successful in school. High attendance rates are linked to high student achievement. This is true for every grade — elementary, middle, and high school students.

Thank you for supporting our children’s school success and well-being, as well as our district.

Joyce and Earl Tsinijinnie
Ganado, Ariz.

Tribal leaders should be more visible with mass media

Editor,
As a Native American woman and a news junkie, I am discouraged and tired of seeing mainstream mass media like CNN trivializing Native people’s efforts and contribution to this country, which is our land by the way. I’m sure our Tribal leaders are aware of this, but how or why they let it continue is beyond my patience. Don’t you see the white media always cancelling and disregarding us like we’re only objects for tourism, or a sideshow?

In the last presidential election, it was the Native voters who flipped the State of Arizona for Democratic candidates, but CNN called us “other voters.” I waited for a chiefly rebuttal from the president or the council delegates’ office of the Navajo Nation, but nothing. It’s Navajo officials’ job to correct these people in the media when they’re wrong. I know CNN would have loved to speak with a tribal official. They love novelty, but it was an opportunity – missed.

Tribal officials of Window Rock, this was your call and an easy one. In building a nation, you must stop being invisible. You must stop taking the back seat all the time because your willingness to be small and inconsequential impacts all of us, your grandchildren and generations after them.

If we don’t correct the powerful mass media, our grandchildren will continue to have these barriers set against them. If we think the white man will say “Oops, sorry” and apologize, it’s not going to happen. As a people building a nation, we must fight for credit and recognition. Everybody else is! You think the Black people got the recognition in the media by being meek and taking the seat? Heck, no!

Correcting these slip-ups is a must – we must correct and hold media to their responsibility to be fair and accurate. You have lofty titles as leaders of the largest Tribe in this country. CNN might not listen so much to me as a common citizen, but Tribal officials, your snazzy title will get you a “soundbite.” To correct the giant medias, call the tv, radio stations, newspapers and their advertisers – and please use polite and professional language.

So, get your public relations staff to lead this initiative. Your PR staff should have the pizazz and the polished English language to lead this endeavor. On election night, I want to see on the big screen how the Navajos voters made the difference again.

EleVena Burbank
Gamerco, N.M.

Concerned citizens oppose Tallgrass/GreenView pipeline

Editor,
We are a coalition of community members and grassroots groups across the 13 Navajo Nation chapters that would be affected by the proposed Tallgrass/GreenView pipeline. We are deeply concerned about the significant safety, health, cultural, and climate harms of this proposed pipeline, and we do not believe that a few dozen off-reservation jobs justify the project’s enormous risks.

Yes, you read that right – the only jobs this project could realistically create for Navajo citizens are a few dozen jobs at GreenView’s two proposed hydrogen production plants in the Farmington, New Mexico area. As GreenView has admitted, pipelines do not create jobs.

We recently presented our concerns before the Navajo Nation Resources and Development Committee (RDC) and sent a letter to the RDC that you can read here (https://app.box.com/s/4szxsd2fdqm0fxu7rc6zjnojk7q7quhs).

GreenView responded by buying a two-page advertorial in the Navajo Times. The advertorial simply repeats the same talking points and falsehoods the company has parroted over and over again. For example, that the proposed pipeline is “clean” (it is not) and will create “multi-generational opportunities” for our people (it will not). We urge you to read our letter, which debunks these myths.

But more importantly, GreenView’s constant stream of paid advertisements (on the radio and in newspapers) highlights what we, as Navajo community members, are up against. GreenView has seemingly unlimited resources to buy ads and aggressively market its proposed project in the Navajo Nation. We are unpaid community members and grassroots groups with jobs, responsibilities to care for our families and livestock, and little time left at the end of long days. Nevertheless, we make time to fight for our children, our families, our people, our precious water resources, and our Mother Earth. We organize and educate our communities about this dangerous pipeline on evenings and weekends.

We cannot afford to buy radio ads or advertorials, but we have something GreenView will never have: the power of the people. Just like our grandparents before us – whose lives were devastated by the uranium and coal industries – we are fighting back. We are land defenders and water protectors who follow in the footsteps of our ancestors. We are this generation’s grassroots resistance. We strongly believe that GreenView cannot defeat the power and spirit of the Navajo people, no matter how many millions or billions of dollars the company throws at this project and no matter how many times KTNN airs the same radio ad on loop.

We invite you to join us in this fight to protect our people and lands. Email us at doodahydrogen@gmail.com to get involved.

Community members from across the thirteen affected chapters:
T’iis Názbąs Collaborative Coalition
C 4Ever Green
Dooda (No) Hydrogen Pipeline Organization
Dooda (No) Helium Extraction Organization
Environmental Justice Clinic, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law

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