Native Americans Helped Invent American Democracy But Are Often Prevented From Practicing It
BY JACQUELINE KEELER | APR 21 2020
WILLIE GRAYEYES WAS BORN IN 1946 in San Juan County, Utah, in a small, isolated community not far from the base of Navajo Mountain. A striking dome of igneous rock rising 10,348 feet above sea level, Navajo Mountain is the highest point within the Navajo Nation, which sprawls across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and, at some 27,000 square miles, is roughly the size of Ireland. In Navajo, the mountain is called Naatsis'áán (head of the earth), a reference to the sacred female, and it plays an important role in the culture and history of the Diné, as we Navajo refer to ourselves. In our creation stories, the mountain is home to the exploits of the Monster Slayer, who helped make the world safe for people. In the 1860s, the mountain's rugged flanks served as a hideout for the resistance warrior Chief Hoskininni after several thousand Navajos were incarcerated at Bosque Redondo. The mountain is also an important site in the personal lore of Willie Grayeyes: It's where his umbilical cord is buried, beneath a collapsed wooden stockade that once served as his family's sheep corral. "This is the place where I was born," Grayeyes told me in a conversation years ago. "So I have ties with the earth there."
The importance that Grayeyes has attached to the burial site may appear, to those ignorant of Diné culture, merely sentimental. Not long ago, however, the site of Grayeyes's umbilical cord served as evidence in a court case to prove where, exactly, he lives—a case that tested cross-cultural understandings of the meanings of home and place and revealed the challenges that some Navajos face in trying to exercise their rights as US citizens.
For decades, the Navajo residents of San Juan County have struggled against unequal political representation. In 1983, the US Department of Justice filed a complaint against the county, arguing that its system of "at large voting" disproportionately favored white candidates for office. The county responded by drawing three geographical districts, but the problem persisted. By the 2010 census, more than half the population of San Juan County was Native American or mixed race. Yet the county commission and the school board remained dominated by whites. In 2012, the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission filed a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act alleging that the county had been effectively gerrymandered by race. "We decided to sue because they weren't listening to us. They didn't accept our genuine effort to work together at that time," Leonard Gorman, the executive director of the human rights commission, told me. "Our office demonstrated that we had the numbers to have two Native Americans seated on the county commission."
On several occasions, the Diné plaintiffs offered to settle the lawsuit with San Juan County ("We were very transparent with them," Gorman said), but the county leadership refused. Finally, after years of expensive litigation, in 2017 a federal court ruled that the electoral districts violated the Voting Rights Act and would have to be redrawn. Noting that there had been no time in San Juan County history when whites didn't control the county commission and the school board, US district court judge Robert Shelby wrote, "It is critically important that the officials representing the citizens of San Juan County are elected under constitutional districts—not districts that have been racially gerrymandered." The new political lines meant that Navajos would be a majority of voters in two of the three county commission districts and three of the five school board districts.
"Our permanent residency is where our umbilical cord is buried."
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2020-3-may-june/feature/native-americans-helped-invent-american-democracy-are-often-prevented-from-practicing-it
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