Talk about confusing sets of interests. The secretary of the interior, Deb Haaland, who is of Native American heritage, was told to ‘go home,’ (presumably to DC) when she returned to her native state of New Mexico yesterday.
But her return to Chaco Culture National Historical Park on Sunday was derailed when a group of Navajo landowners blocked the road, upset with the Biden administration’s recent decision to enshrine for the next 20 years what previously had been an informal 10-mile (16-kilometer) buffer around the World Heritage site.
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Her ethnicity is meant to guarantee that the interests of her tribe are held in the highest regard in the nation’s capital. But it appears that social connections have taken a back seat to the power players of the political process. Those in control of her day job in DC want to favor the environmentalists with a land grab.
The landowners and Navajo leaders have said Haaland and the Biden administration ignored efforts to reach a compromise that would have established a smaller buffer to protect cultural sites while keeping intact the viability of tribal land and private Navajo-owned parcels for future development.
I thought affirmative action was meant to help minority groups by offering a figurehead to look up to. But when affirmative action advances political objectives of another sort, then its days as an interventionist strategy are most probably numbered.
The struggle over property rights is an economic story.
Navajo President Buu Nygren said in a statement issued Thursday that the weekend celebration was disappointing and disrespectful. It should have been cancelled, he said.
“The financial and economic losses that are impacting many Navajo families as a result of the secretary’s recent land withdrawal are nothing to celebrate,” Nygren said. “As leaders of the Navajo Nation, we support the Navajo allottees who oppose the withdrawal of these public lands.”
In this balancing act of heritage sites for posterity versus private property rights, the cultural argument proposed to be weighted more heavily. Yet if the true objective is property control to prohibit oil extraction, then it’s hard not to be cynical about claoking the issue in Native American garb and revisiting a sensitive part of American history to make a power play.
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