Why are Navajos so Fascist? (written for the Navajo Times)

A perplexing question has confronted me for sometime now, “Why are so many Navajos so nationalistic and militaristic?” In fact the idea of Navajos demonstrating “patriotism” (which in the U.S. is akin to fascism) is an absurd contradiction that I can still not understand. For what reasons do Navajos need to be celebratory of the “idea” of the United States, an idea which not only directly cost the lives of their ancestors, (nearly half the existing 1868 Navajo population by some estimates-think on that next time you wave “Old Glory,”) but also cost the lives of many like people with whom they shared the continent, many nations that were completely obliterated in genocidal warfare in the manifestation of this supposed “great nation” that has brought in its most tangible results only a few, rich white people, but utter poverty and destitution for Navajos among other ethnic minorities.

And for what reasons do Navajos need to be militaristic? First off, the U.S. armed forces have always been a terrorist organization, usually employed against people who have something (e.g., land, mineral resources, wealth, etc.,) that the same rich white men who have thus far benefited in the creation of this country also covet in their perpetual and insatiable desire for increased prosperity and power. Navajos need but look no further than the experience of their ancestors for an example of this assertion, rounded-up like cattle and force-marched hundreds of miles into the U.S’s version of a concentration camp. What excuse can Navajos today conjure for serving in the same U.S. armed forces, that are carrying out the same type of atrocities in now different parts of the world for the same coveted mineral wealth?

Aside from being completely contrary to the purpose of survival for their much persecuted ancestors, (I’m sure the surviving elements of the Navajo population, when released from Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner, New Mexico didn’t aspire for their descendants to join the same military forces in like military campaigns against almost as equally defenseless populations, but that’s my assumption of course) joining the military for Navajos is a complete waste of resources. The Navajo Nation doesn’t need dead “G.I.’s” in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or wherever the U.S. military wonders to next, but the Navajo Nation needs both physical and social development, (i.e., Navajo youth should go to school and learn skills to bring back to the Navajo Nation-since they have the opportunity to do so-rather than going off to war for some rich, white men’s oil.)

And so I return to the question of patriotism. How do Navajos come to believe in absurdities like their people have benefited from being cloaked and chocked by U.S. territorial ambitions? (I doubt they ever came to their praise of the U.S. by thinking, “Well, at least we are no longer part of Mexico.”) In real terms, Navajos have, basically been forced into a monetary and market economy in which they are at a severe-disadvantage, hence the poverty, social dissolution (e.g., gangs, drugs, petty-theft, domestic violence, alcoholism) and subsequent decline in health and well being, (e.g., depression, obesity, diabetes, low standards of living as well as a low-life expectancy.)

Problems for which the U.S. has assisted by providing a health care system that ranks worse than those found in its sprawling and bustling prison “industrial complex,” or by recruiting Navajo youth with seemingly no “real” opportunities into the ranks of its “few” and its “proud” as they annihilate villages in Indo-China or slaughter families whole in Iraq and Afghanistan. Possibly, then, it’s the reneging on treaty agreements that inspires patriotism in Navajos, as their water sources are compromised or their land is used first as space for rail, then highway with little to no say or oversight from the Navajo people, and which comes at an increased risk to Navajos living near these places. Or maybe it’s the puppet government that the Bureau of Indian Affairs created, which must still bow for approval from the U.S. Department of Interior on legislative matters it approves. Is this the “democracy” Navajos think they are defending when they are recruited to kill similarly brown-skinned people thousands of miles away? A genocidal legacy, limited sovereignty and instilled perpetual poverty, are these the facets of “American” democracy that inspires such fervor and, ultimately, fascist behavior in Navajos.

And if you didn’t understand some of the bigger words I used in this op-ed, then you shouldn’t vote Republican as this, the righter of the business-class parties, are uncaring about the comprehension of language and would see the U.S., as Arizona has attempted, become an “English-Only” nation. (The paradox being that most self-identified Republicans, though the biggest promoters of “English-only” governments, are the least skilled in the use of this language, just “play me a country song” for myriad examples of this fact.)