spring: on the reservation
17 Aug
A couple of snaps from the Colorado River area trip in spring. Has anyone ever resisted taking photos in Monument Valley?
The first photo is a corner of a little souvenir stand set up by the Native Americans. There were a lot in the area, and there were no customers at any of them. It was the off season, but it still made me a bit sad.
Earlier in the trip, we met with some folks from Navajo Nation and they reported how retailers buy their blankets and ware for very low prices (ie $30-50, if that) and then sell them in their boutique shops in town and export abroad for a huge mark-up (ie $300 up to four figures). So now the Navajo are thinking of selling direct on the internet. I wish them the best of luck, but I do wonder if it’s a doomed venture, since these wares are the types of things people buy while traveling on vacation, not while sitting at home contemplating purchases. I wonder why they can’t simply charge higher prices of the middlemen, but I suppose when you’re poor, you aren’t in a position to refuse small amounts of money in hopes of a future of larger amounts.
The trip was a real eye-opener. We focused mostly on water issues, but in addition to having traded their Colorado River water rights away for very little (say, one community center) before Las Vegas became what it is today, the native tribes in the Southwest also have to deal with the consequences of having mining operations on their lands – the illnesses, the tailings piles. Recently the EPA declared that they were responsible for their own environmental standards on reservation lands, but essentially this means that the US government is no longer respnsible for enforcing environmental regulations on reservations, and since the tribes don’t have the capacity to do any sort of large scale clean up or enforce the regulations, the real world result is that there’s very little in the way of regulation.
The ruling council seems to be prone to the same porblem that the rest of us have with representation. The politicians don’t really understand the local circumstances. Those who are in power, who have wealth try to protect it for themselves and their progeny.
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