Native America Issues
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Shonto is home to renowned artists, bull riders, fantastic landscapes, and highly traditional Diné people.
This community has chosen to pursue a diversified, sustainable economy that is less dependent on coal mining.
Native American Tribes on the Colorado Plateau
More than one-third of the Colorado Plateau’s 120,000 square miles consists of Native American lands. To create a comprehensive vision for regional conservation and sustainability, we must consider tribal lands and perspectives in the dialog.
Tribes have a tremendous ecological, cultural, and economic stake in the Plateau, as well as knowledge on how to sustain it. To tap into this knowledge, we must begin building authentic relationships. This unconventional process will evolve around a series of recurrent culturally appropriate interactions to build a forum for trust, listening, and planning.
The past decade has seen numerous efforts to intercede in conservation issues on tribal lands. Almost all have failed for one universal reason: A lack of engagement in Native American processes, which involve understanding and respecting the wisdom upon which all tribal cultural and ecological meaning is based. Efforts to apply scientific and conservation techniques are meaningless without the willingness to listen, a respect for traditional perspectives, and trust. Only then can we begin to find common ground.
An Honorable Gathering
Toward this objective, the Trust is organizing an intertribal gathering — “Tribal Conversations on the Colorado Plateau” — on November 8–10, 2009, in Flagstaff, Arizona. The event will lay an aesthetic, artistic, intellectual, and educational foundation for later gatherings that will be organized around conservation themes such as water, air, forests, wildlife, growth, grazing, and energy.
The meeting will be designed with elements of prestige and honor using a traditional Native gathering process. It will be conducted in ways that hearken back to the old methods that were used by Colorado Plateau ancestors to create many of the current Natural Laws — using story, teaching, song, and art. The meeting will be documented and archived by Native American youth writers and artists as well as professional reporting and photography.
Using a traditional approach and thoughtful criteria, the planning committee has hand-selected two representatives from each of ten different tribal nations on the Colorado Plateau. Participants will include members from Kaibab-Paiute, Hualapai, Havasupai, Navajo, Hopi, Ute Mountain, Southern Ute, Zuni, White Mountain Apache, and Uinta Ouray Ute.
Post-Gathering
The overall goal of this first gathering is simply to talk so we can explore the processes that tribes have used in the past to solve pressing issues in their communities. These processes were valued highly by tribal members and resulted in harmonious living.
We will likely recommend more meetings to expand the scope, address information needs, and add key participants. The group may also recommend that results be creatively shared with their tribal communities and leaders. The proceedings, stories, and art created from observation of the meeting will be useful as teaching and discussion tools.
Your donations and membership dues make our work with the Navajo and Hopi Tribes possible.
