The Worst Thing

There’s an old saying in the Four Corners region, really more of a dialogue:

Q: What’s the best thing that can happen to you if you’re a white man?

A: Someone finds oil on your land.

Q: What’s the worst thing that can happen to you if you’re a Navajo?

A: Someone finds oil on your land.

It’s very true. Through a combination of exploitation, kinship obligations, and a variety of other factors, mineral wealth rarely ends up benefiting Navajos the way it benefits Anglos. This can be seen quite clearly in the current wrangling over who is going to manage the Utah Navajo Trust Fund, which gets 37.5% of royalties from oil and gas development on the Utah part of the Navajo Reservation set aside to be managed for the benefit of the Navajos living in the area.  The fund has until recently been managed by the State of Utah, which has however relinquished control after a lot of controversy over how the funds were being managed.

This of course opens up the question of who will manage the fund now.  The Navajo Nation wants to, and has been pushing to be designated the new trustee, but many of the local Navajos in Utah don’t trust the tribal government and are convinced that if they turn the fund over to the tribe all the money will just disappear into a black hole in Window Rock.  They’re not crazy to worry about this, either; the tribe’s track record with handling this sort of thing isn’t exactly stellar.

There are, however, two competing factions even among the Utah Navajos about who should become the new trustee.  One, headed by some of the local leaders in San Juan County including the Maryboy family, wants a local nonprofit called Utah Dineh Corporation to get control, and they have the backing of Utah Senator Bob Bennett, who recently introduced a bill designating the corporation as the trustee.  A second group, however, which claims descent from a nineteenth-century leader named K’aayelii, wants to be allowed to manage about a third of the fund, and they have gotten support from the Aneth Chapter, one of the local governments in the area, to draft a proposal.  The Utah Dineh Corporation folks, however, would prefer the K’aayelii group to join the corporation, and they are opposed to splitting up the fund.

So who’s right?  Hard to say.  I don’t have much insight into the local politics, so I don’t know who’s trustworthy and who isn’t.  It does go to show, however, that mineral wealth is hardly a panacea for poor communities.