Stresses importance of maintaining sovereignty

Ya’at’eeh shi’ Dineh, hope this letter finds you all walking in beauty. Peace and harmony be with you always.

I wasn’t shocked that we were cut from the federal scholarship budget. That’s the kind of government that was elected into office–Indian termination policy! It’s important to remember this next election and as we continue in our fight for sovereignty!

Maybe this was Bush’s payback against us for President Shirley’s negative sentiments towards the Bush administration. Nevertheless, it is the result of being too dependent upon another government to feed our economic needs.

The time to get our government in order is upon us. As I read the news in the Times, I become more disenchanted with the lack of direction towards sovereignty. Examples can be seen throughout the lack of actions of our council and executive offices. The old philosophy of American’s “divide and conquer” becomes transparent in statements of setting up a chapter in Phoenix, off our reservation, instead of creating jobs to have our Dine return to the rez. With more Dine living off the rez vs. on the rez, it gives ammunition to the U.S. to inevitably terminate our tribe, because the U.S. Senate has absolute power to terminate our tribe at will! By cutting our scholarship monies to our youth who are our future leaders, we thus lose potential leaders who will protect our sovereignty. Are we getting too smart for our own good?

Then we have the council selling off our water rights to New Mexico and Gallup to a tune of $800 million dollars. Are these monies going into our scholarships? I doubt it! In the mean time, Gallup gets water piped in via our reservation lands while thousands of our elders will continue to be without water. They have to haul water to drink and feed their livestock while we continue to pump in millions of dollars into Gallup’s Wal-Mart mega store and bars instead of building these types of businesses on the rez—minus the bars of course.

We have self-serving council members too consumed with protecting their unearned paychecks giving themselves outrages pay checks with little work in return. Just compare other politicians’ workload and pay scale and you will find our council gets paid way more than their productivity or return. Then to add insult to injury, they revamp the law to prevent our Dine from public redress of this injustice. It’s time to reduce the council to 24 members. We’ll save $2 million of wasted monies that can go back into our education system.

We need to wake up. This sleeping giant known and feared throughout the American government needs to awake and use its power to protect our sovereignty before we all wake up to a dissolved nation, living on our 40-acres with a mule—another terminated tribe in the path towards America’s continued road to world domination!

Peter June Corbell

Kaibeto, Ariz.