<\/p>\n
To understand why Wilfred Jones wanted an ambulance, you have to understand where he lives. San Juan County, in southeastern Utah, is nearly as big as New Jersey but is home to fewer than 15,000 people. The lower third is part of the Navajo Nation and is almost entirely Ute and Navajo. The upper two-thirds are white and predominantly Mormon.<\/p>\n
Jones, a 61-year-old grandfather with jet-black hair and a diamond stud in each ear, lives in the lower third, five miles south of the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Montezuma Creek. It\u2019s rough, rocky country, where bullet holes riddle the road signs and lonely pumpjacks ply oil from the earth. The nearest services are in Blanding, some 40 miles north.<\/p>\n
Sixteen years ago, when Jones joined the board of the Utah Navajo Health System, he realized his neighbors were dying because the closest ambulances \u2014 the county\u2019s, in Blanding, and the tribe\u2019s, in Kayenta, Arizona \u2014 were an hour away \u201con a good day.\u201d So Jones asked the county commission if one of San Juan\u2019s ambulances could be housed in a garage in Montezuma Creek. From there, it would take half the time to rush an elder suffering a heart attack to medical care.<\/p>\n
But the county wasn\u2019t interested. Over the next decade, Jones says, he and other health advocates repeatedly tried to get the commission to improve ambulance service on the reservation. But while the sole Navajo commissioner was supportive, the two white commissioners were usually not. (Former Navajo Commissioner Mark Maryboy and others corroborate Jones\u2019 account, though no official votes appear in county records.)<\/p>\n
Eventually, Jones gave up: The Utah Navajo Health System trained its own EMS volunteers, built a garage and bought ambulances with tribal and federal funds. It stung, but wasn\u2019t surprising. Though Native Americans on the reservation don\u2019t pay property taxes, they indirectly contribute millions of dollars in oil revenue and federal funds to the county each year, which is supposed to be returned in services like education and health care. But many Navajo requests \u2013 from building schools to implementing bicultural education to improving roads \u2013 have been denied by Anglo residents, who have always held a majority in elected offices despite comprising less than half of the county\u2019s population.<\/p>\n
Now, Native Americans could gain control of county government for the first time. Earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Shelby ruled that San Juan County violated both the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution by relying on race to draw the boundaries of its voting districts. By engaging in \u201cracial gerrymandering,\u201d San Juan County systematically diluted the strength of the Native vote, keeping Natives out of power and skewing the makeup of the county commission and the school board. The system, perpetuated for decades, \u201coffends basic democratic principles,\u201d Shelby wrote.<\/p>\n
In 1957, Utah became one of the last states in the nation to grant Native Americans the right to vote, doing so only after being forced by a federal judge. Still, it took another three decades for the first Native Americans to be elected in San Juan County. It wasn\u2019t for lack of trying \u2014 county clerks kept Native candidates off the ballot, refused to register Native voters, and held written elections in English, disenfranchising those who were illiterate or didn\u2019t speak the language.<\/p>\n
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. Department of Justice sued San Juan County for violating the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters by banning discriminatory voting practices. The county admitted fault, and agreed to implement bilingual voting and create three voting districts, one for each county commissioner seat. San Juan County was subsequently divided into three chunks. Districts 1 and 2 were in Anglo territory. District 3, on Navajo land, became known as the Indian District. In 1986, it elected Mark Maryboy as the county\u2019s first-ever Navajo commissioner.<\/p>\n
But though no one noticed at the time, the way the county drew its lines still violated the Voting Rights Act, because it packed minority voters into a single district while spreading the white vote over multiple districts. That meant Native voters could only elect one representative of their choice while white voters got two, even as the Native population surpassed the white population, 52 to 46 percent.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, Navajos remained in the minority on every governing board. Maryboy was frequently outvoted. So were Navajos on the school board; three out of five of its voting districts are also on Anglo-dominated land.<\/p>\n
Current County Commissioner Bruce Adams, who was elected in 2004, says allegations he and other elected officials ignored Native Americans\u2019 needs are \u201c100 percent false.\u201d Yet as recently as 1995, the county denied that it was responsible for educating Navajo children; it built a high school in the town of Navajo Mountain only after yet another judge ordered it to do so. A U.S. Department of Justice official who later reviewed disparities in course offerings between the county\u2019s white and Native schools said in 1997 that he \u201chadn\u2019t seen anything so bad since the \u201960s in the South.\u201d Court-ordered injunctions to provide Navajo language and cultural education were abandoned. And as of 2011, Indian students, who comprised 48 percent of the county\u2019s student population, received 80 percent of all disciplinary actions. Donna Deyhle, a professor of educational anthropology at the University of Utah, says that together these injustices lead to lower test scores, higher dropout rates and fewer college degrees, which in turn results in lower civic participation.<\/p>\n
The inequality doesn\u2019t stop at the classroom. Requests to bring running water or electricity to the Navajo community of Westwater were denied in 2007, because, one county commissioner argued, residents were too poor to pay for utilities anyway. Tribal members have never been appointed to judicial offices, and aren\u2019t represented on cultural or historical boards. And many residents still erroneously believe that because Native Americans don\u2019t pay property taxes, the county isn\u2019t obligated to provide for them. According to court documents, Bruce Adams supporters boasted in a 2012 campaign ad that he \u201chas been very successful in preventing the expenditure of San Juan County tax money on reservation projects for which the county has no responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like most Navajos and Utes living in San Juan County, Wilfred Jones was unaware of the degree to which this was happening. He\u2019d experienced racism in his own life \u2014 from police officers who threw his father\u2019s sacred medicine pouch onto the highway, and from white kids who taunted his son and his grandson with racial slurs when they faced off at sporting events \u2014 but he wouldn\u2019t have called it \u201cinstitutionalized.\u201d \u201cWe thought it was normal procedure,\u201d Jones says, of voting in the county. \u201cWe went with the flow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Until, that is, Jones met Leonard Gorman. Gorman, who\u2019s also Navajo, with a trim goatee and rectangular glasses, is executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission. In 2011, Gorman began visiting oft-ignored corners of Navajo Nation to learn about residents\u2019 concerns. The stories he heard from Jones and others near Montezuma Creek seemed at first like another example of the disparities faced by Native Americans everywhere. But the more Gorman learned, the more he realized that this wasn\u2019t just a lingering effect of generations of discrimination \u2014 it was discrimination in action.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe struggles, the racism we all read about in history books \u2026 I\u2019d like to believe that the overtness of what happened then isn\u2019t happening today,\u201d he says. \u201cBut in some places, it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most far-reaching example is also the least visible \u2013 which is perhaps why it escaped notice for so long. Under both the Voting Rights Act and Utah state law, counties must redraw voting districts at least every 10 years to ensure that the population is spread evenly across districts. But San Juan County hadn\u2019t redrawn its voting districts since 1986. Gorman offered multiple times to help the county redraw its boundaries so that Tribal voters were more evenly distributed over two districts, rather than packed into one, but was turned away. County officials said they believed the Indian District wasn\u2019t just legal \u2013 it was required.<\/p>\n
When he heard this, Jones was outraged. If there had been two Navajos on the county commission, his pleas to get an ambulance might have been answered, and people could have suffered less. \u201cThat was what finally gave me backbone,\u201d he says. So in 2012, Gorman sued twice \u2013 once to redraw the county commission districts and once for the school board\u2019s. Jones was a plaintiff in both suits.<\/p>\n
In December 2015 and February 2016, Judge Shelby ruled unequivocally in the Navajos\u2019 favor. He ordered the county to remap both its school board and county commission voting districts. Commissioner Adams says the county is complying.<\/p>\n
And while there\u2019s no guarantee that having the Native American population spread over two voting districts will lead to two Navajo commissioners, it\u2019s likely that, given a fair opportunity, a Navajo majority will elect Navajo candidates. If that happens, Native Americans could control the financial, law enforcement, education and transportation needs of one of the nation\u2019s largest counties for the first time.<\/p>\n
But given the county\u2019s history, many Navajo remain skeptical that the new maps will adhere to the law. \u201cWe still have a long way to go,\u201d says former Commissioner Maryboy. \u201cBut those recent court decisions look very positive for us. I think it\u2019s inevitable that county officials are going to have to accept the fact that we\u2019re part of the government.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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