Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye passionately encourages tribes to diversify their business away from gambling, and can quickly cite examples of how tribal enterprises are spanning the globe.
But now he’s going even further, encouraging the Navajos to leave the planet – in the form of launching the tribe’s own space satellite.
“That way, every Navajo home will have the Internet, telephone and 911 service,” Begaye said. It’s part of an overall attempt to adapt and advance the culture, with such potentially actionable ideas as aircraft, robotics, the tribe’s own medical school and even bitcoin – all using revenues from gambling.
“If you are not diversifying, you are doing a disservice to your nation,” he said. “Now is the time.”
Begaye, elected in 2015, spoke Friday from the floor at the NIGA Convention & Tradeshow. The Navajo tribe spans into Arizona, Utah and New Mexico and has more than 350,000 members.
As he introduced Begaye, NIGA President Ernie Stevens Jr. explained the responsibilities of being Navajo Nation president: “My father once told me, ‘The president of the Navajo nation is equivalent to (being) President of the United States of America.’”
Begaye began by marveling about how far Indian tribes have come, but he also introduced some possible roadblocks, which we’ll get to later.
“Gaming is a game-changer, we all know that,” he said. “We used to wonder how much money BIA was going to give us, how much we were going to get from health services.
“Not anymore. Gaming has changed the way governments interact with native tribes. We now have the attention of state legislators, governors and U.S. congressmen.”
He notes that Indian gaming helped save the Arizona economy.
“They had a huge deficit. Just think. No one would have ever said 30, 40 years ago that Indian tribes in that state would give the state more than $1 billion. I tell you today,” he said. “We give $103 million a year to the state of Arizona, and we get very little of it back.”
Those Indian gaming revenues are making a huge difference with tribal government, he notes.
“If they want to have jobs, they can have jobs,” Begaye said. “We employ a lot of non-tribal members. We have a traffic jam coming onto the nation because we have so many people now working.”
Begaye said it’s now especially vital to diversity because non-natives are seeing how affluent tribes have become.
“I’m saying this: when Indian tribes become successful, the rest of society will say ‘What happened to our Indians? The ones herding sheep and making jewelry? We have to control them before they take the United States back,’” he said.
That’s a tie-in with the machinations now taking place as tribes attempt to turn land into trust.
“Some of our top (federal) leaders working at departments are redefining how to take land into trust, saying they need the surrounding towns, cities and states to have a say,” Begaye said, referring to the Department of the Interior’s recent efforts to rewrite the fee-to-trust regulations. “That policy right now today is being worked on. And that’s going to impact all of Indian country.”
