A MONUMENTAL DIVIDE

On May 10, 1869, crews working for the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads completed the nation's first transcontinental rail line at Promontory Summit in northern Utah—a historic achievement in the timeline of the United States' development and one that is indelibly etched into the psyche of the West's Indigenous peoples. The story is expressed in many ways across Indian Country, perhaps most beautifully told through the traditional art of Navajo weavers. Many pieces—including some that are now priceless, museum-caliber heirlooms—depict locomotives chugging across the sage landscape, benignly interspersed among ancient symbols and motifs. The strands of wool are dyed from extracts of native plants and then threaded through a loom one at a time by an elder preserving a uniquely American art form. A darker interpretation involves the dreams of spiritual leaders—of trains rumbling unstoppable through wildlands, destroying everything and everyone in its path. "Th...

A state audit closes a chapter in the tumultuous saga of former San Juan County (Utah) commissioners and Bears Ears activists Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth Maryboy.   The conclusion of the Utah Legislative Auditor General’s performance audit reads: “Based on our combined experience of auditing a wide variety of public entities, the actions by the two county commissioners are unique in their disregard for transparency in the handling of some of their business.   “We believe the issues we identified warrant additional measures by the county in the future to demonstrate transparency to the citizens of the county, to restore trust, to protect county officers and to ensure that commission business is open and sufficiently transparent.”   The two Democrats lost bids in November to keep their seats on the commission – tenures enabled in large part by a federal judge who in 2017 declared that the districts in San Juan County disenfranchised Native American voters and ordered them r...

The truck-stop-diner anthropologist in me believes denigration of working-class culture masked by NIMBYistic environmentalism, appropriation of the Navajo Way by even marginally affluent Americans, and Navajo political opportunists rendered untouchable by invoking “sovereignty” and playing the race card lie at the core of the rift in San Juan County, Utah, provides a snapshot of the social, political and economic dynamic transforming the Best of the West. _________  Marvin Hayden Washington survived the aftermath of a world war aboard an armored cruiser anchored just off the Russian port of Vladivostok, a global pandemic that killed millions, and the Great Depression. He worked at whatever jobs came along during the oil boom days of the 1920s in Texas. (Montage: Bill Keshlear) My grandfather, Marvin Hayden Washington was a soft-spoken Baptist who grew up in south Texas during a period when converts were taken to a muddy creek and, well, dunked “in the name of the Father, the S...