DISQUS

Hey skulz,
I've been trying to figure out where that Navajo casino north of Shiprock is. The only casino that I know about is in Colorado and it's owned by the the Ute Mountain Ute tribe. Now given the long history of bad blood between the Ute and Navajo it's unlikely that they are giving any of that money to Joe Shirley. You say you are from somewhere around here but you just don't seem to know much about this part of the world!

Really seriously, I doubt you have any notion of the difficult terrain, vast open spaces, and dispersed settlement pattern found on the res. And, NO the Navajo people are not standing in the way! Stringing power lines to every isolated hogan would be fantastically expensive and I doubt that will ever happen. While a lot of people who live near the Desert Rock mine are very unhappy with that project, the Navajo are not Luddites who resist change or the introduction of electric power to their lands and homes.

Desert Rock is just another in a long series of projects that benefit a few and leave the many behind. The plant and coal mine operators will bank huge profits while only a few Navajo will benefit financially. Some Navajo will get jobs and a few, mostly in the government, are likely to get quite a bit richer. A case in point could be the fellow in Window Rock who wondered where the land could be found for a solar plant. Well, it could be found on the vast tailings piles left by other strip mines or the land that is soon to be strip mined. At a minimum the Desert Rock investors could put a tiny dent in their profits over the next 20 years and supply all of those isolated home sites with adequate, on site solar power collectors and battery storage facilities.