Natives vying for seats on council rare

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Of Gallup's 22,000 residents, fully one-third are American Indian. But you wouldn't know it by looking at the long list of men and women who have served on the City Council.

As far as anyone can remember, not one American Indian, let alone a Navajo, has ever filled a seat behind the raised bench at City Hall.

Few have even tried. Until last week, Don Hubbard, who ran for mayor in 1995, was the last. Anna Rondon, making her own bid for mayor this year, was the only American Indian among the 16 candidates who filed for the three council seats up for grabs in March. And even that, despite the best efforts of a new group formed specifically to field American Indian candidates in 2007, almost never happened.

Of course it's nothing new for minorities to find themselves underrepresented in American's halls of power. Although African Americans account for 13 percent of the country's population, for example, only three have ever been elected to the U.S. Senate.

But even by those standards Gallup strikes an odd figure. Some local American Indians attribute its cause to their ties to the land, others to cynicism, apathy and fear, even the ridicule of their own people.

Mother Earth
"I think that's what it comes down to," said Virginia Ballenger, "the land."

Ballenger, a local fashion designer who markets her wares from a shop in Gallup, was raised 15 miles southwest of town. She remembers her parents urging her to take care of their ancestral lands when she grew up. Now she and her family are working on buying their own home there.

"My generation and my parents' generation, they didn't feel like they were really a part of the city only because of their ties to the land outside of the city," she said.

Also because of those ties, Ballenger believes American Indians, even those who live in the city, care much more about tribal even county politics.

Outgoing Mayor Bob Rosebrough suspects the same thing.

Among his 100-day initiative back in 2003 was an effort to reach out to the Navajo communities that surround Gallup. With the help of a special task force, he visited at least a dozen chapter houses, appointed several American Indians to the city's various advisory boards, and cultivated a strong working relationship with the Navajo Nation. But he also noticed that many of the Navajos who moved to Gallup were choosing to stay registered as voters in the county. Rosebrough's not sure why, but guesses that even those Navajos who live in Gallup consider it more important to chose their tribal leaders than their city ones.

As Gilbert Shorty, a Vietnam veteran and local activist, put it bluntly, "I think we don't really care about what's going on in the city."

From what he hears, there's plenty of cynicism wrapped up in that apathy.

"The phrase I always get," Shorty said, " 'They're a lot of crooks; so there's no need to vote for them.' "

It's not as though the Navajo Nation government is known for its squeaky clean image. But Shorty believes a sense of ownership transcends any similar cynicism about tribal politics.

"It's a personal feeling, a feeling that it's your government, and that you're sovereign," he said.

Fear factor
If neither has a monopoly on corruption, then, or at least the suspicion of it, Rondon suspects many find the city variety more hopeless.

"They feel that the powers that be are too powerful and cannot be changed," she said.

She attributes the feeling at least some of it to inter-generational trauma, the belief that the tragedies suffered by one generation get passed on to the next in an oppressive chain. Rondon notes the Long Walk as an example, and the murder of her father, a medicine man, on his way through Gallup by a white man in 1956.

But if American Indians are being held back by outsiders, she believes they're being held back just as much by one another. It's the old crabs-in-a-bucket theory, that anyone who tries to rise above the crowd gets pulled back by the rest.

"They're afraid," she said of other prospective American Indian candidates. "They are fearful of what their peers are going to say about them, and that's one of our greatest challenges: Our people downgrading each other."

It was almost enough to stop even Rondon almost. She had been debating a run for weeks but didn't make up her mind until filing day. What sealed the deal, she said, was the example of Della John, who has spoken out about the death of her son Clint, fatally shot by a Farmington police officer last summer. Although the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing by a department investigation, the incident renewed debate about racism in the border towns of the Navajo Nation.

"You put yourself in the public eye and you're going to be slammed and criticized," Rondon said. "(John) inspired me, the way she put herself out there."

Although Rondon insists she's not running on her ethnicity, others hope her campaign will likewise inspire more of Gallup's American Indians to vote this March.

Getting out the vote
Among them are the members of The Community for Native American Progress, dedicated, according to its mission statement, to empowering American Indians with an active voice in the political process.

Achieving that voice, believes Joe Darak, the group's founder, means getting American Indians on the City Council. Getting them on the council, in turn, means getting American Indians to vote.

But as Rosebrough observed, Gallup's American Indians may be more interested in staying registered in the county. Although no one has any solid figures on the ethnicity of Gallup's registered voters, it's widely believed that American Indians are registered in much smaller numbers than the city's other two main ethnic groups: whites and Hispanics.

Since its inception last March, then, Darak and his colleagues have been out registering American Indians. They set themselves the goal of increasing their numbers 20 percent by the time the city's next municipal elections came around. But since no one knows how many were registered to begin with, they can't know whether they've succeeded. Darak did concede that registration has gone slower than he'd hoped; not enough members are volunteering to sign people up.

"We don't even have a very firm group coming to our monthly meetings," lamented Gloria Begay, the group's interim president.

Rondon, a member of the group, believes they have bigger problems: the fallacy among many Navajos that they can't vote in both chapter and city elections. Thinking they can chose only one or the other, many chose to vote in their chapters. But according to the McKinley County Bureau of Elections, they don't have to chose. The Community for Native American Progress is trying to let them know.

Getting Gallup 'ready'
But there's only so much any group can do. The voters must still decide who they want their councilors to be. With U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama considering bids for the White House, the national media have been asking whether America is "ready" for a female or a black president. Is Gallup that is to say, its voters "ready" to elect an American Indian mayor?

Everyone who's been around long enough to know agrees that Gallup has lost the racist edge of its past. But many also agree that those attitudes haven't disappeared; they've just become more subtle.

It was only a few years ago that the city paid $300,000 to settle charges from the U.S. Justice Department that it was discriminating against American Indian applicants. City officials considered the matter a bureaucratic misunderstanding, more to do with candidate credentials and record keeping than anything else; however, American Indians are more likely to consider it one more example of the city's persistent prejudices.

Ballenger believes there's more registering to do before an American Indian has a real shot at the mayor's seat.

"We need to educate people more on voting before that can happen," she said, "and I don't think we're there yet."

But as members of her children's generation loosen their ties to the land, and build new ones with the cities they live in, she believes they'll get there.

Begay believes it's more about reaching across ethnic lines than getting more people to vote within them.

"If they work hard enough to relate to the people, whether it's white or Hispanic, that's going to be the key for (an American Indian) candidate to win," she said.

Either way, said Rondon, "it's about time."