State for Natives?
Navajo speaker presents vision of ‘51st virtual state’

Mark Charles gestrures while giving a lecture Thursday in the Calvin Hall auditorium on the UNM-G campus. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Cable Hoover

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Staff writer

GALLUP — Mark Charles would like Native Americans to start thinking outside the box about themselves and their political voice — or lack of voice — in the United States.

Charles, of Fort Defiance, Ariz., spoke to a small group of community members at UNM-Gallup on Thursday about his idea for the country’s Native American people to join together to create a “51st Virtual State” for Native people.

A graduate of UCLA, Charles is a public speaker, writer, computer programmer, minister, and consultant on Native American issues. The son of a Navajo father and a Dutch-American mother from the “Wooden Shoe Clan,” Charles joked about his childhood. “I grew up in a Dutch ghetto just off the Navajo Reservation,” he said of Rehoboth.

Charles explained he came up with the idea of a 51st virtual state for Native Americans after returning to the Navajo Nation and living for three years with his family in a traditional hogan in Cross Canyon, Ariz. There’s a lot of time to think, he explained, when you’re living in a dirt-floor hogan with no running water and no electricity.

After living on the Navajo Nation for the last five years, Charles said he also did a lot of thinking about the last two presidential elections and why Native Americans don’t have a seat at America’s political table.

“How come I never hear a candidate talk about the Native American vote?” Charles asked. But for Charles, living in an isolated, rural area of an Indian reservation provided the answer. Although there are more than 500 Native American tribes in the United States, the total population of Native people is so small that their political voice is marginalized.

Candidates aren’t very interested in communities that have no real voting power.

Even the Navajo Nation, with its large population, isn’t a strong political block, Charles said. “As a Navajo people, as a nation, we can’t vote together,” he said, noting Navajo voter power is split between Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

However, if all Native Americans who are enrolled members of a state or federally recognized tribe could become citizens of a 51st virtual state, Charles explained, they could have a greater political voice. “That would be a mass of voters that candidates can’t ignore,” he said.

Comparing the total Native population to the population of Iowa, which has seven electoral votes, Charles said having one large virtual Native American state with a block of electoral votes would “radically change the political landscape” in the United States. Charles believes it would make political candidates devote more serious attention to Native American interests like treaty obligations, land issues, and tribal sovereignty.

He also believes it would give Native Americans a voice in the nation’s laws, economic policy, and immigration policy.

Regarding the current controversy over immigration issues, Charles wryly noted that immigrants are deciding which other immigrants can be allowed to come into the country.

“You feel like a foreigner in your own land,” he said.

Charles admitted to the audience that he wasn’t going to pretend he knew exactly how this idea for a 51st virtual state might be implemented in all its detail. “I’m more trying to present to you a vision and a picture,” he said.

He offered three different options for the possible creation of the Native American state, and he conceded that there are a number of obstacles that would have to be overcome, including the probable need for amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Responding to arguments that the idea of creating a state specifically for Native Americans had once been considered in American history and then dismissed, Charles countered that the Native American perceptions of time is circular rather than linear.

Information: mcharles@wirelesshogan.com or http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com