K’é doo Hozhò Náhilna’
June 4, 2025, 7:30 AM – 4:30 PM
PHIL THOMAS ARTS CENTER
State Rd 504 Shiprock High School, NM
These are critical times,
We humbly ask you to begin envisioning the MISSION OF THE NAVAJO NATION in service of our future generations. Without such a mission, we are not in control of our destiny.
We hope the envisioned MISSION will ensure the continuance of language, culture, and familial units across all Navajo Nation governing systems, especially local governance.
Thank you all who organized and participated in this event. This is the third in the Envisioning Diné Bikeyah 102 Years from Now series. There were 182 pre-registrants plus walk-ins on the day itself. We served 200 breakfasts and 300 lunches.
The event was livestreamed and recorded by Marley Shebala. Links are below. Thanks so very very much, sis Marley. The Law Panel was on too early and not able to be recorded or streamed. We hope to re-do in a zoom recording.
Recordings & Powerpoints
MORNING SESSIONS
– Law, Custom and Dine Familial Units powerpoint Retired Chief Justice Herb Yazzie, Roman Bitsuie, Josey Foo, Samantha Blend, Hannah Naljahih. How do you identify “law”? Even definition of family is affected. Law says what family is and controls how one becomes a member of it. Law defines the “social contract” of a society. T’áá aníltsoh aanihí adanit’eego. It’s Up to All of Us. (Not recorded). Also see Envisioning Familial Unit Governance for Communities of the Navajo Nation, Hannah Naljahih, M.A., University of Arizona (Capstone Project paper).
– Livestream Recording – PART 1 (2 hours 30 mins) – Familial Unit Presentations on envisioning land use — Biilashii, Litson, Tso and Kady Sheep is Life families. (3-families-vision powerpoint). Family Caregivers. Sarah Marsh (Parents Reaching Out), Alberta Farrell (San Juan Center for Independence), Gloria and Elvira Dennison (Navajo Family Voices). At the 2 hr 17 min mark: special guests Jermane Charley (Roof Butte Search & Rescue) and Eric Trevizo.
AFTERNOON SESSIONS
– Livestream Recording – PART 2 Community Action in Local Land Stewardship – Jared Begay
– Livestream Recording – PART 3 Taachih — Raymond Deal; Next Steps for Familial Units — Retired Chief Justice Herb Yazzie, Roman Bitsuie, Tyler Begay, Gloria Dennison, Raymond Deal, Samantha Blend, Hannah Naljahih, Ann and Ariana Young.
Recordings full link addresses
PART 1 Morning Session — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_vN8iphMro
PART 2 Afternoon Session — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulbJmHgklNE
PART 3 Afternoon Session — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqvOSn6AFc8
Diné Nihi Keyah Project
Photo: Sharon Tsosie
This Envisioning series is part of the Diné Nihi Keyah Project, a community-based effort led by retired Navajo Nation Chief Justice Herb Yazzie (2005-2015) and an active board of retired Navajo Nation justices, judges, land use planners and advocates. The goal is to use laws to serve k’é and hozhò. We are assisted by faculty and interns from educational institutions, including Diné College Land Grant Office, University of Arizona, and University of Arizona Law School.
Lawyers and law students in this project, who serve the people, cannot tell you what to envision. They CAN tell you what may help your vision come true.
We have informed the project’s lawyers that it is the community that will set forth the MISSION OF THE NAVAJO NATION in the manner that makes sense for our own future generations, as instructed since time immemorial.
The project is focused on putting law to its proper use in service of wellness of all beings. Law can be envisioned to sustain Diné relational or familial units in the manner instructed by our ancestors. Law has a responsibility to maintain Diné culture and independence to benefit the people, not oppress. It must never be the means to discard the vital methods of our culture, without which our responsibilities for wellness are lost.
Laws that overly restrict land use by Diné families have been in place so long that even those who have imposed them have forgotten why they were imposed. The laws certainly do not contain the fundamental laws.
Dreaming self-governing familial units
Photo: Sharon Tsosie
Why has the familial unit as the center of local governance become the object of jealousies and conflict? Is it because we have grown used to a foreign culture that is not principled on relational roles and mutual wellness; that we have grown used to isolated effort, scarcity, profit and loss as the life principles. Scarcity has replaced Diné culture in which there may never have been abundance, but there was always enough to take care of us all.
What if the familial unit were the formal organizing entity for local governance and self-determination moving forward, able to independently generate funds, sustain infrastructure, teach, and form relational units with other entities, and which can swiftly address needs and changing internal roles? Possibilities exist for the familial unit to be at the center of the mission of the Navajo Nation only if you express and envision.
What if the Diné familial unit may be defined by ourselves, with members choosing and being chosen within the unit under roles that have worked for our people long before more constricted kinds of “family” definitions and roles were imposed on us?
Lawyers ought not to tell you what is possible before you provide them with your vision, as this will unduly limit your vision, or even steer your vision towards what lawyers want.
Good laws are simple and readily seen. Lawyers will be the first to tell you that if laws are confusing, it means that the purposes are not intended to be understood.
Dreaming stewardships
LGO extension agents and steward dreamers
Grazing permits have been around for nearly 100 years and homesite leases are carved out of such permits, resulting in conflicts of use, and also impossibility of changing and integrating uses among all members of a familial unit. Permits conditioned on single uses and measured on the life of a human being rather than the perpetual life of a familial unit is unnatural in our culture.
What would be more acceptable? Perhaps enabling all land uses to be combined and integrated so that all uses within a familial unit may be freely decided by the unit’s members, be “perpetual” not unlike a tribal enterprise with no need for probate.
Dreaming wellness
Painting: Kyleigh Garter. LEFT: how it feels now. RIGHT: how it will feel in future.
A disabilities state representative recently shared that their state had poured funds into rural job creation, which was unsuccessful as the area lacked infrastructure for disabled and elderly.
Families with weak, ill and elderly members cannot live in any area where their families lack care. The need for caregiving and jobs are the main reasons for leaving the reservation.
What if shared caring can be led by self-determined familial units able to organize to share care especially across our rural areas? Is it possible that the familial units themselves can organize as some kind of funded settlement unit providing meals and care across a mutual area? Have the right questions been asked why familial units have been forced to disperse, and why the Diné familial unit has received no governmental recognition, funding or structural support even to exist?
Ahił n’á’anish
LGO extension agent and students, Navajo Nation Museum
20 years ago, a youth movement thrived across the reservation, in which Diné youth were invigorated to become leaders of the future. High school students informally organized to pick up trash, paint murals, and resolved to form farmers markets and farms. They encountered regulatory barriers, even in obtaining homesite leases, while being told they could not organize in the integrated manner they wished due to the restricted manner in which land use permits are administered. Many of these youth have moved away, all are middle aged some even with grandchildren, and a new generation of youth feel there is no reason to dream.
At our 2023 Envisioning Conference in Window Rock at the Navajo Nation Museum, all generations envisioned culture and language sustained 102 years from now.
What is our responsibility to our present youth? Diné College Land Grant Office are training a batch of youth who are intent on developing farms in informal teamwork until all of us can envision a formal manner for a Diné-based shared economy, that combines efforts and arrangements in all areas of governed life, like a mutually chosen familial unit.
REGISTRATION FORM
THIS EVENT IS PASSED AND REGISTRATION IS CLOSED.
