Should Congress also consider the Navajo Nation for statehood?
This is Trahant Reports.
Recently Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, told MSNBC that he’d “love to make” both Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states. This could happen should Democrats win the election (and especially if there is a sweep of the House, Senate and White House).
The state of Navajo has been an idea that surfaces from time to time. And the idea of an Indigenous state has a rich history in the United States as well as around the world.
Statehood will not fix the problems facing the Navajo Nation but it would do two things: Add representation in Congress and open up funding.
We’re talking about two U.S. Senators and at least one member of the House.
The federal government has a different formula for how to distribute money to states than it does for tribal governments. So much so that federal dollars are the single largest share of every state budget (averaging about a third of all the money coming in). Nearly one out of every five dollars spent by Congress is shipped to states.
Some states do better than others.
New Mexico is at the top of the list. The Brookings Institute estimates the “transfer of payments” between the federal government and that state reach more than $3,500 per person. If that same formula applied to the Navajo Nation, the total funding would be around $600 million per year. (As a comparison the emergency funding in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act was $714 million. But that was a one time funding source (and the most ever spent on Indian Country).
There is no guarantee that a Navajo state would receive that much. But even if the state with the lowest percentage of federal transfers is used as a base number, it would still exceed $340 million a year. (Then so much of federal spending is based on Census data, including poverty levels. So a Navajo state is likely to be on the higher side of that equation).
There is an interesting history here. Congress considered the state of Sequoyah more than a century ago in what is now eastern Oklahoma.
There are also international examples ranging from Nunavut in Canada to Greenland.
There is also a question of representation. The territories of the United States, such as Puerto Rico, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (have marginal representation in Congress … a House delegate that can serve in committees but not vote). And even that is not equitable: The delegate that represents the Northern Mariana Islands with a constituency of about 55,000 people, less than a third of the population of the Navajo Nation.
A delegate in Congress does not go far enough for former Navajo Attorney General Ethel Branch. She told me that would only be marginally helpful, you need people in Congress that can introduce legislation and carry that to the finish line.
I am Mark Trahant.
