I not sure just how often the big flea market is open down on the Navajo Reservation, just outside of Gallup, New Mexico, but I think it may be open for business every Saturday--and business it does. It's big, football-fields big. If you simply want to walk through--if you're not looking for Zuni bread or some kind of silver or turquoise jewelry or CDs or videos or tires or tools or just about anything--it'll still take you some time just to cruise the loop. Besides, somewhere along the line you'll not be able to pass up the honey and fry bread.
I've spent an hour or two there, just outside of town, several times. No curios down here or up the library could call the Gallup Flea Market home--I don't know that I came away with any great buys. Just being there some Saturday would be high on my list of things to do when back in town. I'd go again in a heartbeat.
But then, I like flea markets. What seems a hundred years ago, I used to sell things at a huge one on a parking lot of a dog racing park off 40th street in Phoenix.
But Gallup's is unique because the sellers and buyers are just about all Native people, mostly Navajo. If you're a white guy at the Gallup Flea Market, you're one of few, a minority for sure, a PONC, a Person of No Color. I've not spent my life around crowds of Native people, so the feeling of being alone is suddenly and uncomfortably very real and even disconcerting--there's no one, or very few, who look like you.
Deb Haaland, a tribal leader among the Laguna Pueblo people before gaining a post in the New Mexico legislature, a woman who got an education and completed a law degree as a single mom, became the Secretary of the Interior this week, when the Senate confirmed her nomination, 50-41 (with four Republican votes, itself a win). Will she succeed? Don't know? Will she do well? Time will tell.
If the world of American politics were the Gallup Flea Market (cool idea!), imagine yourself (if you're not) a member of any of the 574 recognized Native tribes in this country. When you'd look through the portraits of Presidential cabinet members throughout history, you'd find none--zero--who looked at all like you, not this year or last, not for more than two hundreds years. Deb Haaland is the first Presidential Cabinet member from this country's indigenous people. She's fond of saying she's the only one who can say she's 35th generation American.
Will her leadership at the Department of the Interior be different from Trump's people? It's hard to imagine it won't. She'll likely be no shill to "drill, drill, drill" (remember Sarah Palin?). I don't think so.
Will she be as radical as the Republicans paint her out to be? I don't know. This we do know. She's no Trumpian. She won't, like Ryan Zinke, Trump's choice, ride a horse named Tonto to work on her first day, and she likely won't begin her term in office by reviewing national monuments with an eye for cutting them back. Probably not.
It's a good bet she'll score more than the four percent rating given to Zinke from the League of Conservation Voters.
No matter how you look at it, you can't help but agree that it'll be just great for all those folks out at the Gallup Flea Market. For the first time in their own long American story, they'll be able to look at the Cabinet of the President of the United States and see someone who looks like they do.
That's no small thing and good reason for morning thanks.
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