Megan Vickery 26:51
Little tiny silver lining

Teracita Keyanna 26:52
Yeah, little silver lining of, kind of just doing what I do for my community, and being passionate about it and wanting to continue it.

Megan Vickery 27:04
Yeah. What changes have you seen in your community so far? And then I’ll jump into what you still want to see.

Teracita Keyanna 27:17
I think the biggest thing that I see in my community is a little bit more, I guess, a little bit more knowledge, and I feel like they’re starting to understand that there’s more of a push that they need to be more involved and that this issue is not going to go away soon. That it’s going to become an issue that our children are going to have to deal with, and I think that’s something that they’re starting to see, but in some cases, I think they don’t want to see it, and so they just overlook it. And so I think those are the changes that I do see, but I also see that with us moving into Gallup and in different locations, that I do see, there’s a disconnect in our community, and I feel like that’s kind of how the government wants it. You kind of see it. There’s always that divide and conquer, and that’s a message that I want people to understand, is that even though we’re divided, we’re still a community. And you can’t spell community without unity, and so we are still united. We may have run into bumps, we may have to stop and pause, but as a community and as a community driven grassroots organization, we still continue to advocate. We still come to events such as the one you had last night [presentation by Chris Shuey and Teracita Keyanna at the Moab Museum on Oct. 28, 2025], where we get to advocate for ourselves. We get to educate people and help them understand that everything is not just, you know, as is or as said on the newspaper. You can’t always listen to what you see in the newspaper, and so that’s kind of the concept where our community was talking about how there’s these misconceptions and this misinformation and things like that that happen with the communities, and sometimes it’s our own Navajo government that’s actually putting that wedge between the two different communities or three different communities, and things like that. So that’s what the community has to deal with.

Megan Vickery 29:49
Can you talk a little bit more about your community’s relationship with Navajo Nation and how that work has gone?

Teracita Keyanna 29:57
You mean not gone?

Megan Vickery 29:58
Yeah. Exactly.

Teracita Keyanna 30:00
Um, so with that, with us working with the Navajo Nation, it was always a plea. Right from the beginning we kept asking for more, more involvement from our Navajo Nation government. And we would always get like, oh, we can’t do that, because we don’t get paid to go to these type of meetings after five o’clock. And that’s the thing, our meetings are after five o’clock, because we do understand that community members work. And so we have our meetings in the evenings, and that’s when Navajo Nation is, quote, unquote, “off the clock.” And so that was one of the pushbacks that we always got, was they’re not getting paid for it, and the community is not getting paid for it. I mean, like, I don’t know why there would be a difference. This is about your community. This is about your people, the people that you’re supposed to be a leadership for. And so it was always, always disheartening and hard to listen to them complain about something like that. And so there’s always been some type of pushback, whether it was a time thing or or just not wanting to bother, it felt like, sometimes. And you know when we work with the different chapters, but working with our own chapter, it was that chapter saying, you know, “If you guys get money, remember, remember your chapter.” And I was like, why would we even remember our chapter when they don’t want to be here to help us? They’re not here in our meetings, they’re not here. And that’s even with the bigger executive branch of our Navajo Nation leadership, the people weren’t wanting to come out. When they were campaigning, they were all about cleaning up and helping the community. But once it came down to it, they weren’t there. And I’m specifically talking about our Navajo Nation president. He campaigned, he came to our commemoration, he came there early, but he left early. He didn’t stay for the whole thing. He just wanted to campaign. And then when we were supposed to have a meeting with him, I myself was out of town. I was actually at Berkeley, and that was because the Human Rights Commission was actually out there having hearing type meetings out there, and we got a side event type of meeting with some of the commissioners. And so when we got the word that we were able to meet with them, we scrambled and had myself and another colleague, Jonathan Perry, come out there with us and our Environmental Law Center lawyer, and we went out there so we could talk to the commissioners. And so during that time, Navajo Nation had set up a meeting with community members and the Navajo Nation president. The community members drove out from the community to Window Rock, to meet with the President, and he wasn’t there. And then later that afternoon, one of our community members went to the New Mexico State Finals basketball tournament. And guess who was there? Navajo Nation president was actually there, and that’s when it hurt, you know, he’s supposed to be our leader. He’s supposed to be listening to the people. And here he was hosting the EPA, I think it was region — I always forget the regions, region nine or region six, I’m not sure who it was that he was hosting, but he took them to a basketball game, he took them out to eat. And it kind of makes more sense now, because now we’re starting to find out these different background things, that are happening now, especially with the Pinyon [Plain] Mine, where Navajo Nation has made this agreement so that they can transport to the Energy Fuels mill in White Mesa. And so it kind of connects now, now we’re starting to understand that it was never really about his people. For him, it was about, I believe the profit, and we’re seeing all these things, and I don’t know if they’re true, but now that you know the things that we do know, the things that we’ve been hearing, you know, missing $23 million is not –it’s not a little thing, that’s a lot [referring to 2025 controversy regarding contracts for housing projects in Navajo Nation]. And so these are the things that our Navajo Nation president has been accused of, and I don’t know why he’s still in office, and so these are the type of difficulties that our community is dealing with, because we get the very beginning of what he wanted to do, and then him kind of being that person who drank the Kool Aid and now sees things in a different light. So it’s kind of, it’s disheartening, but, you know, as a people, we really need to understand that he’s not doing it for the people. He’s doing it for the profit. And you know, it’s just like a mirror image of what’s going on in our federal government. And so it’s not, it’s not about the people. And so if you’re if you’re worried about the federal government and how the disenfranchisement of the Native Americans or people of color already is, now double that, because even our Navajo Nation government is kind of doing the same thing, taking away money from the people. And so, you know, we, we thought we were suffering before, but now we are really, really having a hard time within our Navajo Nation government as well.