The Navajo Lawmaker Bridging Past and Future

Senator Shannon Pinto, the only Diné member of the New Mexico Senate, serves a constituency whose lives have been threatened over time by industry, exploitation, and violence

October 17, 2024 by Searchlight New Mexico



By Molly Montgomery

Listen to the story in Diné

https://searchlightnm.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Shannon-Pinto-Dolly-Manson.mp3

Across from Tohatchi — an unincorporated community in northwestern New Mexico on the Navajo Nation — there’s a depression in the grassland that once was a lake. Senator Shannon Pinto remembers fishing there after school with her siblings when they were kids, before invasive Russian olive and salt cedar trees drank up the water. If you unfocus your vision, you can imagine the lake in the green blur of trees, a sighting of the past but maybe also the future: Pinto hopes to fill it once more, so that people can fish there again, and farmers can use the water to irrigate their fields. Looking at a place, she tends to see at the same time her memories and her relatives’ memories, the way things are now and the way they might be. It’s with this attention that she governs.

Relational Ties
Pinto is Diné, tall house clan, born for the red house clan, from Tohatchi. She’s been a state senator for five years but has been near the senate most of her life: her grandfather John Pinto was a state senator from 1977 to 2019. One of only two Native women on the senate floor, and the only Navajo senator, she occupies something of a solitary position. Her district is huge, spanning the northwest corner of the state and encompassing thirteen chapters of the Navajo Nation, along with parts of San Juan and McKinley counties, the Southern Ute Indian Reservation and the city of Gallup. To get from the top of it to the bottom, she has to drive more than 100 miles. To get across the widest area, 50. To reach many of her constituents, she traverses rough roads in her heavy-duty Chevy truck or her Subaru Outback, winding around and up bluffs and crossing arroyos.

Her priorities are particular to the place she represents. “Senator Pinto usually thinks about her district first and the state second,” says Sisto Abeyta, a legislative lobbyist based in Albuquerque. “That’s what you want from your state senator.”

She focuses on bringing about infrastructure changes that will make the communities of her district safer. In the process she must navigate multiple jurisdictional boundaries and negotiate with a range of government entities, each of which has different levels of control over how the money she obtains in the legislature is spent. “Jurisdiction is a four-letter word,” she jokes.

More:
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-navajo-lawmaker-bridging-past-and-future/