The McKinley County Sheriff’s Office is requesting the public’s assistance for gathering information on an armed robbery that occurred at Tse Bonito Mortuary on July 15.

Per the released security footage, an unidentified person in all black clothes and carrying a handgun entered the business and went through the office.

There is no information on what was taken or if any persons were harmed. There are also no suspects.

If you have information on the robbery, call MCSO at (505)722-7205. Ask for Investigator Joseph Guillen.

Bringing technology to the Navajo Nation

John Badal saw a need and has spent the past 16 years filling it. Badal is the founder and president of Sacred Wind Communications, a local telephone company and broadband provider for the Navajo Nation.

He was in the telephone business for 30 years, first Mountain Bell in Albuquerque, and later AT&T. He retired from AT&T in 1998 and started a consultancy. In 2000 he was invited to run Qwest for the state of New Mexico. He was the state president for the company for four years.

In 2004 Badal’s attention turned to the Navajo Nation and other Tribal peoples. Though he is not Native American himself, he was moved by the high poverty of one of the largest tribes in the country, the Navajo. He felt it was an entity that could never achieve equality of educational, economic or health care opportunity with urban areas in its current state.

He saw broadband as somewhat of an equalizer, particularly to the elderly and to children, giving more direct access to information systems and other services.

“I was an advocate of tribal ownership of their own telecom systems and as a matter of their economic and cultural survival,” he said. “When I couldn’t find a company that was willing to focus on the needs of the Navajo people, I decided to do this myself.

“I started with the business plan in 2004. We opened in Dec. 2006,” he said.

Sacred Wind, which employs a significant number of Navajo people in its ranks, says it is currently providing the highest speed broadband service to homes, of any company operating on Navajo lands.

Badal said his company has telephone dial-up service and hi-speed Wi-Fi with a mix of fiber, broadband and fixed wireless, which allows people to put an antenna on their home and attach it to a modem inside.

Badal said Sacred Wind acquired all of Qwest/Century Link’s telephone assets on Navajo lands in New Mexico, which represent 15 percent of Navajo reservation lands.

“We have more than 5K customers in an area with the total household count of over 8K homes,” he said.

Badal said it took a little while for employees of Sacred Wind to understand the significance of what they were creating together. But now, when his employees describe the company, they say, “We provide a voice to the people who are voiceless. And we provide a new level of opportunity to our customers.”

Badal said customer service is tremendously important at Sacred Wind. He got choked up when he told some of the stories about the things the company has done for people on the Navajo Nation.

“We’ve had adults come into our customer service office signing up their grandmother … It was the first time they’d ever been able to talk to their grandmother on the telephone,” he said.

In 2017 Sacred Wind started a solar program to provide customers with electricity. Badal said it had some of the employees and customers in tears, because they had electric power for the first time.

He also told the story of a Navajo family, a husband and wife and two children who lived at a distance from Gallup. The children had to live with the mother’s sister and her husband during the school week, because they had broadband and electricity. When the family was hooked up to solar power, they were able to bring their children home. Badal said they had a message for Sacred Wind. “Thank you for uniting our family.”

COVID-19 PANDEMIC BRINGS MORE TECHNOLOGY

Badal said the COVID-19 environment has created a huge surge in applications for broadband services from people who could not afford a monthly broadband service. Many became convinced of the need for communication links to hospitals, family members and online education.

The company was contacted by three different school districts, a local university, and the Gallup Indian Medical Center to create broadband services for students and the hospital.

Sacred Wind has partnered with Microsoft under the Airband Initiative to expand broadband access in McKinley, Cibola and San Juan counties to install free public access Wi-Fi hotspots.

The Airband Initiative was launched in 2017.

“Our goal is to extend broadband access to three million unserved people in rural America by 2022,” Shelley McKinley, Vice President of the Microsoft Technology and Corporate Responsibility Group said. “The  broadband gap disproportionately affects  Americans who reside in rural areas, preventing millions from accessing the economic, educational and social benefits that broadband internet can provide.

“According to the FCC and backed up by our own studies, Northwest New Mexico is one of the most underserved regions in the country when it comes to broadband availability. COVID-19 has put this reality into stark relief, leaving communities — including many in the Navajo Nation — without the ability to access telemedicine services, learn remotely, or work from home.

“In light of the pandemic, we built on our existing partnership with Sacred Wind Communications, to move quickly and help connect the community,” McKinley noted.

There are now seven Wi-Fi sites in the service territory, six of them were installed as part of the partnership with Microsoft, as were the set-ups in 60 homes. The public hotspots are:

• Red Rock Chapter House
• Tohajiilee Senior Center
• Huerfano NHA (Ojo Amarillo)
• Huerfano Chapter House
• Nageezi Chapter House
• Iyanbito Senior Center
• Upper Fruitland Chapter House

An eighth one was set up at GIMC.  Sacred Wind also installed a temporary Tower on Wheels in Tohajiilee to extend broadband to additional homes while they are waiting for rights of way permits for a permanent tower. That tower can be converted to Wi-Fi if it is needed there.

The sites are active now, but they are not permanent. They will remain in place for the foreseeable future. Microsoft is covering the cost of equipment in some of the hotspot areas. It has also invested some money in the company’s infrastructure. Meantime, Sacred Wind has applied for a federal grant to expand its broadband.

Badal said the GIMC hotspot has already done something very important. It allowed a girl to talk to her grandfather for the last time. She went to the parking lot of the hospital and face-timed with her grandfather over her telephone the day before he died.

REACHING OUT

Badal said he wants to send a message out to the world for other companies that want to reach and serve tribal areas in the country.

“The larger national companies that have built networks across America are not able to invest as much as the rural communities need [in order] to bring them up to Twenty-First Century communications [standards] because their business plan is built around providing more profitable services in urban areas,” he explained.

“Our model … is built around directly serving the rural communities using a mix of technologies that the larger companies can’t afford to do. We’ve seen that this model using landline and fixed microwave has been really taking off,” he said. “And for the 500 tribes that don’t own and operate their own telephone systems, many of them can adopt this model.”

Sacred Wind completed a broadband network for the Pueblo of Laguna in 2015 and is building, designing and training workers for another network on the Pueblo of Acoma.

Badal has presented his model to six Sioux tribes in Montana at the Economic Development Office of the State and has held separate counseling sessions with other tribes from New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington State.

By Beth Blakeman
Associate Editor

Juneteenth weekend

Jerry Brown never colored inside the lines. When his grandmother gave him a coloring book at the age of three, she set him on a path that he says looks like his artwork today.

Brown has had a variegated 49 years since his birth in Crownpoint.

He spent third to eighth grade in a boarding school in Crownpoint, where sports, not art, was the subject of significance.

He skipped ninth grade and then spent five or six months as an exchange student with the LDS church in West Jordan, Utah.

After that he tried several public schools including Wingate and Thoreau High School, but nothing felt like a fit until he spotted Sister Michelle at what is now St. Bonaventure School.

She was wearing a habit and carrying a guitar when she literally crossed his path.

He talked with her and concluded that this was where he belonged. He attended tenth and eleventh grades at the school and stayed with the missionaries there until the end of twelfth grade.

While there he met a German artist, Clarence Giese, from Vermont. Giese did abstracts. Giese became a mentor to the young Navajo man.

He took Brown to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

“I liked how he approached stuff and how he looked at it,” Brown said. And [I liked] how he used mediums.”

Giese, whose work was influenced by rocks, bones, and nature forms, died in 2018. He produced oil on canvas and spent 21 years teaching in Vienna, Austria before moving to the U. S., studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and spending 18 years in New Mexico.

In describing Giese’s work and his landscapes, Brown characterized them as being primarily about the Holocaust.

Brown said the trip to IAIA with Giese led him to apply at the institute.  He began classes there in August 1991 and finished the two-year program, following it up with another two years.

“I decided to stick around and took two 2D and 4D classes,” he said. “I have two Associate of Fine Arts degrees.”

During that time Brown said he met a lot of Native and non-Native professors.

“I started to do a lot of mixed media. Did an independent,” he said.

On the topic of becoming a muralist, Brown said, “Never thought of that. Never thought I was going to be that.”

How did he become a muralist?

“I have no idea,” Brown said.

Brown said he bid to do a mural on the south side of McKinley Courthouse and the rotunda.

Ultimately he created a 20’x25’ mural, entitled Window on the outside wall there. It took him two years of preparation, much of that looking for an architect, and 14 days to install the work made of 13” porcelain tile and 6” (See bottom of page 19).

He created a Gallup Veterans Mural on Courthouse Square. (See top of page 19).

Brown says his connection with activism came as a result of living in Minnesota. His wife was a librarian at the Correctional Facility in Lino Lakes and he worked at the Target that was looted in the protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The two decided Minnesota no longer felt like home, so they moved back to the red rocks and sunsets of the Southwest.

He watched the protests after Floyd died. A few weeks into the protests, he got a call from a member of Black Lives Matter asking him to get involved as an artist.

Originally Brown thought he would perhaps do a single letter of the street design.

But he worked with city officials and the mayor and volunteers who chalked out the letters.

He placed a hummingbird in the middle.

The hummingbird has particular significance to Brown, who was visited in a dream by a South American giant hummingbird, which started him on a series of works. He considers the hummingbird good luck.

Brown is enthusiastic about the idea of doing more activist art.

“Yes,” he said with emphasis. “I like it. I love it … It’s almost amazing, Gallupians coming together in our town. It makes me feel good for other people to come out.

“I’m part of something that is moving forward towards healing and diversity and it just goes on. We’re doing it for the elders,” he added.

Jerry Brown’s work can be seen at: facebook.com/jerrybrownart/

Clarence Giese’s work can be seen at: clarencegiese.com

By Beth Blakeman
Associate Editor

Local hospitals can handle current caseload

The Gallup Alternate Care Facility at the Miyamura High School gym closed down in a ceremony held by staff from Gallup Indian Medical Center and Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services June 17.

The facility was established in April as an overflow site for patients recovering from COVID-19 at GIMC and RMCHCS. The reason for the closing is the need for hospital beds for COVID patients at the two hospitals has decreased to the point where they are able to provide the necessary care for patients.

Major General Jeffrey Clark of the U.S. Army Medical Command spoke about how the two hospitals collaborated to run the facility, along with the New Mexico Medical Reserve Corps.

The Medical Reserve Corps also helped staff medical surgical units at the two hospitals and helped monitor more than 140 people in the motel program for COVID positive unsheltered people.

“The Rehoboth hospital and GIMC [staff] were working as one team to take care of patients, and the Army National Guard was absolutely critical in this endeavor,” Clark said.

It took about three weeks for the idea of the facility to come to fruition, and the Army Corps of Engineers spent 12 days to convert the gym to house overflow COVID patients. The first admission was on April 25.

The Gallup site served 36 patients in the two months it was active. Between April and May, both hospitals transported more than 300 patients to Albuquerque for intensive care.

Clark recited a passage from the poem To be of use by Marge Piercy, which he thinks applies to the use of the facility and the people who ran it:

“The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.”

“This ACF and the response of this community speaks to something that’s inside each of us that wants to be part of something bigger than ourselves,” Clark said.

Mayor Louis Bonaguidi was present and recalled how the site was established in light of a sharp rise in positive cases in the area in the early part of April.

“That’s when we realized McKinley County and the City of Gallup was in deep trouble,” he said. “The virus numbers were outrageous and it was getting the better end of it.”

However, coming to this point after collaboration with multiple parties was exciting for Bonaguidi, especially after the city took drastic measures.

“We blocked off the city. We were the only city in the United States to use the Riot Act, so we got national publicity for that,” Bonaguidi said.

The mayor also spoke to the efforts of the community to combat the spread and how they have followed the rules in place to lead to this point.

“This community really came together. It’s impressive when you go to Walmart now and you see everyone wearing masks. We came together, and our numbers are going down,” Bonaguidi said.

Sanjay Choudhrie, who became known as incident commander for the facility, thanked all of the staff for their efforts. In addition to Clark, other staff who provided leadership for the site include George Morgan, who helped set up security, custodians, and supplies for the site; Kevin Gaines, M.D., and Valory Wangler, M.D.

The staff also thanked people who volunteered their time and brought supplies, personal protective equipment, and worked in the ward at the site.

“We were able to be properly equipped to take care of our staff and deliver quality care to patients [because of them],” Choudhrie said.

While the facility may be closing down, the staff reminds people this does not mean the pandemic is over, and people still need to wear masks and maintain physical distances in social situations and continue to practice effective hand washing and not going out when it is not necessary.

For information about what comes next for the Hiroshi Miyamura High School Gym see: Getting the gym back in shape.

By Cody Begaye
Sun Correspondent