The record, read closely · issue articles

Where would the money come from?

≈ 9 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines

D · Draft — not verified   Every quote below is verbatim from the interview transcripts and attributed to the interview it came from; quotes are candidates’ claims and proposals, not this site’s findings. Where speaker attribution in a transcript is unclear, the material is described as a theme rather than quoted to a name. How we verify →

Companion page: where the candidates stand on this, one by one →

The budget starves the fixes, and the economy feeds the budget — so “how would you grow the economy?” may be the most consequential question in the whole record. It is also where the record is widest: candidates propose doing business on the Nation, in the border towns, online, and as far away as Las Vegas. This article groups what they actually said. Their words, your verdict.

The problem, in one recurring exchange

A statistic Cal Nez carries between interviews: roughly 1,963 fully Navajo-owned businesses, against more than 91,000 residents driving off the reservation to work in border towns and for outside governments and enterprises. And a second recurring theme in the interviews cuts deeper: that the Navajo arts-and-crafts economy was historically built with outsiders as the intended buyer — that the customer was never supposed to be the Navajo people. Between those two facts sits the whole question: an economy that sells out and commutes out, circulating too little within.

Approach: gaming — on the Nation and beyond, even Las Vegas

Shaquille Begay goes furthest afield, pointing to Native-owned gaming outside the Nation as a model and a revenue source: “maybe that’s something that we could actually reach out to vendors, such as casinos in Phoenix that are Native owned. Or I know there’s that casino in Las Vegas, which is the Palms that’s operated by a tribe out of California. That would be also a source of revenue that we could generate” — adding that gaming is “going to be operating 24-7.” Johnny Russell Jr. is blunt about the mechanism: “Revenue from the casino will make a lot of money.” The caution also lives in the record — the Gervana Begay interview presses on who actually funds the gaming floor: whether it’s Navajo money going in, when “it’s not the non-Navajos that should be putting in” — gaming as extraction from the very people it’s meant to fund.

One law runs under every approach below, and it has its own article: the Navajo Business Opportunity Act.

Approach: small business first — grow our own

The largest group by far. Titus J. Nez frames the pivot: “There’s other ways to expand opportunities, not just through mineral extractions, but other ways to develop and create a Navajo economy by supporting small businesses.” Joan Gray names the gatekeeping: “we never give our local businesses, our local entrepreneurs, the opportunity to grow” — “if we continue to use the same recycle, the same businesses over and over, we’re not giving our small entrepreneur businesses the opportunity to have a piece of that pie.” J. Kaibah Begay says the support offices themselves need to change: “The regional business development offices… need to be more supportive of our Navajo people… that are dreaming.” Lewnell Harrison points at the Nation’s own enterprises: “you see enterprises coming to Navajo Nation Council always requesting for funds… They’re not pro small business at all.” Mikhail Ganadonegro states the goal in a sentence: “small businesses, so more of our own economic growth stays here with us.” Lavonne Tsosie takes it to the statute books: “we need to amend the laws regarding this particular issue on small business.” Debbie Nez-Manuel adds the missing input: “there’s not enough education to the public… not for small business owners… not for people who want to… build with Navajo Nation.”

Approach: fix the land paperwork — leases as the bottleneck

Multiple candidates locate the choke point in site leasing itself. Jamie Henio: “what I’m looking at is a lot of development areas when it comes to business site lease development.” Christine J. Benally on the trust-land gap: “If you buy a house… in the city or border town” it’s one thing, “but when it’s on the reservation on trust land, it’s more difficult.” Joan Gray on where difficulty meets poverty: “some of our people can’t even afford to pay the $30 money orders for home site leases.” And Andrew Curley names the pattern candidates keep circling: an impediment to “entrepreneurship or… home sites or any kind of new activity on the reservation.” This is where the economy article meets the law article: the leasing rules live in the scattered law, and a process people can’t read is a process that takes years.

Approach: energy and manufacturing — make things here

Germaine Simonson draws the lesson from the coal era — that in the first years of coal “we should have pursued” investments while “the revenue was coming in healthily” — and points at what’s on the table now: “the $24, $25 million for home manufacturing productions.” Lavonne Tsosie describes a housing manufacturer siting in her community and what it means: “my community being able to work, to provide for the families.” Marcella Yazzie presses on who runs what’s already here: locals “well qualified to run… the power plant, but yet they bring in” outsiders — “even down to the co-op stores.” Jordan Begay wants the workforce built fast: “how we can quickly certify our Diné people to become solar technicians.”

Approach: tourism — the customer who drives through

Marcella Yazzie maps her district’s asset: Highway 89 as “real tourism related business such as gas station restaurant and local artists.” Vince James wants the president to see the same map: Ganado as “a very important intersection to many tourists.” Marsha Greyeyes reports the western agency “looking at tourism development, coordination.” Tourism is the one approach where the outside customer is the point — the historical arts-and-crafts pattern, done deliberately and on the Nation’s terms this time.

Approach: follow the people — on the reservation and off

This has its own article now: Half the Nation lives somewhere else.

Some candidates refuse the on/off framing entirely, because the people are already both. Christopher Curley: “how do we adequately provide health care for those living off the reservation?” and, on commerce, “How do we bring in products to be competitive when those are off border towns?” Titus J. Nez extends the Treaty itself: services “can be provided” to members in the cities, and “the obligation from the Treaty of 1868” follows the person. The border-town workforce — the 91,000 — isn’t a failure to be scolded in this framing; it’s a market and a membership to be served and, where possible, drawn home.

The Nation’s own companies — and where their numbers live

What 19 of the 42 candidates said about them, and the referendum section that would transfer them: the enterprises article.

The Nation doesn’t just regulate business; it owns businesses. The biggest, with their official sites: NTUA, the tribal utility, a not-for-profit enterprise running electric, water, gas, wastewater, solar, and broadband since 1959; NTEC, the energy company whose sole shareholder is the Navajo Nation — owner of the Navajo Mine, a seven-percent stake in the Four Corners Power Plant, mines in Wyoming and Montana, plus helium and solar ventures; Diné Development Corporation, the federal-contracting holding company; the Gaming Enterprise, whose structure the Council’s Resources and Development Committee reviews; and others from agriculture to shopping centers. These are the entities Lewnell Harrison’s quote above aims at — and they are also real successes: NTEC’s dividend to the Nation rose from $3.15 million in 2025 to a record $5.5 million announced in 2026.

FINDING

Where’s the financial data? Where are the business plans? Here is what this project could verify: NTUA posts annual progress reports — project narratives presented to Navajo leadership, explicitly labeled public record, going back to 2008. NTEC posts an operational report and announces its dividends. What we could not locate on any enterprise’s public site: audited financial statements or business plans. The people are the sole shareholder of these companies — and a shareholder who cannot read the financials is in a familiar position on this site. Whether the numbers exist in Council committee files is a separate question from whether the owner can read them. This is What Should Be Public, applied to the balance sheet.

What almost nobody said

FINDING

Two silences stand out. First, almost no candidate named who the customer would be for the businesses they propose — Navajo households, tourists, export buyers, or wage-earners pulled back from border towns — though the answer decides everything about what to build. Second, only a few connected the economy to the rules themselves: Lavonne Tsosie’s call to amend small-business law and Andrew Curley’s “impediment” point stand nearly alone in saying out loud that a business cannot follow rules it cannot read — and that the leasing, certification, and business-law stack is itself economic infrastructure. That connection is the loop this site keeps finding: opacity starves the economy, and the starved economy starves the budget that would fix the opacity.

What you can do with this

Up a level: What runs through all of it →