Wednesday, June 20, 9:15 p.m. Roxie
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| Moroni for President |
The first time in my adult life that I passed through the Navajo Nation, I was surprised to see all along the roadside signs proudly proclaiming “BEGAY for President!” The Diné were in election season, and it turns out that Begay(e) is a quite common Navajo surname. So I shouldn’t be surprised to see someone named for a figure from the Book of Mormon (the religious text, not the Broadway play) running for the same office.
Moroni Benally (rhymes with Denali) was one of 17 candidates for President of the Navajo Nation in 2014. Although it was not a secret that Moroni is gay, the focus of his campaign was sovereignty: although the Navajo Nation is legally semi-autonomous, the US government owns the land and provides most of the money. The unemployment rate is over 50% and ⅔ of the people are below the poverty line. Moroni felt that the old guard, particularly incumbent Ben Shelly and his predecessor Joe Shirley, have failed to confront the bread-and-butter issues of everyday life on the rez. From his university background, he started out with abstract academic terms like decolonization, but found that people responded more to vague platitudes like “deciding our own future.”
We follow Moroni and some of the other candidates, as well as openly gay campaign workers for the two “establishment” candidates (Shelly and Shirley), through the campaign for the primary, with a brief epilogue about the results of the general election and what Moroni and others have been up to since. Although as of 2018 the Navajo Nation still does not recognize same-sex unions due to a 2005 “one man, one woman” law, LGBTQ rights were not a prominent issue in the campaign.
The Navajo Nation is the largest tribal jurisdiction in the United States, but most Americans outside the Four Corners area know little or nothing about it, and most LGBTQ Americans know even less about our Native American comrades. This documentary goes a long way to rectifying that, with an emphasis on allowing the Native Americans to speak for themselves without a white male interpreter. Highly recommended.
Moroni Benally (rhymes with Denali) was one of 17 candidates for President of the Navajo Nation in 2014. Although it was not a secret that Moroni is gay, the focus of his campaign was sovereignty: although the Navajo Nation is legally semi-autonomous, the US government owns the land and provides most of the money. The unemployment rate is over 50% and ⅔ of the people are below the poverty line. Moroni felt that the old guard, particularly incumbent Ben Shelly and his predecessor Joe Shirley, have failed to confront the bread-and-butter issues of everyday life on the rez. From his university background, he started out with abstract academic terms like decolonization, but found that people responded more to vague platitudes like “deciding our own future.”
We follow Moroni and some of the other candidates, as well as openly gay campaign workers for the two “establishment” candidates (Shelly and Shirley), through the campaign for the primary, with a brief epilogue about the results of the general election and what Moroni and others have been up to since. Although as of 2018 the Navajo Nation still does not recognize same-sex unions due to a 2005 “one man, one woman” law, LGBTQ rights were not a prominent issue in the campaign.
The Navajo Nation is the largest tribal jurisdiction in the United States, but most Americans outside the Four Corners area know little or nothing about it, and most LGBTQ Americans know even less about our Native American comrades. This documentary goes a long way to rectifying that, with an emphasis on allowing the Native Americans to speak for themselves without a white male interpreter. Highly recommended.
• IMDb • official site • official site 2 •
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