Land Acknowledgement Statement
My home sets on land first explored by English and Scots-Irish freemen who had migrated from their homeland in search of freedom and opportunity or sometimes on the run from the law. The land was settled primarily by Germans from the Palatinate, who, through their industry, created farms, pastures, and orchards where only unproductive, fallow wilderness had existed. These men and women held savage tribes at bay and together created a nation that has been the beacon of hope to the world for over two hundred years. In the process, they lifted up a people who had neither the wheel, metallurgy, or written language. This land was conquered, not stolen, and any acknowledgment we make is owed to those who, with axe and musket, created the most powerful nation in the history of the world and we don’t owe a damn thing to anybody for being proud of their accomplishment.
The president of the Navajo Nation is demanding that NASA delay the scheduled launch of a lunar probe because payloads are believed to include cremated human remains. The United Launch Alliance's Peregrine Mission One, powered by the Vulcan rocket, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on January 8 as the first commercial robotic landing on the moon. Among the payloads to be delivered to the moon are cremated remains or DNA samples from several actors and personalities in the Star Trek series.
Slipping the gravitational bonds of Earth early next year, the Enterprise Flight will blast off in early 2023 using United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket carrying additional cremated remains and DNA samples of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry, “Star Trek” engineer James “Scotty” Doohan, and “2001: A Space Odyssey” VFX wizard Douglas Trumbull.
According to Navajo President Buu Nygren, that is a no-go.
Nygren wants the launch delayed and the tribe consulted immediately. He noted the Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures and that depositing human remains on it is “tantamount to desecration.”
This dispute goes back to 1998 when NASA's Lunar Prospector carried the cremated remains of astrogeologist Eugene Shoemaker to the moon.
The then-president of the Navajo Nation, Albert Hale, objected at the time. “The moon is revered, and it regulates life cycles, according to Navajo traditions and stories,” he wrote to NASA in January 1998. “To send something like that over there is sacrilege." The Clinton Administration pledged to consult with the Navajo on further launches.
“It is crucial to emphasize that the Moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours,” Nygren wrote. “We view it as a part of our spiritual heritage, an object of reverence and respect. The act of depositing human remains and other materials, which could be perceived as discards in any other location, on the Moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space.”
Nygren went on to invoke Biden's Executive Order 13175 (Memorandum on Tribal Consultation and Strengthening Nation-to-Nation Relationships) as requiring the Navajo to be given veto authority.
“This memorandum reinforced the commitment to Executive Order 13175 of November 6, 2000,” President Nygren wrote. “Additionally, the Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Interagency Coordination and Collaboration for the Protection of Indigenous Sacred Sites, which you and several other members of the Administration signed in November 2021, further underscores the requirement for such consultation.”
He added this explicitly recognizes that sacred sites can consist of "places that afford views of important areas of land, water, or of the sky and celestial bodies."
I'm agnostic about leaving cremated remains on the moon's surface. I wouldn't want mine there, but I don't have enough energy to argue about it. If we are going to have commercial space flights, the flights have to sell a product, and there is a finite number of satellites that can be launched. I wouldn't mind seeing the Department of Energy start stacking expended nuclear fuel rods on the moon to keep residents of Nevada from having an aneurysm. I wouldn't be opposed to popping a moderately sized nuke on the moon to show the Houthis and Iranians that we mean business.
I do have strong feelings on the principle that "President" Nygren is trying to establish.
First, the Executive Order he quotes doesn't come close to saying what he says it does.
(c) This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
He's trying to bulldoze a gutless, feckless White House into creating a precedent that can be used against future administrations.
Coming back to first principles, American Indian tribes are not sovereign governments who are peers of the United States. They are semi-autonomous units of government with limited authority over the land the United States has allowed them to occupy. If they want to continue the pagan worship of puddles and mounds of buffalo chips on their reservations, go for it. When the claim to possession is outside the boundaries of their reservations, shut up. Nygren's bizarre claim that the Navajo have some particular claim to "places that afford views of important areas of land, water, or of the sky and celestial bodies" should be laughed at if for no other reason than it makes everyone in the country observe their superstitions and treat them with respect.
Don't take this as some benign, if eccentric, act by a people dependent upon US subsidies and goodwill for survival. This is an act of "decolonization," a Marxist philosophical concept that seeks to erase the "colonizers," ethnically and culturally...though they seem happy to use the language of my people to bitch about their perceived injustices.
The Navajo have no serious claim to the moon or what goes there. The Executive Order used to bolster this nonsense does not create any legal enforcement mechanism. This is just a power grab.
A sane government would send a bicycle messenger to deliver a STFU letter a couple of weeks after the rocket reached the moon. But a government as weak, addled, and corrupt as that run by Joe Biden will probably kowtow and cancel the launch.
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