Vietnamese Navajo President Lays Claim to the Moon
What happens when everything is a sacred space and everyone is an Indian.
By Daniel Greenfield
Buu Nygren, whose father came here as a Vietnamese refugee, has warned NASA not to trifle with the moon.
According to the Vietnamese president of an Indian tribe, Biden had signed a memorandum protecting “Indigenous Sacred Sites” which can consist of “places that afford views of important areas of land, water, or of the sky and celestial bodies.”
That would cover most of the planet and worlds beyond. Including the moon.
NASA’s Peregrine Mission One, which has been delayed multiple times, is carrying a lunar lander to the moon and is partly financed by also carrying private science and technology payloads including the ‘ashes’ of deceased Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. The company involved, Celestis, had previously tried to bury the ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan, who portrayed Scotty, in space. While media stories inaccurately described these as ashes, they’re accurately a small fragment of DNA from Clarke’s hair taken when he was alive.
Also along for the ride is the DNA of a 16-year-old boy who died in a motorcycle accident. “For now, Liam is going to the moon. Wherever we will be in this world, his siblings, his family, his friends, will only need to look up at the moon and smile!”
The Vietnamese president of the Navajo Nation is not smiling at the thought of Liam’s DNA ending up on the moon. He is very angry at the idea of anyone’s DNA going to the moon.
According to Nygren, the moon is sacred to the Navajo and putting Liam and Arthur’s DNA on it is “tantamount to desecration.”
He’s demanding that NASA scrap the lunar launch and get Liam and Arthur off it.
“The Moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours,” Nygren warned. “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.”
Wait until Nygren finds out that there are 96 bags of human waste on the moon left over from the Apollo missions.
The murder rate in the Navajo nation is four times the national average, 40% of adults don’t even have a high school diploma, and a quarter of Navajo households are headed by single mothers (like the one who raised Nygren after his Vietnamese dad absconded) and 8.4% are being raised by grandparents. So you would think that Nygren would have more important priorities in public safety, education and family integrity than laying claim to the moon.
This isn’t a problem that began with Nygren.
In ’97, Eugene M. Shoemaker, who witnessed the first planetary collision and had been scheduled to be the first geologist on the Apollo mission before being disqualified for health issues, was killed in a car accident while investigating impact craters on a research expedition. His ashes were carried to the moon along with a plaque from Romeo and Juliet reading, “And, when he shall die/Take him and cut him out in little stars/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night/And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
Shoemaker became the only man to have an ounce of his ashes ‘buried’ on the moon.
The Navajo Nation’s president at the time had condemned the move, claiming that, “the moon is a sacred place in the religious beliefs of many Native Americans” and “it is sacrilegious, a gross insensitivity to the beliefs of many Native Americans to place human remains on the moon.”
Since the president of the Navajo Nation, Albert Hale, was also a Democrat state legislator in Arizona (as is Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren, Nygren’s wife) NASA apologized and promised to consult next time. According to Shoemaker’s widow, Carolyn, who observed the sky with him, his feelings about the moon were also religious. “He always said that every crater was a sacred site to him. I don’t think Gene ever dreamed his ashes would go to the moon.”
So whose feelings of “sacredness” about the moon should take precedence? Shoemaker and Arthur C. Clarke or the Navajo Nation? Any number of cultures have a notion that the moon is a special place. If every culture that looked up at the moon and associated it with a goddess or deity gets to lay claim to it or exercise veto power over it, we’ll have our first lunar holy war.
This lunacy is what happens when the identity politics concept of ‘indigeneity’ takes precedence over national rights and the right of exploration. If peoples can claim territories that they have never lived on or set foot on based on their feelings about them, the sky isn’t even the limit.
After all the stars are also sacred to many American Indian cultures. So that’s the universe. If mankind goes to other stars, will we be able to bury our dead anywhere else in the galaxy?
The moon doesn’t belong to anyone. No one has ever lived on it except the few brave men who walked on its surface. The Outer Space Treaty, one of the more absurd treaties we ever signed (and there is a lot of competition on that front except under LBJ) rejects “sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” beyond the earth’s atmosphere.
LBJ claimed that the treaty “means that astronaut and cosmonaut will meet someday on the surface of the moon as brothers and not as warriors for competing nationalities or ideologies.” In reality it took the wind out of the sails of private space exploration and its ban on satellite weapons has allowed China to covertly begin militarizing them while we do nothing.
The moon, like the rest of the universe crudely referred to as all of “outer space” is not the common heritage of mankind: it belongs to those who work to lay claim to it.
Indigenous identity politics is a loser ideology which rewards failure and punishes success.
That doesn’t mean that war, cruelty and conquest are justified, but indigenous identity politics has become a professional victimhood that is a drain on society and cripples the initiative and progress of those who practice it. All too often victimhood ideologies provide excuses to victims for doing nothing and hold back those on both sides from striving to change their situation.
If the moon will one day belong to anyone, it will be to those who dream of it and one day occupy it, not to those who declare the entire universe to be theirs while they live in misery.
Down here on earth, the declaration that everything is a sacred site has crippled mining and strategic initiatives that could make America independent of Chinese rare earth minerals and Russian uranium, and provide jobs to members of Indian tribes. Insisting that the moon is a sacred site that can’t be sullied by NASA should be a wake-up call to dismantle the entire infrastructure of sacred sites which have proliferated more than they have in Stephen King novels. But that’s what happens when everything is a sacred space and everyone is an Indian
There are legitimate sacred sites that are practiced and utilized, but endless miles of territory can’t all be sacred sites. Neither can mountains, the Grand Canyon or the Moon.
When the Vietnamese president of an Indian tribe where membership requires only one Navajo grandparent can try to order NASA off the moon, indigeneity has become lunacy.