In Southern California, firefighters from the Navajo Nation coughed and sneezed as they toiled diligently through a dust cloud to clear dirt off a tiny road at the foot of a mountain that had been hit by a landslide.
The Navajo Scouts had been fighting the Eaton Fire outside of Los Angeles for eight days in a row. Their two-pronged mission on Friday morning was to repair vehicle access to the mountain outside of Altadena and assess the extent of fire damage to the nearby structures.
From the Navajo Scouts’ headquarters along the Arizona-New Mexico state line at Fort Defiance, the 23-person crew traveled for two days to Southern California to assist in the battle against wildfires that have destroyed over 12,000 structures, killed at least 27 people, and forced more than 80,000 people to evacuate.
The crew is fighting the fires alongside a number of firefighting teams from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Native American nations.
Several elite hotshot-certified firefighters are part of the Navajo Scouts’ “initial attack” unit, which has assisted residents of Los Angeles in snuffing out lingering “hot spot” fires and navigating through mangled trees and landslides.
Brian Billie, a Navajo Scout emergency organizer, said, “We all feel like we’re giving back to the people.” “After speaking with the locals, I learned that some of them have lived here since they were young and have lost their homes.”
Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, commended the crew for “answering the call” to defend the Navajo diaspora and others in Los Angeles.
Regarding the Navajo Scouts, he wrote on the social media site X, “Let us send them our heartfelt wishes for protection, so that they may return home safely.”
Eleven Navajo Tribal Utility Authority electric utility journeymen, qualified to work on both new construction and “hot” lines, have also deployed to Los Angeles to help with the wildfire response and recovery.
According to Navajo utility spokesperson Deenise Becenti, they are repaying a debt of gratitude after utility employees from the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power visited the Navajo Nation on a training mission several times in recent years and assisted in bringing electricity to 170 Navajo households that had previously been without service.
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The Navajo Nation, which covers an area the size of West Virginia, has more than 10,400 homes without electricity due to gaps in the 1930s rural electrification initiatives in the United States.
According to Becenti, Navajo utility crews are used to temporarily leaving their homes to finish large-scale construction projects on the expansive reservation, but this deployment to Los Angeles is the first time they have taken part in a significant mutual aid effort outside of their country.
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Becenti noted that many Navajo people live in Los Angeles. “There’s a deep sense of pride not only for our utility employees here but people throughout the Navajo Nation… in sending firefighters and now utility workers to help an area that’s been just hit severely by a force of nature,” she said. To the best of our knowledge, we are the only tribal utility dispatching staff to Los Angeles.
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