Opinion: Voting rights for Native Americans

""Gerrymandering eats at our right to vote" is the title of a Tribune editorial (Dec. 16) concerning two congressional redistricting plans being talked about prior to the 2007 legislative session.

The Tribune's premise for the editorial attacking the redistricting plans is based primarily political idealism, which for the most part I tend to agree with. But sometimes, this being one of them, idealism needs to be tempered with all of the facts.

The editorial does not address the 17,000-plus American Indians who were gerrymandered - there's that word again - out of the their district in the northern congressional district and placed in the southern congressional district.

Many of the disenfranchised American Indians were Navajos stripped from other Navajo-speaking peoples and placed in the southern district. This was done without a second thought as to the political, sociological and fiscal differences these American Indians have with the majority of the district, which contains communities such as Hobbs, Roswell, Carlsbad, Artesia and Las Cruces. The populations of these cities contain less than 1 percent American Indian populations."