Ordinary Americans experience cooperatives as a limited vehicle that may enable greater earnings, job security and lower goods and services costs, but which provides no route to building legacies that envision universal wellbeing generations into the future.
The American cooperative model has limited aspirations that have long been purely economic and short term, distancing itself from non-capitalist matters, however urgent. The coop enables joint economic solutions when poverty and fragmentation may consume a community. Yet the limited nature of the solution aids in the compartmentalization of American life by excluding community fundamentals.
As the world resets in multiple ways, including insertion of AI in corporate workplace tasks, the familial unit increasingly makes sense as the unit on which human beings can generationally depend, which has a core generational stake, and which cooperatives of the future must build on.
It is a reset moment for community itself to affirm fundamentals and assert them as the cooperative system of the future.
This webinar jumps off a law review article in The Urban Lawyer, Vol. 53 No. 1 (2025), entitled "Live, Work, Govern Using Diné Fundamental Law," asserting that we are now in an era in which western society is realizing that its tools and methods are far from its ideals. The federal government itself is striving to downsize and reshape itself, seemingly by throwing functions away for localities to figure it out for themselves.
Presenters:
Herb Yazzie served as Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court from 2005 to 2015 and formerly was Navajo Nation Attorney General and Chief Legislative Counsel. He raises livestock in the polluted Black Mesa region of the Navajo Nation, in which aquifers have been exhausted by coal mines that have recently ceased operations and pulled out, leaving health risks and depleted communities in their wake.
Raymond Deal is a Marine Veteran and Diné Hataałi Association certified traditional counselor. He is a knowledge keeper whose work involves assisting families in wellness and self-abundance.
Josephine Foo served as attorney in the Office of the Chief Justice, Navajo Nation Supreme Court for eight years and is Executive Director of Indian Country Grassroots Support.
