Navajo Mountain

“Our people out here were hit very hard, and it spread like wildfire in our community,” said Jeff Begay, a business consultant living in the tiny community of Navajo Mountain, Utah.

Even in remote Navajo Mountain, Begay said there was an outbreak of four cases at a nearby church earlier in the pandemic.

One of the Navajo Nation’s largest economic casualties of the Trump era happened about an hour’s drive south of Begay’s home in Navajo Mountain, Utah, when Peabody Energy shut the Kayenta coal mine in 2019.

Commissioner Willie Grayeyes is a soft-spoken man from Navajo Mountain, more than four hours drive from the county seat in Monticello.

During the campaign, the county clerk kicked him off the ballot, asserting that he really lived in Arizona—not at his ancestral home in Navajo Mountain.