Peabody Coal now wants all water left on Big Mountain/Black Mesa. None for the people there; they have to go.

Peabody Coal stands in the shadows, as though a passive player, as the U.S.A.’s federal Office of Mining Surfaces announces bureaucratically scheduled violence is recounted to native people in passive verb forms that leave both the subject and object of extremely violence—water waste, contamination, water and land theft, and forced relocation

I’m still staggered by the Office of Surface Mining’s announcement this week that, on Big Mountain/Black Mesa, they would: 1) Reopen the mine, 2) reopen the Mojave Generation Station (coal-fired power plant), and 3) reopen and rebuild the slurry line between the mine and the plant.

Peabody Coal wants all of the water now; they have applied to use 6500 square acre feet per year at the mine alone. The plant and the slurry line will, if we allow this to happen, use much more much faster.

Peabody Coal wants all of the water now, people out of the way.

There’s resistance, including the Hopi resistance described below. In California it seems that the public utility commission is obliged to respond to protest submitted by the Just Transition Petition of the Black Mesa Water Coalition by January 22nd, having informed the coalition of its decision in favor of Southern California Edison.

This seems to be one form of Hopi resistance, at http://www.h2opirun.org/h2opirun-intro.htm:

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Black Mesa Trust

NEWS Release

For Immediate Publication

Prestory — Feb. 22, 2006

Hopi Indian runners head south to World Water Forum

Photo by Zdenek Plachy
“I AM A SIMPLE MAN” – Rueben Saufkie Sr., center, a Hopi Indian from Arizona, tells Otomi, Teotihuacanos and dancers from Amatlan de Quetzalcoatl in Mexico City about a delegation of Hopi runners who will arrive bringing sacred spring waters gathered from around the world to the World Water Forum from March 15 to 20 in a call for spiritual unity. In the middle of the dry season, drops of rain began to fall, a sign of assistance from the spirit of water.

Photo by Joan Price
TIES TO THE SOUTH - Jerry Honawa, a Hopi Indian religious leader was at home upon seeing a clan sign and stories with other petroglyphs in New Mexico that recorded the history of pre-Columbian cultures traveling between Central Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona. Honawa will be going to Mexico in March with a team of Hopi runners to the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico City on March 16 to 20 with a message about the spiritual nature of water.
The Way It Has Always Been Done

By Joan E. Price
KYKOTSMOVI, (Ariz.) - Relying on their own feet and centuries of tradition, Hopi Indians runners 12 to 75 years of age will run from their desert mesa homelands of Arizona some 1,500 miles south to Mexico starting March 2.
They will carry an ancient message about water to the 4th World Water Forum March 16 to 20 in Mexico City. 8,000 delegates are officially expected to attend representing the commodification of water – municipal utilities, pipeline companies, bottling companies, political and government representatives – are expected to attend. They will discuss the global crisis of equitable drinking access, food production, wide-spread contamination of water sources and global climate change.
Along with hundreds of other Native American nations, non-governmental organizations and environmental groups who will also attend on their own, the Hopi do not have an official invitation. But they will be coming with a message – a spiritual ceremony to place water as a living sentient being, “the first living spirit on Earth,” at the center of the global forum. The Hopi delegation is being hosted by the University of Puebla in Mexico.
Vernon Masayesva is the executive director of Black Mesa Trust, a grassroots organization that led the final years of a 40 year struggle of Hopi people to stop Peabody Coal Company from pumping pristine groundwater (the sole source of drinking water for Hopi and Navajos living on Black Mesa) for a coal slurry pipeline in their homeland. Masayesva met with the Secretariat of the World Water Forum Cesar Herrera and three assistants in Mexico City on Feb. 8 to present and explain the Hopi message to be brought by the runners.
“The Secretariat was very generous with his time even though this is very late in the organizing timetable,” said Masayesva.
“After I saw the size of Mexico City and all the traffic, I understood his concerns about security to bring our delegation of runners into the city to come to the global forum. I was really surprised at the amount of cooperation he extended to us. He is arranging for the runners and supporters to be met in an official welcoming reception on March 15 outside the city with officials of the World Water Forum, city dignitaries and media. He also offered a space for a Hopi booth at the exhibition hall of the forum and invited us to observe the proceedings of the forum on March 16.”
“We will also be participating at a nearby park with other indigenous peoples and NGO’s gathering for conferences and position papers on water rights and the cultural values of water in their own world water forum,” Masayesva continued.
The Hopi will then travel to Puebla, Mexico, a world-renowned center of Mexican and indigenous ceramics and textiles for a cultural exchange event coordinated by Samuel Malpica, a professor of anthropology and former president of the University of Puebla.
After a day of relaxing, Malpica will be their guide as the Hopi tour the pre-Columbian Temple of the Sun. That evening, the Hopi will participate in a dialog about the cultural symbol of the serpent as a wind and water deity maintained ceremonially among native peoples of the North American Southwest and Meso-america for a thousand years.
The team of runners and supporters has been preparing for the continental run strengthened by a cultural history shared with other native communities along the route. The Hopi runners will be joined by Native American runners at Zuni, Albuquerque and Isleta del Sur – all bringing water in gourds gathered from sacred springs to add to a ceremonial water bowl carried by a Hopi matriarch to the forum and indigenous events. These waters will be used for the ceremonies to renew the memory of water as a sacred being and to unite all land and life.
Hopi women have been giving as much of their spare time as possible to this preparation. Rebecca Masayesva and her sister Rachael Sakiestewa will be covering the office and phones of Black Mesa Trust while the Hopi delegation travel through Mexico. Masayesva daughters Denise and Esther Masayesva are teachers. They will tutor the youth that are running so they will not fall behind in their education during the event.
“There has been a lot of challenging things that we went through…I have just had a baby and now I don’t know if I will go,” said Barbara Burton, wife of Rueben Saufkie Sr., the coordinator of H2OPI, the Hopi running project.
“We have had to push the family aside. Rueben goes out to explain about the project and ends up telling people about water as a sacred being. If he talks to people about water, he asks them to send him water. We have had water sent from the Lake of Galilee by Jerusalem and from Mt. Fuji in Japan. As Hopi people, we know something is wrong,” said Burton, a member of the Snow Clan.
Saufkie Sr. returned from Mexico on Feb. 15 after scouting the way and meeting with organizers and supporters along the route into Mexico City.
“I stayed longer than I intended because I was invited to present our project to a Mixica-Azteca dance ceremony. The people really responded. People are more than willing to give and help out because water is sacred, a human right, not a commodity to be privatized – water is our unifier because we are all made of water,” said Saufkie. “If water is privatized, there won’t be enough water for all the children of the future generations,” he said.
“The waters we bring will be received at the Indigenous World Water Forum by four women including a ‘rain maker,’ a Holy woman who was marked by lightning,” said Saufkie, a member of the Water Clan.
“I told the people I am a simple person, not elegant or a leader. I said I am a raindrop and that they were clouds,” he said.
Jerry Honawa, a Hopi religious leader and advisor to Black Mesa Trust, will accompany the runners to the World Water Forum to pray for renewal for the global waters all life depends on.
“In most cases, we have a female counterpart in our prayer ceremonies when we are going to start rejuvenation of a water source because the female is responsible for new life,” said Honawa.
Honawa said his grandfather told him Hopi concerns in the 1950’s of global climate change.
“He told me that once they start tearing down our mountains, once they start blocking our waterways, (and these are the dams that are being built), once they go and start making oasis out of desert areas that they should be, they are going to move the ‘belt of patuwakatsi’ (water world). It is going to lose its equilibrium, it is going to shift, it is going to move when spring or when summer should begin. It will be warmer all the way into winter months, you will not see the cycles as they are today and yesterday,” said Honawa.
The runners will speak and stand for the spiritual relationship humans have to rain, clouds and lightning, snow, mists, dripping caves, springs and oceans, living forms of a moist global matrix within which a spiritual life is lived in resonance and mutual cooperation rather than domination.
“We are of water, and the water is of us. When water is threatened, all living things are threatened. What we do to water, we do to ourselves,” they stated in a Declaration of Water sent out in October 2003.
“The runners have received an endorsement by Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona and we are hoping for one from Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico. We have also been given a resolution from the All Pueblo Council to carry to the peoples of the world,” said Masayesva.
Each placement of a foot is a pulse-prayer into the earth and the pulsing vibrating waters that moisten the planet.
“Now we have to organize a run that is a prayer — the vibration and energy goes out with thoughts of peace and harmony for all living things and for the children of the future,” said Masayesva.

Prestory — Feb. 15, 2006
For more information, contact:

Vernon Masayesva
Executive Director
Black Mesa Trust
P.O. Box 33
Kykotsmovi, Arizona 88630
(928)734-9255
www.BlackMesaTrust.org

Ruben Saufkie Sr.
H2OPI Run Coordinator
P.O. Box 901
Second Mesa, Arizona 86043
(928)734-5438

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Privately owned prisons

“Judith Greene, a criminal justice policy analyst and Open Society Institute Justice fellow, notes that prison privatization got its start in the 1980s, under the Reagan Administration. With the push to “get government off our backs,” prison privatization became a highlighted goal that promised to reform prisons, turning them into clean, well-run facilities operated at little taxpayer expense. For-profit prison shareholders would finance new prison construction, while private operators would find cheaper ways to house, educate and rehabilitate prisoners, market analysts promised.”

-Not with Our Money, http://www.notwithourmoney.org/02_about/colorlines.html

The GRANDMAMA and the OH-MAMA . . .

The GRANDMAMA of all RECOLONIZATION PLANS,

The OH-MAMA!!! of all PUBLIC MEETINGS. . .

Imagine trying to force a referendum, by petition, on Peabody Coal’s Recolonization Plan for the Black Mesa Water Coalition of the Four Corners, a.k.a., the National Sacrifice Area. Peabody’s plan is 758 pages long. Actually, the Draft Environmental Impact Statement alone is 758 pages long.

The Office of Surface Mining put their stamp on this plan, but the Office of Mining Surfaces is just an obscure department within the Department of the Interior. If you check out their web page, you will find that the Office of Mining Surfaces has no purpose but I spoke to

How could the grassroots Diné Navajo people, many of whom don’t even have electricity be expected to pay the printing bill required to comply with all the obscure legal trivia of God and law and man and City Attorney Dennis Herrera? Or rather, Office of Surface Mining head and former Peabody and Arch Coal executive John Chorrey?

Didn’t our City Attorney insist that all signatories to that doc, so notoriously dangerous to decency and democracy, know how many City Attorneys could dance on
the head of a petition?

Excuse me if I remember that assault poorly, but I sorta kinda crumbled inbetween Dennis Herrera and the gang injunction, then fell flat on the floor when all three gas turbine peaker plants suddenly appeared out of nowhere. “PEAKERS!!! PLEASE HELP!!! PEAKERS!!!” I shriekeded, then hit “SEND” on the way to the floor. “Please help. I don’t even know what a peaker plant is.”

And, it’s true; pardon me, but I did not then know half of what I believe I know now, did not even realize that the two round-the-clock gas power plants in the middle of your ‘hood for all those years were supposed to be peakers kicking in for the hours of the City’s peak energy use and then switching off as use did. I’m told they never could have been peakers, no matter how much juice this city cranked up and turned off again. They were built to burn gas all day, every day, every week after week for years, that they never once even noticed demand rising and falling with use. Who was operating that closed plant all those years? Who’s operating the other Non-Peaker that someone told everyone was a peaker and who said that? Sound actionable? If so, anyboy got a dime or even one ounce of energy left?

Might as well mention the no-peaker peaker issue to Michael Boyd, who sent a note saying your lawyer got your peaker lawsuit filed and in line today. I’d add the no-peakers planted there in the name of peak use when whoever planted them there must have known that those couldn’t respond to pea if he thinks it’s actionable ’cause it should be.

Barbara George collaborated in that legal blockade and CPUC “intervention.” Not having been there done that, I belly flopped trying to do something similar for the Black Mesa Water Coalition of grassroots environmental groups and survivors, who may well be engaged in the Grandmama of All Battles. I didn’t know either of them the first tiem I called and had this naive illusioin that my CPUC would have to listen to me because I’m a citizen. But no; they briefly imagined that CPUC President Malcolm Peevey might listen to them, but all they got was a photo-op with Mr. Peevey, who happens to be a former V.P. of Southern California Edison, though he nodded and smiled and posed for the photo, muttering that their health didn’t look all that bad to him.

This Office of Mining Surfaces seems to have bushwhacked the grassroots into this Oh! Mama of Meetings last week, text below, and it seems that this event, the Oh-Mama-of. . . , really did happen. Oh! Mama, mama, mama.

But, it’s not over yet, even if the CPUC President did give all the carbon credits to Southern California Edison, market based incentives enouraging SCE to turn the plant off long after even this EPA had finally told them they had to turn it off or clean it up, and quite a few of the people of Big Mountain/Black Mesa had let SCE know how much they’d love to see them go and stay gone.

Indeed. I didn’t quite realize how criminal till I began to understand the wholly phony, totally faux energy crisis, that some thought justified the war, and 40 years of the coal-fired power plants in the National Sacrifice Area, and the BVHP RP, and what may be the Grandmama of all Recolonization I’ve beeon the way to the floor—”Anybody know anything about gas turbine peaker plants? i know nothing.”

You can read a few hundred, or more, pages of this proposal outlining the last stand of the Hopi and Diné Navajo people of the Four Corners, long known as the National Sacrifice Area, much as Bayview Hunter’s Point should be known as this city’s Municipal Sacrifice Area.

This city of ours just keeps doing its best to martyr the ‘hood out there, but, it seems to me, that everytime Dennis and Gavin and even their own Aunt Sophie, or even the Prop 90 Zombies, pass them that crown of thorns yet again, they pass it right back in the form of petitions, lawsuits, Marie Harrison, Ahimsa Porter-Sumchai, or Louis Farrakhan’s Hunter’s Point School. No matter how thick the radioactive asbestos gets, that crown of thorns keeps landing back on our City Hall’s steps, and I think the hood’s built a never-say-die reputation in the world out there beyond its own borders. The Lennar Corporation and LNR Properties are all over the Bay Area, east and west, but I don’t see anyone fighting back like Bayview-Hunter’s Point. no matter how heavy the pressure.
.
Just click to see the Grandmama of sociopathic recolonization plans; this time for the Rural Removal of Indians:

Draft EIS. . . Or, try http://www.wrcc.osmre.gov/WR/BlackMesaDraftEIS.htm#draft. If you’re a licensed masochist, order 758 pages of bureaucratese.

That is, if and only if, you’re willing to spend one more minute of your life on this coal mining Concept Plan put forth by the award-winning Office of Mining Surfaces, LLC, a branch of the Department of the Interior, LLC, and a branch of Western Peabody Coal, LLC, for Big Mountain/Black Mesa’s coal, after all the people are out of the way.

This is the plan that says, in the elusive, deadening, thick-as a brick passive verbs that the Big Bureaus always use:
1) The mine will be reopened, 2) the plant will be reopened, 3) the slurry line between the plant and the mine will be reopened and rebuilt, 4) Peabody Coal will squander the C-aquifer water, having squandered most all of the N, 5) the Four Corners will become drier and deader than any land on earth yet, because 6) there will be no water left, and 6) the people will be force relocated to the yellow banks of the Rio Puerco, site of the worst nuclear accident in American history at 5:00 A.M. on July 16th, 1979. And then, 7) everything living will die, because there’ll be no water left. Not even to drink.

If anyone wants to make calls, write letters, and stand up like a citizen, or, like the Hunter’s Point parents, students and teachers at Louis Farrakhan’s Hunter’s Point School, about this mother of all recolonization plans, or maybe even go to the Four Corners to pitch in, here’s a whole page full of righteous ideas, http://www.stoppeabody.org/index.html.

Just to find some “Talking Points,” the kind that blow the whistle–WHOO!! WHOA WHOO!!–on this totally phoney salami energy crisis, I recommend Public Citizen’s critical mass energy expert, Tyson Slocum, on KPFA, last September 12th:
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=16105; plays with a dial-up Net connection.

In case you haven’t listened yet, the main point is that we don’t need it.

We don’t need the power, though that’s the implicit justification of this mother of all recolonization plans. The people have to leave and the desert has to die, all so we can have a lot of power out here, in California. We’re the implied higher good that the Diné Navajo are supposed to leave home for, and let everything die for. Because there are more of us and we’re the fifth largest economy in the world, though these things are never quite said out loud. They’re implied, because Peabody Coal doesn’t feel comfortable saying that it’s because they wan to mine coal, slurry coal, burn coal, dry out the aquifers that desert storms have replenished and desert sand has filtered on the way down, every year, year after year.

Or that they want to force relocate the people and let all the life in the desert die of dehydration. Or that “water is life,” as the people there say, or that they come as death to all the life and the culture of the people which cultivates life and still tries to protect the land that they still believe to be sacred because, if they could protect it, it would sustain them. Peabody Coal doesn’t like to admit that they bring nothing but death to the desert and the people, so they hold us, busy California, and Arizona, ratepayers, aloft. Implicitly. We’re the implicit reason the people on Big Mountain/Black Mesa and Desert Rock have to die.

Tyson Slocum of Ralph Nader’s citizen advocacy outfit, Public Citizen, says that we’re wrongly implicated.

He says we don’t need it.

There’s an excess of electricity producing capacity. We didn’t need this anymore than we did when Enron created all the faux shortages to send electricity prices skyward.

And he’s not the only saying that there is no energy crisis or that Peabody wears no clothes. That’s phoney salami, faux crisis on sourdough. Hold the onions ’cause it already makin’ me wanta cry. I said that.

It’s kinda hard not to hold the onions for at least a minute, thinking that we all have to go through with all this just because Peabody Coal, Sithe Global, PG&E Utility, PG&E Corporation, and all the retail/wholesale/holding company energy hawkers can’t think of a way to make another buck and further concentrate wealth without killing all life in the desert and driving the people from the place where their ancestors survived. Or that San Francisco may never have needed the round-the-clock, so-called peaker plants that weren’t even built to turn on with peak use and off as use subsided.

Or that current rumor might be true, that there are powerful people in San Francisco who think our little people-packed peninsula should crank up our new used gas turbine peaker plants in Bayview Hunter’s Point and/or near our State University on 19th Avenue, even if we finally reach the promised land of community choice, energy aggregation, solar, wind, geothermal, sustainable, renewable, clean’n green power.

Rumor is that these people, whoever they are, want to use the peakers to make San Francisco a net energy producer, but that doesn’t sound as though even these peakers would be used as peakers; because, if we crank them up to generate revenue, then won’t they be on all the time? More revenue is always better than less no, so why would anyone interested in generating revenue with net energy exports ever turn them off, unless they cared about people?

Those were the peaker plants that our City Attorney won back for us by suing the PG&E Corporation, LLC when, he claimed in his lawsuit on our behalf, that our utility monopoly, the PG&E Utility, LLC had declared bankruptcy, after slipping half a billion or so to its PG&E parent, the PG&E Corporation.

Oh Dennis;Dennis, Dennis Herrera. Why couldn’t you just get us some cash? Better yet, why didn’t you get Bayview Hunter’s Point some cash, like for schools, breakfast, after-school sports and the like, or for gardens, trees, job training and retraining, or low-cost home and business loans? This neighborhood deserves reparations, not occupation, Dennis not gang injunctions, not scorn for their heroic democratic efforts in the face of formidable pressure. The pressure’s really intense, Dennis; that petition drive was heroic. Shame, shame, shame. If you really can’t feel it for anything else, then you must, at the very least, be ashamed of suing PG&E, the Corporation, LLC, for those used gas-burning peakers.

Because we don’t need the power.

San Francisco doesn’t need it any more than California rate payers need or want coal mines or coal-fired power plants or slurry lines between them. Or people pushed out of their homeland, so everything living can die there. Sure we could and should cut down on our power use, but we don’t need the grandmama of all people-removal plans on Big Mountain/Black Mesa or Desert Rock.

Excessive as our power use may now be, we don’t need it..

Most of us can’t call this surplus of existing power producing capacity ours, but our demand for more electricity isn’t demanding the ultimate sacrifice in the National Sacrifice Area. .Peabody Coal is demanding that, for its own reasons. The Mojave Generation Station doesn’t even have a majority buyer. Peabody may have to buy the old “dirty” coal plant and add scrubbers, despite its commitment to clean coal, as evidenced by the $19.y million George Bush handed to Peabody Coal to build the Mustang clean coal-fired power plant, also on the Navajo Reservation.

Southern California Edison now has a very nice $$$,$$$,$$$ sum coming in the form of carbon credits, as decreed by our California Public utility Commission, headed by former California Edison Vice President Malcolm Peevey. And it looks as though they can now sell their majority interest in that plant to whomever, most likely Peabody Coal, if Arizona requires that plant to buy carbon credits to resume operations. Time will tell, but, Arizona doesn’t yet have any landmark legislation that requires them to. So, the net result of California’s landmark is likely to be a doubling of the Mojave plant’s carbon emissions, when SCE sells that plant’s carbon credits to a company that needs them, and Peabody Coal reopens the plant. It took a few days, but I knew that I wasn’t going to like that landmark legislation.

It took a few days to realize that I wouldn’t and, I still might not have realized it, had i not picked up what seemed like the only voice raised against our landmark legislation—that of the Diné Navajo, who well knew that Arnold Schwarzenegger, just like George Bush, was committed to to clean green Peabody Coal.

Southern California Edison has lost its motivation to respond to California ratepayers demand for that plant’s power as soon as carbon credits seemed likely to slurry their way. so why do they keep building more dirty power? To manipulate it, drive utility rates artificially high, turning power plants off for what they call maintenance, evan as they create a faux energy crisis, stirring up fears of the lights going out, without warning, leaving us to face all these terrorists in the dark.

But we all know by now that it’s unsustainable and nonrenewable, which is to say that we could burn it all up and have none left.

Most of us need energy efficiency, before the municipal utility monopolies disembowel all of us with oh-my-god! power bills from municipal utility monopolies that contract with corporations to keep making more dirty, coal-fired, power, more gas peaker plants, and even nuclear (weapons infrastructure).

We may need to help them imagine that they might survive without going to all these extremes, might even find something they didn’t feel so @*#(&!!!’in’ vengeful doin’.

That’s my riff on Tyson Slocum’s argument, but don’t quote me. Listen. Tyson’s the energy expert at Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen advocacy and information outfit, so give Tyson a listen and create your own riff or two. It’s good to keep a few on hand, with all the coal-fired power plants planned for the Interior West. There’s even a rumor that someone’s hoping to use these peaker plants to turn our little people-packed peninsula into a net energy producer. (These are the peakers that Dennis Herrera won for Bayview Hunter’s Point in a lawsuit with the PG&E Corporation.)

We may still have to go to some hearings.

But, in case you thought last spring’s Redevelopment hearings in the Supes chambers, with the Bureau, were bad . . . well, you were right; they were bad. Who gave Marcia what’s-her-name the right to drone all afternoon and gave champions of the verbal arts like Marie Harrison, Ebony Colbert, Ahimsa Poter-Sumchai, Espanola Jackson, Willie Ratcliff, and all the rest of us two minutes?

I’m sure that was un-Constitutional, and I probably would have been ejected from chambers for snoring if these Shakespeares of the ‘hood hadn’t been there to punctuate the drone of the Bureau withoutbursts of real verbal genius and diversity—the holy grail. Like Ebony Colbert telling Marcia and the Supes that they could call a chicken a horse for as long as they wanted to, but, that a chicken would still be a chicken, no matter how long they went on, and on, and on about it bein[’ a horse.

Each of those drone fests did have at least a few splendid moments, but check out the Free Speech Radio at this gathering, which may have been the Mother of All Closed Meetings yet. Kathy Helms’s account here stirred me to raise the issues of Diné Navajo Freedom and Diné Navajo Democracy when I wrote to all the Arizona Bureaus. They all tell me that what is described here really did happen, on January 3rd, 2007, on the Navajo Reservation, though no one took pictures. http://www.blackmesawatercoalition.org/black_mesa_meet010307.html

How Peabody Coal Divided the Hopi and Navajo on Big Mountain/Black Mesa . . .

http://www.stoppeabody.org/bground.html

Divided but not conquered. The Navajo Hopi land dispute on Big Mountain/Black Mesa was settled on

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Background: Peabody Coal Company’s Conflict of Interest

at Black Mesa

After the passage of the relocation law in 1974, it was proven by private research and investigation that the coal company’s law office was instrumental in lobbying the U.S. Congress to pass this (inhumane) Act.

Public Law 93-531 was signed by President Ford in December 1974 while on a Christmas ski vacation in Colorado. Peabody and its subsidiary, Utah International, had urged Congress to rush this legislation as their lobbyist and certain Congressional delegates fabricated that the Navajo and Hopis were having a “bloody range war.”

This relocation law was known as the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, and its main purpose was to force the US government-designed, tribal council system to establish Indian Land Claims and so that, Peabody can “legally” hold a lease to mine coal. The Navajo nation’s tribal council was established already back in the 1920s when Standard Oil of California needed oil leases.

This type of “foreign” resource development was a violation of treaty rights for the Dineh (Navajos). The Hopi nation never had a treaty with the U.S., and Utah International’s legal maneuver of 1962 was also a violation of Hopi sovereignty and International Human Rights.

1.8 million acres of land were in question and this area was juxtaposed with the Black Mesa coal fields. The Land Settlement Act partitioned the land and approximately 20,000 Dineh (Navajo) lost all rights to their ancestral lands. Nearly 500 Hopis also were caught on the wrong side of this partitioned boundary.

The implementation and recent amendments of this Executive Order are so complex and furthermore, it is also important to know about the history of U.S. government and Dineh-Hopi relationships. The history of these relationships and policies go as far back as 1882 with the 1.8 million acre Executive Order Reservation and the USGS discovery of large deposits of coal in 1906.

Dineh resistance to Peabody occupation began in the late 1960s but most were bought out by their Navajo tribal council. The resistance to the relocation policies began at Big Mountain which is a region that surrounds significant summits that hold sacred shrines of the Dineh and their healer-chanters. The Big Mountain resistance of 1977 gained solidarity with traditional Hopis that still claimed their sovereignty, and together they claimed that the so-called “Navajo Hopi Land Dispute” was a means of divide and conquer tactic by the federal government and its energy policy.

Today, elder leaders of the original resistance state that, “We are resisting relocation and the coal mining not only for ourselves but for the whole world. Black Mesa must not be desecrated because of its sacredness –it provides life to all living things including all the human races.” Thereby, the Big Mountain resistance should be included in the efforts to halt dependency on fossil fuel and global warming. The resistance to relocation policies by the Dineh and with support from a few traditional Hopi should also be seen as a key factor in completely stopping coal extraction and coal-fired power plants.

-Kat (Haastiin Maas’ii)