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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~ by Ann Garrison on January 17, 2007.