And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: From: Robert Dorman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The article referred to below is currently at http://www.newtimesla.com/1999/080599/feature1-1.html, but in case it goes away, I am posting it after Mauro's message, and for the benifit of those of you without web access. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 08 Aug 1999 20:17:05 -0700 From: "mauro deoliveira" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: newtimes article Please post: THE LA NEW TIMES article at http://www.newtimesla.com about Black Mesa IS A MUST TO DOWNLOAD AND ADD TO MEDIA KITS. To make the most out of this big break in the story, each and everyone who supports the struggle should e-mail the editor of the New Times and ask that the magazine CONTINUE WITH THE LEAD and FOLLOW THE STORY beyond the deadline date (better yet...until resolution). The e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Congradulations Victor Mejia for the best news story in years. -Mauro SOL Communications ======================================== Pauline Whitesinger climbed out of bed in the predawn cold. She put a coat over her long cotton dress, stepped outside into the darkness, and turned to the starry east to say her morning prayers, as her ancestors had done for hundreds of years. She welcomed the sun, thanked the Creator for this life, and asked for a prosperous day. Whitesinger has a sun-wrinkled face and long graying hair. She's probably in her late 70s or early 80s; her exact age is unknown because she has no birth certificate. Her posture is slightly bent; years of living a frontier lifestyle on the Big Mountain Navajo Indian Reservation, a mostly barren, Rhode Island-size swath of land in the northeastern corner of Arizona, have left their mark on her body. Whitesinger herds sheep for a living, carries a .22-caliber rifle to ward off coyotes, and lives alone in a one-room cement-block shack with no electricity or running water. She speaks no English. After tending to her animals that morning last spring, Whitesinger climbed on her horse and galloped five miles across the rugged, semiarid terrain to a neighbor's home. There she joined other Navajos for a community meeting to discuss the loss of their land and their precarious future. That was when they came, in the late morning after she had left, to impound part of her livelihood. She knew who they were, too. The tire tracks they left behind betrayed them. Whitesinger's bull calf was gone. It had been loaded onto a trailer and hauled off to Keams Canyon 35 miles away, where it was auctioned off by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the federal agency that oversees life on Indian reservations. The one-year-old bull was unbranded -- a violation of Whitesinger's grazing permit -- so the BIA took it. But the animal was suffering from a dislocated hip and Whitesinger didn't want to harm it further by burning hot steel into its flesh. "I decided to leave it alone and let it heal first," she says through an interpreter. "That's why I had not branded it yet." Losing her calf was only the beginning. That same day, as she traveled to Keams Canyon with a friend in hopes of getting her bull back, Whitesinger's horse was shot to death not far from her home. Her 14-year-old grandson found it while herding Whitesinger's sheep. "At first I thought it was the BIA rangers," she says. "But I now suspect it was my neighbors. They support relocation, and I don't think they want me living here anymore." Like other Navajos who've had their only source of food and clothing impounded for seemingly mundane reasons, Whitesinger believes the BIA's program of animal confiscation is a "pressure tactic to starve us," she says. "It's all because of the coal that is in our land." Whitesinger is one of about 3,000 mostly elderly Navajos who live in abject poverty in the high desert of northeastern Arizona and are being forced to move from land that is rich in coal. About 13,000 Navajos have already been relocated under a 25-year-old congressional act that some say violate the tribe's human rights. Coal dug from the Big Mountain reservation yields electricity for more than 1.2 million homes in L.A. County. "Every time you flip a switch, you are helping eradicate Navajo people," says Marsha Monestersky, consultant for the Sovereign Dineh [Navajo] Nation and cochair of the Human Rights Caucus for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. "The United States likes to point its finger to human rights violations in other countries, but never to itself." Federal authorities, however, say the relocation has nothing to do with coal. Navajos are being moved out simply because the land they occupy now belongs to the Hopi tribe, under the terms of the congressional order. The energy industry, including Southern California Edison, which transmits electricity to L.A. from a Nevada power plant fueled by coal from the reservation, also denies any responsibility for what's happening to the Navajos. Some scholars view the relocation as the latest manifestation in the U.S. government's century-long campaign against the Navajos. "This is the largest forced relocation since the forced removal of Japanese Americans in World War II," says Dr. Thayer Scudder, a Caltech anthropology professor and expert on forced removal programs. "We realized that internment was unjust, and we tried to make amends. Navajo relocation is equally unjust, and all three branches of government are responsible." Caught in the middle are Whitesinger and other Navajos who must vacate Big Mountain by February 1, 2000. And as the federal deadline approaches, there is growing fear of a potential clash between government agents and Navajos who refuse to leave. "I think there will be some kind of showdown," says Kerry Begay, a 30-year-old sheepherder. "I'm prepared to fight for my land. But I don't know for sure what's going to happen." The tense situation at Big Mountain has roots that go back decades. In 1974, Congress passed the Navajo-Hopi Settlement Act to resolve a purported "range war" between the two tribes. Land surrounding the Hopi reservation that had been used by both tribes became strictly Hopi territory under the act, and Navajos were forced to move out. But critics say the supposed range war was largely a fabrication designed to open the land for coal mining and more cattle grazing by wealthy Hopis. The Hopis began lobbying Congress to partition the joint-use zone so they'd have exclusive use of it, according to Gabor Rona, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based public-interest legal organization that in 1988 sued the U.S. government, charging that the relocation act was unconstitutional. The Hopis were joined by the Peabody Western Coal Company, which liked the partition scheme since it would be easier for the firm to expand its strip-mining operations in the area, adds Rona. "There is evidence that Peabody hired a public relations firm to promote the range-war story," he says. Congress, convinced that the two tribes were at each others' throats over land and desperate to solve the energy crisis created by the Arab oil embargo in the early 1970s, passed the relocation act with little hesitation. "There was tension between some Hopi and Navajos who were competing for land, but it never got too serious," says David Brugge, an anthropologist and author of the The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: An American Tragedy. "The [coal company] came in and exploited this tension for their benefit. They wanted to get at the mineral wealth. So Peabody supported the Hopi. They wanted the tribe to get the surface and subsurface rights to the land." Since the settlement act's passage, more than 13,000 Navajos have been relocated to towns outside the Big Mountain reservation, like Flagstaff and Holbrook, Arizona, and Gallup, New Mexico. The total cost of moving them: $350 million and counting. The act also imposed a building freeze and reduced livestock in Big Mountain by up to 90 percent; Navajos are prohibited from renovating their dilapidated homes, and most of their animals have been confiscated. The government denies that displacing the Navajos has anything to do with coal. "We are concerned with overgrazing on the reservation," says Heather Sibbison, a special assistant to U.S. Interior Secretary Kevin Gover. "It's really that simple." But critics charge that the relocation has caused cultural and social disruption as well as physical and psychological shock to a sheepherding, matriarchal society whose identity is closely tied to the land. Caltech's Scudder, who has studied forced relocations in Asia and Africa and testified before Congress against the Navajo resettlement act, has estimated that during its first phase in the late '70s, 25 percent of the relocatees died within six years from illnesses brought on by stress and depression. He describes the Navajo removal program as "a magnificent 20th-century example of one of the worst relocation programs that I have seen anywhere in the world" and a "real human tragedy." Although there is no recent study measuring the impact of relocation on the Navajos' health, the Navajo Area Indian Health Service and the U.S. Public Health Service in 1978 looked at 80 patients in the first wave of relocation and found that at least 85 percent of them suffered from depression and severe stress. In 1985, UCLA anthropology professor Jenny Joe examined 300 Navajos and concluded that "people facing relocation are more likely to have people die in their families." Alcoholism and suicide were also found to be more widespread compared with Navajo families who were not being pushed off their land. Moreover, Navajos today continue to complain about illness and depression that they attribute to relocation. Scudder has seen the same pattern throughout the world among forcibly transplanted peoples. "Relocation creates what I call multidimensional stress," he says. "There's psychological stress, where people grieve for the lost homeland and have anxiety about the future; there's physiological stress that leads to death and illness; there's emotional stress and cultural stress, where the religion and ideology of a people is undermined when they are taken away from a land that has strong meaning to them. For the Navajo, relocation is about the worst thing you can do to them, short of killing them." ************************************ Bob Dorman, KD7FIZ [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Activist Page http://www.theofficenet.com/%7Eredorman/welcome.html Also, for great internet tools please visit: http://www.msw.com.au/cgi-bin/msw/entry?id=1271 Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ UPDATES: CAMP JUSTICE http://shell.webbernet.net/~ishgooda/oglala/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
