NATIVE_NEWS: [BIGMTLIST] newtimes article
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.
NATIVE_NEWS: [BIGMTLIST] newtimes article part 2
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. Not all Navajos are leaving. About 100 signed an "accommodation agreement" with the Hopi that allows them to stay for 75 years. The 1996 agreement was struck during talks over settling the Center for Constitutional Rights' lawsuit that challenged the relocation act. The suit charged that relocation violated the Navajos' right to practice their site-specific religion. The court, however, upheld the act, stating that relocation benefits provided by the federal government "would be the envy of countless millions in other countries," says attorney Gabor Rona. But many Navajos thought the agreement was unfair, not only because it prevented future generations from living in Big Mountain but because it forced them to live under Hopi jurisdiction, without any say in how they are governed. Even more insidious, says Rona, is that the U.S. offered to pay the Hopi Tribal Council $25 million for a certain number of Navajo signatures, an incentive that led to fraud and intimidation as Navajos were pressured to sign. "A bounty was placed on Navajo signatures," he says. "Some people claimed their signatures were forged." Coal is the real cause of the Navajos' plight, say critics. "Places privileged by nature have been cursed by history," wrote the Uruguayan historian and poet Eduardo Galeano in his famous indictment of Yankee and European imperialism in Latin America, The Open Veins of Latin America. He could have been describing Big Mountain, where some of the world's richest deposits of high-grade, low-sulfur coal lie beneath cedar trees, meandering arroyos, and burnished mesas covered in ancient Indian drawings. More than a billion dollars of coal has been gouged out of the earth in the last 30 years, according to Beth Sutton, spokesperson for Peabody Western. Each year, the land yields 12 million tons, five million of which are pumped through an underground slurry line to the Mojave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada -- 275 miles away -- where the coal is burned to generate power for most of the Southwest, including L.A. Yet, Navajos have no electricity. The truth is, the Navajos and Hopis peacefully coexisted for hundreds of years until fossil fuel was discovered on their land in the 1950s. At that time, neither tribe had formal governing bodies (they were self-governed and community-based) capable of negotiating mining leases with coal companies. To solve that problem, two white lawyers, John Boyden and Norman Littell, were dispatched on behalf of the U.S. government and the energy industry to delineate tribal borders and set up tribal councils for the sole purpose of issuing coal leases. Traditional Hopis and Navajos, however, wanted nothing to do with the tribal councils. They viewed them as a violation of their autonomy. "Creating the tribal governments made it easier for the United States to deal with the Indians," says David Brugge. "But the traditionalists saw them as another way for the U.S. to control the tribes." Acting in a lawsuit by Boyden and Littell, a court set aside separate areas for the two tribes, and coal leases were signed. A joint-use zone for both tribes was also established in which coal revenues could be split equally between the tribal councils. In 1970, Peabody opened its Black Mesa Coal Mine about 15 miles northeast of Big Mountain in an area that straddled the two tribes' land. Peabody opened another mine, Kayenta, a few years later. The coal company's lease area stretches over 100 square miles, a vast terrain that is still home to 200 Navajo families. As strip-mining expands into areas where these families live, Navajos are bought out and moved to different parts of the reservation. About 50 people have already been "resited" by Peabody, which has exclusive rights to the land and the legal power to force the Indians out. The Navajos are paid per acre --Peabody won't say how much -- and given new homes. "Our leases have provisions for resiting homes to ensure that the mining can continue safely," says Sutton, the Peabody spokesperson. "The family selects an area...and Peabody constructs a brand-new home for that family with solar heating and plumbing. The process has to be approved by the tribe and the family." Since the mines opened, Peabody has paid $40 million a year to the tribal councils for the leases. Mining operations generate 700 jobs on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, where unemployment is around 50 percent, Sutton says. "These are highly skilled jobs that enable Native Americans to live and work in the area," she says. "We are proud of that." But Navajos like Whitesinger say they haven't benefited from the jobs or coal revenues. They say the tribal councils
