And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:13:13 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Robert Dorman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Denver Post article Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >From BIGMTLIST Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 10:11:00 -0800 (PST) From: Jerry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Big Mountain Efforts to inform the press have been brought to a front page and full page article in the Sunday Denver Post. The story of the struggles of Roberta Blackgoat and the forced relocation issue. A striking picture of a traditional hogan and a AIM style handbill tacked to the front door graces the center page of the full page within. Way to go. jerry ........... The Denver Post on-line article appears at: http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0314a.htm For those without web access, it is reproduced here. All others should follow the link. Forced relocation tears at tribal soul By Electa Draper Denver Post Staff Writer March 14 - BIG MOUNTAIN, Ariz. - Eighty-two-year-old Roberta Blackgoat believes losing her ancestral lands means losing her soul. For 25 years, she's defied eviction from her home, one of 12,000 Navajos caught in the biggest forced relocation of Indians by the U.S. government since the 1880s. The handful of holdouts aligned with Blackgoat now faces the latest deadline for forcible removal - Feb. 1, 2000, if not before. Countless federal officials and newspaper articles have presented the relocation of thousands of Navajos and hundreds of Hopis from Black Mesa as the sad, final solution to a centuries-old dispute between the two tribes. But Blackgoat and her supporters, scattered across the country and overseas, say that's just a cover story. The real story, they say, arises from the mesa's black heart, the world's richest deposit of near-surface coal. The trail of lives shattered by relocation begins there. It's led to soaring rates of suicide and alcoholism, financial ruin and premature deaths among relocated Navajos. Blackgoat and 64 Navajo elders of the Sovereign Dineh Nation at Big Mountain swore to fight the 1974 law that disinherited Navajos and Hopis to clear the way for strip mining. Before that the two tribes had co-existed peacefully for hundreds of years. The value of the coal has been estimated variably in the press but is worth somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars. The 1974 law partitioned the lands occupied jointly by Navajos and Hopis to clear up which tribe could issue coal leases. Blackgoat and her splinter Dineh nation declared their independence in 1979 from the Navajo and Hopi tribal governments that had signed the coal leases and accepted a fraction of standard royalties from Peabody Coal Co. The royalties still total $40 million a year for the two tribes, and Indians make up roughly 90 percent of the labor force. But Blackgoat told The Denver Post that she was taught that coal and uranium are Mother Earth's liver, heart and lungs. She sees mining as a terrible violation of the "mother,'' and when humans cut out bits of her organs, her breath grows hot. "All the suffering going on in this country with the tornadoes, floods and earthquakes is carried on the breath of Mother Earth because she is in pain,'' Blackgoat said in the Book of Elders published in 1994. Blackgoat says that the Four Corners is the Navajo holy land, a vast natural church with cornerstones, four sacred mountains placed by the heavenly father. Blackgoat has Navajo names for them but offers these names in English: Mount Taylor in New Mexico, San Francisco Peaks in Arizona and Hesperus and Blanca peaks in Colorado and Utah. Her hogan is an altar in this church, she says. She is inseparable from this landscape, she says, adding that the soil, the pin~ons, sage, junipers, the tufts of medicine plants, the sheep and she herself are all woven by the creator into whole cloth. To leave here would be giving up her religion, she says. "This natural life is our only known survival, and it's our sacred law,'' Blackgoat wrote in the Dineh declaration of independence Oct. 28, 1979. Last year, the United Nations sent representatives of its Commission on Human Rights to investigate the treatment of the traditional Navajos at Big Mountain. U.N. findings, expected in April, will not be legally binding on the U.S. government, but members of the Sovereign Dineh Nation hope shame might inspire amendments to the 1974 relocation law that set all this in motion. The late Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona said his help in shepherding the relocation law through Congress was the biggest mistake of his career. Congress tried to undo some of the damage in 1996 when it adopted a law that allowed the remaining Navajos, more than 100 extended families, to stay on their lands as tenants for 75 years if they agreed to a number of restrictions on livestock, wood cutting and building. Navajo sheep herds would be limited so the Hopi could graze cattle. Many have agreed, but perhaps a dozen, like Blackgoat, have refused to sign the accommodation agreement. If she did, she would lose all but 10 of her sheep, she says. She needs a herd of 50 or so to survive. What she doesn't eat of her herd is bartered for other goods or taken to ceremonials. A smaller herd can't sustain itself or her, she says. It's hard to believe that someone as hard to find as Blackgoat could be so squarely in the way of the Hopi government, the U.S. government and multinational corporations, says JR Lancaster, a Bluff, Utah, artist who is part of a network of local support for Blackgoat. He visits her when he can, taking groceries to save her the drive of several hours to a store. Like more than half the Navajo people, Blackgoat has no telephone, no electricity and no running water. The coal from Black Mesa fuels power plants that light up Las Vegas and Los Angeles and pump water to Phoenix, not here. The mine itself is an awesome sight. Building-size cranes wield booms bearing buckets as big as buses to claw up the coal. Beyond the mine, gravel roads give way to unmarked dirt roads that scar the mesa top in every direction, but people are scarce. Neighbors are miles apart. Lancaster rates the ruts on the dirt roads to Blackgoat's the way a kayaker classes whitewater rapids. Class I bounces passengers around. Class 5 ruts will open your truck's hood, stall out the engine or turn the truck sideways. When it rains, the roads become impassable. It's hard to talk about the situation at Black Mesa from the Navajo viewpoint because so many of their beliefs have become New Age cliches, Lancaster says. "But Roberta's the real thing, a real daughter of Mother Earth,'' he says. "All she's got is a hogan, some sheep corrals and two juniper trees on a sand dune . . . and they can't leave her alone.'' He says her occupation of her land wouldn't interfere with mining operations for decades. Some historians hold that President Chester Arthur deliberately created the Hopi Reservation in 1882 to encompass Black Mesa, described as a rich coal deposit in an 1879 government survey. The act removed the lands from the public domain available to Mormon settlers in the region. White homesteaders would have gained individual title to the lands and any minerals therein. As part of a reservation, the coal remained under control of the federal government, the trustee of Indians and Indian lands. The Hopi reservation was set within what would become a much larger Navajo reservation, first established in 1868. Black Mesa coal was untouched until the late 1960s. Its development eventually motivated Congress to divide the Hopi and Navajo joint lands into distinct Hopi territory and Navajo territory. The Hopi population is concentrated on three mesas far to the south of the mine and the partitioned land, and so the burden of relocation fell harder on the Navajos. Blackgoat's small stone house, her hogan, her corral and grazing lands were declared to lie within Hopi territory. "How does it make sense to remove 10,000 Navajos and replace them on the land with 2,000 head of Hopi cattle?'' Lancaster asks. The U.S. government has spent more than $400 million moving Navajos into cities, towns and some rural areas. Blackgoat and the resistance of other Navajos have increased substantially the government's costs. "They didn't consider the grandma factor,'' Lancaster says. He admiringly calls Blackgoat and her peers great warriors. Blackgoat admits she is angry but also sad and tired. Her children and grandchildren can't build homes around her. They are lost to her. Blackgoat's Anglo herder, Jake, a recluse who works for her without pay, says that harassment to scare off Navajo elders has taken many forms. Their wells have gone bad, sheep have been shot, and lights are shone into hogans in the middle of the night, he says. "The government's done everything it can to make sure that people are scared and upset here,'' Jake says. Hopi and Bureau of Indian Affairs officials deny charges of harassment. In posting eviction notices and warnings of livestock reductions, they are merely enforcing the law, they say. Jake points out that the 1996 law created a $25 million incentive for the Hopi government to obtain signatures from 85 percent of the 125 Navajo families, some 1,500 people, who previously had refused to leave. "This is the way I feel,'' Blackgoat says. "We're told the land isn't ours, but it's our ancestors' bodies.'' She claims it as her home because she is walking upon the bones of her ancestors. Those bones have crumbled and become part of the soil, she says. Her family's dust is everywhere. "I have five grandmothers (generations) buried around here. More than a hundred ancestors are buried here. My mother is buried across the canyon. I have a baby buried here, too. I can't forget them. "I don't care how hard it is here. I would rather live the hard life.'' Copyright 1999 The Denver Post. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Return to Top Return to News Return to Post Home ******************************************** You are on the BIGMTLIST, a moderated mailing list of Big Mountain relocation resistance information (not discussion or debate). To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the subject header. For non-list members receiving this post as a forwarded message, you may subscribe by emailing [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "subscribe" in the subject header. For Big Mountain and other activist internet resources, visit "The Activist Page" at http://www.theofficenet.com/~redorman/welcome.html Also, for great internet tools please visit: http://www.msw.com.au/cgi-bin/msw/entry?id=1271 ******************************************** &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
