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Traditional
Navajo and Hopi warned
against strip mining Black Mesa
By
Marley Shebala
for Headwaters News
I try to start each day with the dawn. I take a palm-size
amount of coarse ground white corn and quietly step outside my home.
I face the east direction and sprinkle my offering of white corn
from the north to the south and then from Mother Earth upwards to
Father Sky.
My prayer to the Creator, Talking God, the Dawn People, Grandfather
Eagle and all the Holy Ones is simple and often repetitious. I thank
them for all the blessings they have given me, especially my daughter,
three grandchildren and Eagle Woman, a traditional medicine woman,
who has become my friend and sister.
I also ask them to bless my in-laws, my five-fingered relatives,
the Four-Leggeds, the Ones That Fly, the Ones That Crawl, the Ones
That live in the Water, Mother Earth and all of life, especially
the children.
And I always ask for guidance, patience, intelligence and wisdom.
I’m Dine’ (Di ‘neh) and Ashiwii (A’shi’we).
The English word for Dine’ is Navajo and for Ashiwii, it’s
Zuni. My mom was Navajo and my dad was Zuni. And so I’m also
To’aheedliini (Where the Water Flows Together clan) and born
for Naasht’ezhi (Zuni). My dad’s clan was Frog.
That is who I am. I know who I am because I know my history, and
it is not myths or legends. The history of the Navajos and Zunis
are retold in the numerous traditional ceremonies that are still
practiced. These ceremonies can be an afternoon, two days and nights,
or nine days and nights. Certain ceremonies are only done during
the winter or summer.
The Navajos came from perfect ears of white corn and yellow corn.
The white corn was First Man and the yellow corn was First Woman.
The Holy Ones created them side by side and with prayers and ceremony.
We are taught in the traditional Navajo way that we are born from
earth, fire, air and water. These four elements of life are Holy
Ones. That is how we are connected to life, to the environment.
We cannot survive without earth, fire, air and water. And they cannot
survive without us. We take care of them and they take care of us.
This philosophy also holds true for traditional Zunis and other
indigenous people.
In the early 1970s, before the arrival of corporate public relations
people on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, who spewed propaganda
of Navajos and Hopis warring with each other, the Navajo and Hopi
people lived together.
They even held hands and stood in front of gigantic coal strip-mining
machines to save a traditional female shrine, the Black Mesa, which
blessed the land with water.
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Contradictions
run deep on Black Mesa
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Oct. 23, 2002
Black Mesa is ground zero for a mix of issues impressive
in its complexity.
The diverse cast of characters includes Peabody Coal, conflicting
factions of the Navajo and Hopi nations, the Mohave generating plant,
the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and Southern California utility
regulators and ratepayers.
For
three decades or so Peabody Coal has been strip-mining coal
on Black Mesa, then mixing it with water and pumping the slurry
273 miles to the Mohave generating facility, which evaporates the
water, burns the coal and produces electricity for California Edison.
For the Hopi, the operation is draining their lifeblood. It pumps
4,000 acre-feet a year from an aquifer that is the sole source of
the tribe's drinking water, and the surface water that makes their
land habitable and their livestock operations feasible.
Hopi elders are demanding that Peabody find another source of water
for the slurry. The Hopi's Black Mesa Trust and its potent environmental
allies claim Peabody could use less water or find other sources
of less-pure water, including 1,000 acre-feet a year from the Tuba
City treatment plant.
Instead, Peabody filed a request to increase its use of the aquifer
from 4,000 acre-feet to 5,700 acre-feet a year.
That has given rise to a $125
million plan pushed by Arizona's Sen. Jon Kyle to suck Colorado
River water up, over and through the rim in a giant pipeline to
Black Mesa, a project comparable in scale to construction of the
Glen Canyon Dam.
Some Hopis like the idea, if it preserves the water sources that
have been sacred to them for a millennium. But environmental groups
are aghast at the notion of losing 6,500 acre-feet of Colorado River
flow, blasting 1,200-foot tunnels through the canyon rim and miles
of pipeline through the desert.
Meanwhile, some Navajo
leaders say the tribe won't sign a new contract with Peabody
until the tribe's lawsuit over the first contract is settled. The
tribe wants $600 million in damages and alleges that former Secretary
of the Interior Donald Hodel conspired with Peabody to force low
royalties.
The suit is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Unless Southern California Edison has copies of new coal and water
contracts in hand by the end of the year, it will likely close the
Mohave plant, officials said.
That would likely mean closure of the Black Mesa mine, too, as Mohave
is the mine's only customer. Either or both would be devastating
to the tribes.
The
mine's 300 jobs generate $22 million a year in wages for Navajo
and Hopi tribal members -- about $73,000 a year per job.
The Navajo Tribe receives about $17 million a year in royalties,
about 12 percent of tribal income. The Hopi Tribe receives about
$3.7 million annually, or 25 percent of total tribal income.
Laughlin, Nev., site of the Mohave plant would lose 355 jobs worth
$20 million annually.
Meanwhile, California Edison is warily
eyeing $1 billion in new pollution-control equipment it's required
to install at Mohave under a 1999 agreement that settled environmental
groups' complaints the plant's emissions were fouling the air and
obscuring the views at Grand Canyon and other national parks.
Utility officials say they have to start next year with $58 million
in improvements to meet the 2005 deadline, but they won't spend
anything until the California Public Service Commission approves.
But, to come full circle, the commission won't rule without coal
and water contracts in place.
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