Healing the wounds of mining

Centuries of mining on their homelands by US corporations may have devastated their lives and environment, but the Native American peoples of the Desert Southwest region of the United States still continue their resistance. Brad Miller reports on their continuing struggle.

LILIAN Hill, a Hopi from Kykotsmovi, Arizona, points to a dried-up wash as she drives across the desert towards the Four Corners.  Her hand maps out the devastation brought on by Peabody Coal, whose massive mines on the Hopi and Navajo reservations have brought air and water pollution and the depletion of aquifers and sacred springs, their impoundment dams causing the Moenkopi wash to be alternately starved of water and then flooded with coal contaminants.  Their washes and sources of drinking water have also been poisoned by years of uranium mining on Navajo land, leaving toxic sand for children to play in and radioactive stones and wood for their elders to build homes.

But while they have suffered under centuries of energy-consuming colonialism that has bestowed on them the gifts of poverty, drug and alcohol addiction and environmental degradation, the Navajo, Hopi and other Native American nations of the Desert Southwest continue to struggle for their homelands and their resources.

'Our goal is to have an orchard in every village and every school,' says Lillian, explaining part of the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture project she directs under Native Movement, a collective that promotes culturally based leadership development and sustainability programmes in Arizona and Alaska.  Hill and her husband, Jacobo Marquez Carranza, are travelling across Hopiland with their twin daughters to visit the various orchards located on communal land and elementary schools.  By planting apple, pear, peach, almond and other trees, Native Movement and local Hopis are not only creating a habitat for birds and invigorating the soil, but are helping their people recapture their culture of food production and community organising - traditions that have been subdued by the market-oriented economy and society that the US government and Peabody Coal have created in the region.

'Trees really bring people together,' says Jacobo. When they schedule a 'work day' to plant trees or maintain the orchards, people of all ages come out to help.

At one of their project sites on the grounds of the Moenkopi Day School, orchard keeper Steven Lamadafkie oversees the cultivation of the fruit and nut trees and spends half an hour a week teaching the kindergarten through 6th grade students about pruning and irrigation. He says he enjoys encouraging the kids to learn about science and natural history as they care for the orchard. The ultimate goal is for the students to regain their culture of cultivation, and then to serve the organic produce in the school's cafeteria as a way to mitigate the maladies of an unhealthy diet (heart disease and diabetes) which plague the reservation.

Currently, the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture project relies primarily on grants from philanthropic organisations, and receives most of its seedlings from the non-profit Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, whose trees are nurtured in California under prime conditions. Other trees have been provided by a nursery in northern New Mexico, and seem to be more acclimatised to the conditions of the desert southwest and the local afflictions of wind, clay and sand-dominated soil and pests such as jackrabbits.

On one of the community orchards in Kykotsmovi, an older Hopi man named Don nods to some pear trees on the perimeter of the new planting field.  He doesn't know exactly how old they are, only that they were here before he arrived sometime in the 1930s.  Being a variety of tree that the Spaniards introduced, the project has been grafting them onto the saplings they are donated to develop strong, habituated plants that will help maintain the integrity of the old orchards.

To wean their communities off dependence on the government or non-profits, some of the project's members have attended workshops on fruit tree care, and Lillian Hill says they plan on sending more of their orchard keepers for similar training. They are also considering starting locally run businesses to market their produce, with solar-powered greenhouses and their own nursery so they can develop strains of fruit trees that will survive the harsh desert climate - just as they have for tens of thousands of years.

‘I think we've been pretty successful,’ says Lillian, smiling at her husband.

'Pueblo resistance'

The social and environmental impacts of the coal and uranium mining industry are also being addressed by Native Movement's other programmes - the Urban Lifeways Project, which teaches urban gardening and zero-waste living skills, the Pinon Project, where local youth are trained in natural building techniques and weaving, and the Black Sheep Art Collective, providing mentorship and work space for indigenous artists.

Music ‘brought me into the world of environmental justice and social justice’, says hip-hop artiste Gabriel Yaiva (Hopi/Navajo), director of Native Movement's Peace and Balance programme. Yaiva works with native youth who are vulnerable to substance abuse and gang violence.  His mission became more urgent in February 2009, when the younger brother of Hopi reggae singer Casper Loma-Dawa was beaten to death in Kykotsmovi by one of Yaiva’s friends. The alcohol- and drug-induced murder left Loma-Dawa questioning his typically positive musical messages, confusion and sorrow prompting the two to launch the Revolt Against Violence Tour, which took them to over a dozen schools across the country.  Speaking and listening tours designed to dialogue with the youth and communities about their unique problems are part of a 'pueblo resistance’, says Yaiva, modelled after the early indigenous opposition to the invasion of the Spaniards.

Since the death of Casper Loma-Dawa's brother, Yaiva says there have been four more brutal killings on Hopiland.    

‘Let’s work together to put an end to violence in our communities,’ he proclaims in a written statement.  ‘There have been too many people touched with pain, loss and despair from losing loved ones to the hands of others.’

The mining giant

They rode for 100 miles and three days to attend the 19 April 2010 Navajo Nation spring Council session in Window Rock, Arizona.  Arriving on horseback, the traditional method for community representatives to deliver important messages to their leaders, they came to express their concerns over the lack of consultation regarding the Navajo Nation's current royalty negotiations with Peabody Coal Company, the corporation's efforts to obtain a 'life of mine' permit for its Black Mesa Complex and the continuing negative impacts mineral extraction is having on the land and people.   

Peabody - whose parent company, Peabody Energy, is the largest coal company in the world - has been tearing up the land, spewing contaminants into the air and water and draining the Navajo and Hopi's aquifers for four decades. Peabody was using over 1.3 billion gallons of water annually from the N-aquifer to slurry coal from their Black Mesa Mine to the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada - until the smoke-belching coal-fired power plant was closed  on 1 January 2006 due to the Navajo and Hopi councils’ decisions to end Peabody's use of their water and pressure by the environmental groups Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Trust, National Parks Conservation Association and Black Mesa Water Coalition (BMWC) to force the plant's majority owner, Southern California Edison, to install modern pollution control equipment.   

With a lack of a market for their coal, the company shut down its Black Mesa Mine while continuing to run its Kayenta operation. While this was a huge victory for Native and environmental groups, the ensuing loss of revenue Peabody paid out for water and mineral rights has come as a heavy financial blow to the Hopi and Navajo nations.

Sustainable development

To heal an economy and culture fractured by a dependence on corporate royalty checks, the BMWC and its allies of non-native environmental groups like the Energy Action Coalition and Sierra Club formed two important organisations - the Navajo Green Economy Coalition and the Just Transition Coalition; their goal, to fuel economic development that is self-sustainable, and green.  

In the fall of 2008, the Navajo Green Economy Coalition began its community outreach programme.  Wahleah Johns, former BMWC Co-Director, and other coalition organisers, travelled across the Navajo Nation to garner support among the locals for their programme of small-scale, sustainable projects, including renewable energy production, green business ventures and the promotion of traditional agriculture.

 Though native environmentalists have often had a confrontational relationship with the pro-industry Navajo and Hopi tribal councils, the grassroots organising of the Navajo Green Economy Coalition pressured the Navajo Nation to reconsider their energy production strategy and economic plan and pass a green economy legislation by an overwhelming margin in July of 2009. The Navajo Green Economy Commission was created, with Wahleah Johns being chosen as one of its five members.

The Just Transition Coalition, made up of the BMWC, Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Trust, Tonizhoni Ani and the Apollo Alliance, has requested from the California Public Utilities Commission that the profits Southern California Edison has accrued from the closure of the Mohave Generating Station and the ensuing sulphur dioxide allowances it has been credited under the US Acid Rain Programme be placed into a special account to fund renewable energy projects like wind and solar on the Navajo and Hopi reservations.  

The Sierra Club is also trying to convince the coal industry and tribal nations to convert their power plants to clean energy, with an accompanying strategy of making coal extraction economically unworkable.         

‘As long as it remains economically feasible, no one's going to make a move,’ says Andy Bessler of the Sierra Club’s Environmental Partnership Programme.  ‘Because it’s the status quo.’    

Historically, the status quo has seen the energy industry exerting a heavy influence over tribal politics, with the Hopi tribal council voting in September 2009 to ban several large environmental groups like the Sierra Club and National Resources Defense Council, along with affiliated native groups, from the reservation.           

But Bessler thinks the ban (possibly initiated by Peabody) has 'backfired', only serving to further anger and unify the grassroots opposition to more coal mining.

Bessler is driving back from Window Rock, where, after the Navajo Council session adjourned, the horse riders, native activists and members of the Navajo community held an Environmental Education Forum concerning the current negotiations with Peabody Coal, renewable energy alternatives and green jobs.

Bessler feels Peabody has an impending reckoning.

‘Justice will come,' he says.  'It's got its own time line.  And now is a really good time.’                      

Brad Miller is a freelance journalist who has written for Inter Press Service, Pacific News Service, The Progressive, Cultural Survival Quarterly's Weekly Indigenous News and other publications.

*Third World Resurgence No. 240/241, August-September 2010, pp 2-4