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ROBERTA BLACKGOAT.

Many still suffer under relocation

By Cate Gilles

"For twenty five years I've been dealing with the government trying to move me off my ancestral lands. My great, great ancestors have been born here, and they've been buried in this areamy grandfather had taught me how to care for life on the land in the sacred ways, with the sacred prayers and the sacred songs, and he told me how in the very beginning the world was created and how the great Spirit has surveyed it for the Dine people in this area, between the Sacred mountains.

And this is the main poin tthat we are being told to move off the land. This is our altar that we can't give up. We can't sell it, we can't buy it, we just have to take care of it and have people live in this area." Dineh elder Roberta Blackgoat, 82 years old

"The so-called "Navajo resistors" resident on the Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL) seem to think that there is still another chance to change the law. This is wishful thinking. The families are not gaining any bargaining power to change the law, nor will they get the Hopi Tribe to change the settlement agreement if they do not sign. However, it must be clear in the minds of all Navajos on Hopi Land that by refusing to sign the agreement they are giving up their privilege to continue to live here. They will be considered trespassers, subject to eviction from Hopi land if they never sign a lease nor sign up for relocation."

Former Hopi Tribal Chairman Ferrell Secakuku. The agreement was negotiated during his tenure in office.

Roberta Blackgoat has grown old fighting relocation. Her hair has changed from black to white, her eyesight has faded and arthritis makes her body sore. Her hands are stiffer than they used to be. And she tires much more easily when she weaves her beliefs and her visions into beautiful, strongly patterned wool rugs.

What will happen to the land if all of the people are forcibly removed worries her terribly. What has happened to the land in her lifetime has already damaged her: the coal mining, the loss of sheep, fewer living plants and living creatures. According to Roberta, coal and other elements work inside earth much like the parts of the human body. "That governmentwhat they want this land for is what the Mother Earth is living on. She is supposed to have a liver, and lungs, and a heart, and all these things are what we are sitting on. Just like our bodies, the Mother Earth has internal organs," she says. "These are the precious and valuable minerals that she needs, and so, all the equipment and things they make, all our food, even ourselves is made out of the Mother Earth. Even a part of her body has been turned into money. And now the greed is always working against our Mother Earth and Mother Earth is suffering."

"We've been hearing a lot about tornadoes, and earthquakes, a lot of these warnings have been going on. That's her breath, because she is suffering and her breath is giving us warnings," she adds. Peabody Coal Company, the tribal governments and even coal miners have always insisted that there is no link between relocation and the massive coal strip mine to the northeast of Roberta's house. That idea, they say, is just some conspiracy theory created by "outside agitators." But for Roberta and many other Navajos who have faced relocation, there is no other reason that makes any sense, to cause so much pain to so many people. To shatter their lives.

Outside her small frame house the world seems dry, hot and still-until unmarked helicopters and planes fly low over her isolated homestead near Thin Rock Mesa. Or until BIA and Hopi tribal officials drive up to quiz her on when she'll sign an accommodation agreement, or how many sheep she has left. Roberta is one of a few who resolutely refuse to sign an agreement. Refusing is taking all their strength and faith in traditional beliefs. The agreement represents the latest version of US attempts to resolve some of the twisted mess caused by the relocation law-P.L. 93-531. But according to Roberta and then others, the agreement does not protect everything she has spent her life fighting for.

For the families that signed, the agreement promised 75 year leases with the Hopi Tribe, some livestock, an end to the current construction ban, three acre homesites and some temporary religious structures. Navajos who have signed an agreement will live under Hopi jurisdiction for the next 75 years. They have also agreed not to be buried at their homes on the land the relocation law gave to the Hopis.

Questions remain about what Hopi jurisdiction will look like in practice. Another resisting elder is sure agreeing to Hopi jurisdiction will only make life worse: "The way that the Hopis talk about us, saying we are worthless, it is going to be really hard for us. many violations of our way of life and religion will happen-warrantless searches, interference with religious ceremonies, livestock impoundment, constant harassment and surveillance, desecration of our burial sites and sacred places, limitations on our farming and grazing areas, the disruption of free travel rights for myself and my family. All of these violations will come true. Some of them are already happening."

Another twist to the accommodation agreement split the list of the 600 officially recognized Navajo heads of households in half-253 were eligible to sign, and 317 more were ineligible to sign for a homesite. In order to stay on the lands partitioned to the Hopis those 317 households would have to squeeze on to someone else's land. Then there are still more families still living and resisting on HPL who are not eligible to sign an agreement. It is likely that the only scenario these families face is eviction at some unknown time in the future. Most of the 253 officially eligible households have placed their signatures on accommodation agreements.

How those signatures were collected is another issue: On the land there are rumors of coercion and even forgery. When most of the families signatures were gathered, the Hopi Tribe collected the agreement bonus: $50.2 million and 500,000 acres of land to be placed in trust for the Hopi people. The Navajo Nation will also continue to pay "rent" to the Hopi for Navajos still living on the partitioned land. Many Hopis also oppose the accommodation agreement. They say they are tired of harassment by Navajo resistors and their supporters. And in public meetings, people from the Hopi villages opposed accepting money for land. Others, like then Bacavi governor Clifford Balenquah, want the remaining Navajos to be moved now. "Seventy-five years should be 75 seconds," he told the Hopi tribal newspaper, Tutuvehni.

Most of the people who have refused to sign are elders. And if Roberta Blackgoat lived somewhere else on the Navajo Nation she might have been able to live out her old age, still herding her sheep, weaving, and laughing with her grandchildren and relatives. But not here. Her relatives and and her neighbors have relocated. So Roberta Blackgoat lives down a long rutted dirt road, surrounded by the place she reveres, the memories of her ancestors, and very little else. Eviction notices in the mail and sheep impoundment notices add to her loneliness. This is the place she knows intimately--each tree, each hill memorized herding sheep. So she worries all the time about what it would be like to be forced out after all of these years of resistance. "I wouldn't know what to pray to," she says.

P.L. 93-531: A VERY PECULIAR LAW

"We have our own law. We can't get the blue eyes and yellow gold hair and eyeglass and lipstick. It doesn't have any prayer for it, any sacred song for it." ROBERTA BLACKGOAT

The land of the JUA is usually awesomely quiet. Vast sky and huge clouds seem to be in perpetual motion over grasslands, stark canyons and buttes. The pace of life is slow. Most roads are dirt here on the partitioned lands-there are a few trading posts but no malls, bright lights or neon signs. It has been isolated for a long time: As a child, Roberta remembers riding a donkey to herd her sheep and travelling by wagon to border towns to get supplies and sell rugs. The lonely land has been marked by the decades of pain it has witnessed: people who have died of grief, elderly who lost their family to relocation, medicine men who died too soon, and all of the young people driven to suicide by the enormity of the law. For a long time before the arrival of cell phones and satellite dishes basic information about the evolving federal relocation policy took a long time to get out to the remote Navajo communities scattered across the Hopi partition lands. The lack of electronic news also meant that sometimes information never arrived at all.

Twenty-five years ago, Congress called the relocation law (P.L. 93-531) a "resolution of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute." But the law did not really resolve anything-instead it worsened relations between the two nations and set in to motion a massive forced removal of some of the most traditional people in the country. How deep the "dispute" between the Navajo and Hopi people was before the law existed is open to question. But what is not in dispute is that lawyers for both tribes widened the gulf at their convenience when they were pushing hard for the lawsuit-Healing v. Jones-that eventually led to the relocation law.

"Dineh have intermarried with Hopi and most families can count members of their clan who are part one or the other," Roberta says. "We have always had Hopi friends among the traditional people and they never mentioned to us that we should leave our homes." But then the law arrived on the land with no warning. A partition line drawn in Washington split the land of the JUA and created a fence between the Navajo and Hopi. Navajos in the partitioned area were shocked. One day in 1974 they were sheepherders. The next day they were illegal aliens in their own homes, a classification that many never accepted. So, since 1974, the Navajos who found themselves on the wrong side of the fence have faced the constant threat of forced eviction. Their only real defense is based in a culture and laws that are older than the U.S. government. 93-531 did not penalize the U.S. government for its own role in the conflict. The government worsened the situation a century ago by locating tribes on top of each other during early BIA attempts to control the land. Nor did the law penalize the settlers who pressed inward on the boundaries of the reservations during the last century. Instead, elderly people and the ragged remnants of their extended families are paying for history with relocation.

In this century, there is nowhere else in the entire country where the government ordered such a massive relocation to "resolve" a land claim. Other tribes got "compensation" for treaty-guaranteed lands from the Indian Claims Commission (whether they accepted the money or not.) 10,000 Anglos were not moved from the Black Hills to resolve the Lakota claim to that land. In all, the ICC paid out $818 million for 342 Indian land claims. The government estimates relocation will cost a total of $678 million. So in the end the U.S will have paid just about as much to relocate Navajos as it paid to all other tribes for the treaties it broke to steal America. But what price for ending traditional livelihoods and self-sufficiency?

The government has not put a price tag on that irreparable loss. Nor has the government made a cost analysis of how much it takes to try and keep people afloat in alien environments like border towns after they are relocated.

Coal from the Peabody mines at Black Mesa powers electricity and big business in hungry cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. But at Roberta's house a few miles from the coal mine there is no running water, no electricity and she cooks on a wood stove. She doesn't use what the mine is eating from the heart of her country. The decades of agony caused by the relocation law remind Roberta of the nightmare memories Navajos carry of the Longest Walk to Bosque Redondo about a century ago.

She remembers youth and elders who decided to relocate and died soon after their move. "A lot of people have been relocated and moved out to a place they are calling New Lands, but this is a place I call a concentration camp. That is where they are now and a lot of them lose their lives there, under alcoholism. And a lot of them have worries, loneliness. This causes them to lose their lives because they are not used to that land," she says. "And this is why I compare the Long Walk to the struggling we are having now." "The 1868 treaty was signed after the Long Walk. We miss all the treaties that have been promised. And now I need to have my people return to their birth place and then live on the way they've been living, with their sacred prayers and sacred songs on the altar again."

On the New Lands, the Relocation Commission built a suburb to house some of the relocatees. But commission promises of factories, training and jobs never materialized. Alcoholism and depression grew on the New Lands instead. One man who decided to relocate with his family now wishes he had never left his birthplace. "There are things out there they can never replace. They made us so many promises and now all we have left is grief. I can't even get a job with the tribe and they promised us employment," he says. "There were so many prayers to stop this from happening. And it didn't change anything. And so you have destroyed something else: that faith, that belief that worked where we lived," he adds. "And now the young ones just say the hell with it. And so many are drinking."

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The destruction of Navajo people in Northern Arizona continues like a piece of well-oiled machinery today. The Hopi Tribe says it will stand for no more negotiations. They want the JUA land they claim as theirs. And the one-time communities on the Hopi Partitioned Land that have been cleared of Navajos are still quiet, except now they are occupied by cattle that graze around torn down hogans and homes. In fact, there are more cattle that have moved on to the partitioned land than Hopi families. But back at Roberta's house, she is still weaving. Done talking, Roberta returns to her loom and sits back down on the floor in front of the vibrant red, white and black rug in progress. Weaving as she waits for some justice, she adds one more row of red, tamps it down, then one more row of black.