The new long walk

Traditional Navajos stand up to cultural death

- - - - - - - - - - - - by Ben Corbett (Editorial@boulderweekly.com)

Dusk approaches as the sun meanders into the cradling bosom of the San Francisco peaks on the western horizon, 140 miles away. Across the scape of trammeled grass, past the house and the hogan, beyond the beaten fence of the sheep corral, the sparse juniper and sage brush, 200 bodies stand in a prayer circle, holding hands, elevated on the unseen but felt energy drifting from the mountains, floating over the land, purifying everything it touches. In the center of the circle, the crescent moon of prayer sticks poke out from the soil. The second leg of the "Long Walk for Peace" is complete. The prayer circle breaks to the west, winding around itself in handshakes, warm smiles, eyes agleam with tears of surrender, sincerity, compassion.

The Long Walk for Peace began in Japan, when Haru Yamaguchi, who has been traveling to the Navajo reservation each summer to Sun Dance, launched the Walk in Beauty project in support of traditional Navajo resisters. Last year, he inspired 30 people to the cause. Beginning at Japan's sacred Kuraiyama mountain on January 1, the group prayed for the new millennium sunrise and walked 300 miles to Tokyo, where 100 more marchers joined, finishing the march at the U.S. Embassy on January 22, delivering 15,000 signatures petitioning against the Navajo relocation. From there, the group flew to Phoenix, drove to Flagstaff, and with 110 American activists, began at the Navajo sacred mountain to the west, San Francisco peaks, walking the 140 miles to Big Mountain in the heart of the reservation.

"People are beginning to see Big Mountain as a symbol of the world's harmony," says Yamaguchi. "The same things are happening in our country, Japan. People are being relocated. Nature is being destroyed. With our walk to Big Mountain, we are trying to tell the world that we need to start thinking about the future generations. In the walk, we prayed in each step, a prayer for the Earth and the Elders of this land."

The Big Mountain struggle is fast becoming an international issue, as more and more people are beginning to focus on the progress of technology and the growing residual destruction of Indigenous cultures. Besides Yamaguchi and the Japanese contingent, two Japanese Buddhist nuns walked, several British and Scottish activists, a family of Germans, and around 100 American protesters from places as far apart as Washington, California, Arizona and New York. Many had attended the WTO protests as strangers, unaware they'd be seeing each other again in this remote locale in Northeastern Arizona. Among the Americans was Julia Butterfly Hill, who recently descended after tree-sitting for two years in a 1,000 year-old redwood in Northern California.

"I see the Dineh one of the last guardians of the Earth," says Julia. "In a lot of mythological histories, there are gatekeepers that watch over the world of reality and spirituality. The people of Big Mountain are those gatekeepers. They are literally willing to risk death, starvation, hardship, anything that comes their way to honor that responsibility as a gatekeeper. The Dineh people are living out here so simply, using very little energy. They're taking so little from here, and they're giving back so much with their protection."

While the march and encampment at Roberta Blackgoat's Big Mountain ranch carried on through the February 1 deadline, the Hopis were issuing press releases like crazy, attempting to salvage their waning PR image while combating the onslaught of trespassing "outside agitators" streaming across their officially acquired HPL land. In a press release issued February 2, Hopi Tribal Chairman, Wayne Taylor stated, "Please be advised that your presence is unwelcome and you will be coming on our lands without our consent and against our will. This is an occupation we view as a hostile and insensitive act against the Hopi people."

Ancestral Voices

For most, Dineh country is what you see from that sinuous tongue of asphalt called I-40 stretching from Gallup to Flagstaff, twisting like a black ribbon of progress with its billboards, truckstops and Denny's restaurants along the southern border of the reservation. Armies of Suburbans and family minivans plow across this desert like modern prairie schooners every summer, bouncing from one historic marker to the next, perusing the surface of life through tinted glass. The more daring tourists stray off the beaten path to Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley and Chaco Canyon for that ephemeral jeep tour with a real live bonafide Indian, who points out all the sacred sights for a mere $75 a head-part of the three-day tour package bought at the Holiday Inn, Kayenta.

But just out of sight, just out of reach lies a foreign land. The real country. Where progress ends and reality begins. The veins of dusty washboard roads winding through the ether. The arroyos and washes and slickrock basins. The mesquite, juniper, pin pine. The scent of sage rising with the heat from baking mud. Where a pin jay alighting on a yucca breathes sermons. The heart of Dineh The naval of the Earth Mother. The last island of traditional living in this which we call the United States. Where people still walk in the Beauty Way. The people here consider themselves a living, breathing part of the process of nature. Their blood is the soil which provides life. And life itself is a cyclical prayer without time.

It is written that First Man and First Woman emerged from the Earth-womb of the underworlds with the other first beings at what is now known as Silver Lake near Silverton, Colorado. Initially, these holy beings created the four sacred mountains which represent mountains of the underworlds. To the east, Blanca Peak spirited from the Earth Mother's soil. Big Sheep Mountain, it is believed, marked the Northern boundary in the La Plata range. Taylor Peak in the San Mateos marked the Southern boundary. And to the West, the San Francisco peaks complete the life circle, with Huerfano peak at the center, the hub of the universe which emanates to the four directions.

In a complex turn of events, other beings like the Hero Twins came, destroying monster beings, whispering other mountains and trees, stars, water and a home to life, preparing this world for its inhabitants. And then story by story, name by name, clan by clan were created the Dineh the people, also known as the Navajos. In the Dineh cosmology, this physical upper world is a dualistic replica of the underworlds, one and the same. Every berry. Every sage twig, animal, insect, was created by the Dineh Gods. To the Dineh life itself is a rich worship to the creation. To destroy the land and the people is to profane the cosmology, the womb, the prayer itself, which is the life cycle.

"I was told that I had five grandmothers," whispers 83 year-old Roberta Blackgoat in a broken English. "Number one is buried near here, and the daughter was buried at Tonalea. And the granddaughter of the first is buried across the canyon at the higher place. And the fourth grandchild is buried at the tip of the canyon that lies here," she points. "So this area has been through five grandmothers. All our flesh is the dirt right here. They've been turned to soil. So in that way, the spirit is still here. These prayers have been carried on since the very beginning, when the Great Father created the world and set us here. And every living being-all the insects and the crawly people, the four-legged people and the windy people-they've been set here with the prayers and the song. We've been set here to take care of this land and told, 'This is what you have to use, don't make a mess of it. Take care of it with the prayers.'"

Roberta Blackgoat, a Dinelder of the highest esteem, is one of 200 traditional Navajos resisting forced relocation from their homelands. She, like the others, live what most would consider a hard life, herding sheep, without electricity, running water or telephones. But to these people, many of whom can't speak English, have never seen a McDonalds, and have no understanding of the white man's laws, the prayer and traditional life cycle is the only way to live. To abandon these lifeways is to abandon their responsibility to the Gods.

"The holy ones set the Dineh people here surrounded by the four sacred mountains," Roberta continues. "It's tied into a bundle. This is what's been taught, and it has to be carried on from generation to generation to generation, never to expire. The area between the four sacred mountains, this land, it's our church. On the west side is our altar. But if they take that away from us, are we gonna move our altar on the north side of the four sacred mountains or the south side, or by the doorway? We can't do that. Now they're making us get a permit to break a medicine leaf. If I go to the Hopi to get a permit to break off the medicine, what would I say? Would I tell the plant that I had to ask the Hopi permission to go over here and break off this leaf? It's not the way we have. We have a prayer to say to the plant, and that's more important than some idiot idea they're working on us."

Land before time.

Western anthropologists place the Navajo emergence to the Four Corners region at around 500 years ago, encompassing the Chaco Canyon and Canyon de Chelly area. They began surrounding the Hopis, who'd been around for 1,000 years. Throughout their tenure as neighbors, there have always been small scuffles between the two nations, which were resolved internally.

"Relocation" is a word that's never sat well on the Navajo palate. It's a white man's word, equivalent to death. In 1864, General Carleton and "friend of the Indian" Kit Carson forcibly relocated the Dineh on the infamous Long Walk. Like cattle, the soldiers rounded up the 8,500 Navajos who survived the bullets of the whites and herded them off to Fort Sumner in New Mexican territory. Their new home was a desolate concentration camp along the Pecos river with scant wood and food called Bosque Redondo, where they were expected to cohabitate with the Mescalero Apaches. En route to and on the reservation, hundreds of Navajos died. Many dropped from starvation and pestilence. Others were shot unarmed while trying to escape. But most died from the sheer heartbreak and depression of having their roots yanked from their holy land. A once strong people with hundreds of horses and sheep, rich peach orchards, fields of corn and deep religious ties to the land, the Dinhad been broken and reduced to dirt.

"When it is considered what a magnificent pastoral and mineral country they have surrendered to us-a country whose value can hardly be estimated-the mere pittance, in comparison, which must be given to support them sinks into insignificance as a price for their natural heritage." These, the cynical 1864 words of General Carleton, overseer of the removal.

During their stay at Bosque Redondo, the Navajos practiced none of their sacred songs and ceremonies, since they would not be sanctified by the Holy Ones outside the realm of the four sacred mountains. They were a people dislocated from their church. Year after year, the crops failed due to alkalides in the soil. The water was bad, making them and their livestock sick. And the entire idea was costing the U.S. government some $1 million annually-much more than the anticipated $100,000 per annum. The graft and scandal was enormous, as Indian agents and government officials embezzled nearly 75 percent of the proceeds allotted the Navajos, who were ironically shipped to Fort Sumner initially because they were considered "thieves and raiders."

The Navajo adventure was costing too much dinero. So in 1868, they were sent back home with a new treaty promising not to fight with the whites. In 1873 an executive order reservation, roughly 125 by 170 miles was declared the Navajo reservation. And later, in 1882, another executive order reservation surrounded by the Navajo reservationwas declared by President Chester A. Arthur for the Hopi and "other Indians" who the government may so desire, consisting of 2.5 million acres. During the early 1900s, the Navajos had their own baby boom, and the Hopis began to complain that the Navajos were encroaching upon the Hopi villages with their cattle. So finally, in the 1940s, Grazing District Six was established for exclusive use by the Hopi, creating a buffer zone between the Hopi villages and the Dineh In 1962, a federal court ruled that the remaining 1.8 million acres would in perpetuity be know as the Joint Use Area (JUA), where the Hopis and Navajos would share and graze the land equally.

PL 93-531, the white menace

"The total number of families that have been determined eligible is 3,520," says Paul Tessler, legal eagle for the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation in Flagstaff, Ariz. "We have relocated 3,104 families to date. Twenty-six of those were Hopis, the rest were Navajos. Our average family size is about 4.5 persons. If you want to multiply that out, you'll get the total number of people relocated [13,968]. There's a handful of families, 11 to date, who have refused to take advantage of the Accommodation Agreement and refused to relocate. They're the ones who are facing eviction."

On February 1, both tension and relief swept across the Navajo and Hopi reservations, as the weathered Navajo/Hopi land dispute drew to a close, at least in theory. On this day, the division of former (JUA) shared by the two neighbors was made official, with federal land title handed over to each of the nations. The current land struggle dates to 1974, when Senator Barry Goldwater ushered the land division law PL 93-531 through Congress, prompting the relocation process with a projected cost of $40 million for an estimated 3,500 Navajos. Today, the relocation still lingers on, costing U.S. taxpayers nearly $500 million to date. In 1977, the line was drawn, splitting the JUA 50/50 between the nations declaring each respective side the Hopi Partition Lands (HPL) and the Navajo Partition Lands (NPL). All Hopis, around 100, on the Navajo side were ordered to move. And all 13,000 Navajos on the Hopi side were ordered to do the same. After the February 1, 2000 deadline, all Navajos remaining are considered trespassers on the HPL.

On December 14, 1995, the Hopis offered a 75-year Accommodation Agreement to remaining Navajo traditionals resisting relocation. Those who signed were permitted to stay for that term on a three-acre plot, without the ability to build structures, a limit to a half-dozen sheep, and the list goes on. Essentially, the Navajos signing the agreement would need Hopi permission to eat, breathe and sleep. Those who refused to sign the Accommodation Agreement are now subject to eviction. There's no choice now. They will be removed, whether willingly or by force. It's only a matter of time.

"It's really up to the Navajo Nation and these non-signers," says Eugene Kaye, spokesman for the Hopis.

But there's only 10 or 12 families left. Why not just let them live out their lives out there? They're not harming anyone. "

You know," says Kaye, "before the 1974 act was passed, they were trying to work something out, and at that time, the Hopi Tribe offered the Navajo families 'life estates,' and they turned it down, claiming that it was 'death estates.' They didn't want that, so that offer was rejected. We didn't have to do this. We didn't have to offer anything, but the Hopi Tribe did. It was their choice not to recognize our government or any government. They wanted to be their own."

The dispute has been a long and arduous process. Relocation deadlines have come and gone. Fences have been strung by the Hopi Tribal Council to mark off their land acquisition, only to be defensively cut by Navajo resisters. Navajo sheep have been rounded up time and again by the BLM and the Hopis in their "Grazing Reduction Program." In the past, the livestock impoundments have struck terror and fear into traditional Dineh who never know when the Hopi Rangers and armed federal officers will roll in with the trucks to impound their sheep, the very staple of traditional Dineh existence. To many, it is seen as a means of psychological warfare, aimed to wear down relocation resistance.

"It denies the Indian people the ability to sustain themselves," says Ward Churchill, C.U. Professor of Ethnic Studies and author of Struggle for the Land. "They don't have a hook into the cash economy. They grow their own. The problem with the livestock impoundments is it denies them the subsistence base that would allow them to resist. The most delicious part of it is they've packaged that bill of goods as some sort of conservancy measure because they say that Navajos are 'overgrazing' this land and causing soil erosion of a terrain that's been earmarked for strip-mining for Christ's sake. Ever since the 1940s they've been saying that the Navajos have been overgrazing this land. They're trying to force them into a dependency relationship, whereas the subsistence economy allows them to be relatively independent."

The greatest fear of Big Mountain inhabitants is that the land, once relinquished, will be stripped of coal by the Peabody Coal Company, a British multinational mining firm. Currently, the mines at Black Mesa and Kayenta, in the Northeast corner of the former JUA are expanding at more than 500 acres per year, as the jaws of the dragline rip into the ore, extracting hundreds of tons of coal each day. Many believe that coal is the driving force behind PL 93-531 and the forced relocation. It has been determined that major parts of the former JUA are ore rich, and that relocation is a means of clearing the land for extraction. As written into PL 93-531, although the land surface of the former JUA is divided equally between the nations, ownership is only of the topsoil. Mineral rights and royalties are divided equally between the Hopi and Navajo Tribal Councils.

"I've been working on the issue for 22 years," says Paul Tessler. "I do not believe this was a coal conspiracy involving Peabody Coal and the Hopis to get the Navajos off the land. Some people don't like the idea of coal being mined on Indian lands. They think the Indians are being exploited."

And it turns out that "they" are probably right. Just last week a federal judge in the U.S. Court of Claims decided the case, Navajo Nation vs. USA, denying compensation of $600 million to the Navajos over a royalty dispute which involved Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary Donald Hodel, who secretly consorted with Peabody Coal in an ex parte meeting, withholding information from the Navajos, skewing a slated 20 percent royalty revaluation down to 12.5 percent in 1984. A major savings for Peabody Coal, and the swindle of the century. "We conclude that the defendant, acting through former Secretary Hodel, violated the most basic common law fiduciary duties owed the Navajo Nation," stated the Judge in his final remarks.

"They've been brainwashed," says Roberta Blackgoat. "They want to move us away from our altar and put in a mine. We're sitting on these precious minerals. These precious minerals are the Mother Earth's liver, and lung and heart. We want our Mother Earth to be healed, but they don't care. They only want to get more money in their pockets. If these congressional people and legislators want to sue somebody, let them sue the Creator!"

The New Bosque Redondo

Driving through the rippled byways and mud tracks of the Big Mountain area, it's common to stumble across a herd of 30 or 40 white sheep crossing the road with a couple of mutt dogs running around as shepherds. You'll know the owner is close-by, just out of sight. You'll look and look, as the sheep scatter to clear a path for your passage. And then, just beyond a big juniper, there she'll be, like an apparition in traditional garb, riding high in the saddle, watching over her flock. Dineh traditional living is very much the same it's been for the past five centuries. However, the threats to this culture loom large.

"New Lands"... Has a nice ring to it. This parcel was acquired by the Navajo nation to accommodate the 14,000 Navajo relocatees from the HPL. Throughout this area, the houses are on neat little cul de sacs with street signs like Manuelito, named after the great Dineh leader who fought against Kit Carson in 1863. You never know when irony will bare its grinning teeth. In the Big Mountain area, the dogs run free. In New Lands, they're on chains. The local Conoco in Sanders is the regular loafing spot. Liquor can be purchased at the ready. A rural ghost town and highway gutter, just out of eyeshot of Interstate 40.

"We've built a relocation community there, where we took about 350,000 acres of raw ranch land," says Paul Tessler, pitching his Indian projects. "The people on the New Lands have it pretty good by comparison for grazing. Besides that, we've built a chapter house, an eye and chest clinic, a head start center, senior citizens center, behavioral health center, a police sub-station, power, water, roads, sewer."

In 1976, about 60 miles upstream on the Rio Puerco, one of the most devastating radioactive uranium spills in U.S. history flooded the river, which flows right through New Lands. Relocatees living along the river think it's typical for the U.S. to purchase their land in one of these as yet undeclared "National Sacrifice Areas." At a recent talk at the University of Colorado, Verna Clinton, a resident of the Star Mountain relocation area of the HPL, and Willie Begay, a Big Mountain area rancher, both believe that the rise in cancer patients in New Lands is directly related to the stress of relocation, coupled with the contaminated Rio Puerco.

"It was the biggest nuclear spill ever recorded," says Clinton. "Tons and tons of green slime broke the dam on the Rio Puerco and ran down to Gallup. For a while there, we were going to funerals every month," she adds, explaining how two of her aunts living in New Lands have been stricken with cancer.

"The Department of Interior is denying they knew that this land was contaminated," says Begay. "But we have documents that they knew this land was contaminated."

Paul Tessler assures that the wells supplying New Lands residents with water percolate from aquifers which aren't recharged by the Rio Puerco. However, he adds, "when the Rio Puerco flows in the spring when there's run-off, if you went and allowed your cattle or kids to drink the water in the river, it probably wouldn't be good. But we did a several million dollar study which said that the water from the wells is not affected by the spill."

Aside from these threats, alcoholism is on the rise in Sanders, most-likely the effects of depression associated with relocation. When I took a drive through there, I picked up an HPL New Lands relocatee, a Navajo man who was pretty hammered, and gave him a lift 60 miles down to St. Johns. As we bounced along the road toward his destination, he looked over and said, "I don't know who I am anymore. I have nothing now."

Voices crying in the dark

At dawn on February 2, the 200 walkers greeted the morning sun with coffee, shaking the sleep from their eyes after a night of good conversation, acoustic music and folk songs, jokes and laughs. This day would see the final leg of the Long Walk for Peace, three miles to a holy spot near Roberta's. Around 8 am, with full bellies, the throng broke camp, packed up, and geared into the walk, which ended with a sacred pipe ceremony led by Sun Dance overseer, Allen Jim. After the elders spoke, the Pipe entrance song began. The Pipes, three total, were packed atop Mount Kuraiyama by the wife of Nippashi, a Japanese Monk and Sun Dancer, who spent 10 years living with the traditional Dineh at Big Mountain. Before dying in late 1998, Nippashi spent his life praying for the Dineh elders, Big Mountain and world harmony. His bones join the many others that line the generations of soil across this holy land.

"All of us who are struggling so hard to protect Indigenous rights, what we're really talking about is our souls," says Julia Butterfly. "To me, everything that is wrong in our world is all our responsibility. When you first look at it, you see Peabody Coal as the responsible party for what's happening out here. And you see the government. And you see the corrupt people pretending to represent the Indigenous people. Those are the people you first see as being the problem. But then if you think about it, Peabody Coal would have no business if people were conserving more energy. So the responsibility comes back to the consumer."

"The people who live on the land have every right to live on the land," says Ward Churchill. "They've lived on the land since before there was a United States by a fair sight. They don't want to relinquish the land. They're under no legal obligation that's discernible. There it is. It's a sham and a shell game from start to finish. It's presumptive arrogance on the part of an imperial power called the United States to administer for its own purposes the internal domains of other peoples. What's the loss? The people who constituted the largest remaining traditional enclave of Indigenous society remaining in all of North America, that's the loss, and that's inherent in its own terms. In a greater sense, the loss is the humanity of this society. This is simply another cardinal signifier of that. Not just inhuman, but anti-human. It's unspeakable in the sense that I can't come up with words to describe it."

"Our ancestors are buried all over here," says Roberta Blackgoat. "We don't know how thick the bones are that we're sitting on. That's the main thing I have in my mind. These are our roots. The prayers and the holy songs are still here with us. We're carrying on the law of our great great great ancestors. We're carrying on how the prayer has to be carried on. And now they want to take it away from us. Why?" c 1999 Boulder Weekly. All Rights Reserved