>January 12, 2000
>Carol Snyder Halberstadt
>
A NATIONAL SACRIFICE OF U.S. CITIZENS--ECOCIDE & ETHNOCIDE ON BLACK MESA:
NO ONE IS SAFE

>While President Clinton designated today more unpopulated land in the vicinity
>of the Grand Canyon as protected wilderness areas--and rightly so--no one
>seems to
>be paying much attention to the plight of the original Americans living
>just 60
>or so miles away. These U.S. citizens, traditional and deeply religious, have
>been the victims of the unending war on the Indians still going on in this
>country.
>
>Since it was discovered that just below the surface of the sacred land
>they have
>been living on for hundreds of years and many generations were billions of
>dollars worth of coal, they have been designated for national sacrifice.
>
>With their bodies, these Navajo Indians, the Dine', are literally holding the
>Earth on Black Mesa from total destruction. Only their presence stands between
>the monstrous engines of "commerce"--which are stripmining the land and
>draining
>the water aquifer--and the survival of sacred place. The survival of home.
>From
>the air more than 100 square miles of the mesa looks like the aftermath of
>a firestorm, or a
>bombing.
>
>Imagine bulldozers in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, pushing down the Dome of
>the Rock, destroying the Al Aqsa Mosque, reducing the Western Wall to a
>pile of
>rubble. Imagine them at the gates of the Vatican, chewing their way
>through the
>Holy Door opened by the Pope on New Year's Eve. Imagine them at the Church of
>the Holy Sepulchre, or in Bethlehem. Imagine your drinking water being used to
>transport coal, while you turn your taps and filth comes out. Imagine the land
>drying up, and the tree roots dying, and no water coming out at all...
>
>Yet, these monstrous bulldozers--the largest land machines in the
>world--do the
>equivalent on Black Mesa, destroying holy sites, sacred land, medicinal plants
>and herbs, the homes of animals and people. Peabody Coal pumps out the
>irreplaceable
>drinking water aquifer under the mesa--source of water and life for Hopi and
>Dine' both. Then the stripmined coal is mixed with the water in order to
>move it via a
>272-mile long pipeline to the Mojave generating plant in Laughlin, Nevada.
>There the exhausted water is thrown away and the coal is burned to drive
>the air
>conditioners of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Five billion gallons a year. While
>the Bureau of Indian Affairs steals the subsistence livestock--sheep, donkeys,
>goats, horses--from the Dine', because they say the land is too "dry" for
>them to
>graze...
>
>How did Peabody Coal become exempt from EPA regulations to build this "slurry"
>line--the only one in the United States?
>
>Surrounded by pristine, "protected" national parks and wilderness areas, the
>Dine' and Black Mesa have been designated for "national sacrifice." To be
>sacrificed for what?
>For coal to air condition Las Vegas; for uranium to build more nuclear
>weapons. The Dine' and the Hopi were living here long before the Europeans
>arrived. They built no empires, conquered no one, but lived in reasonable and
>sane balance on the Earth. Imperfect. Outside the mainstream. Human.
>
>If it can happen to these Americans, it can happen to anyone...
>

-- Carol S. Halberstadt, Migrations (carol@migrations.com)
Native American art and crafts
http://www.migrations.com

"A generation goes, and a generation comes, and the earth abides forever."
(Ecclesiastes 1:4)

"...then weave for us a garment of brightness,
that we may walk fittingly where birds sing..."

(from a Tewa prayer)

"Lift up your eyes to the heavens and look on the earth beneath,
for the heavens will vanish like smoke and the earth wear away
like a garment..."
(Isaiah 51:6)