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 DinŽ as 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 DinŽ 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, Arnold 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, DinŽ 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, pi–on pine. The
scent of sage rising with the heat from baking mud. Where a pi–on jay
alighting on a yucca breathes sermons. The heart of DinŽ. 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 DinŽ, the people, also known as the Navajos. In the DinŽ
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 DinŽ Gods. To the DinŽ, 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 DinŽ elder 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 DinŽ 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 DinŽ 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 DinŽ had 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 DinŽ.

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 DinŽ, 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 DinŽ 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. DinŽ 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
DinŽ 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 DinŽ at
Big Mountain. Before dying in late 1998, Nippashi spent his life praying
for the DinŽ 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?"

© 1999 Boulder Weekly. All Rights Reserved.

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