Navajo Times, 2/29/2000

Dineh HPL residents call on McCain for accountability, support

By WENDY R. YOUNG, Navajo Times Correspondent

TUCSON, February 26, 2000 — On Tuesday, the same day that
Senator John McCain won the primary in Arizona, four Dineh HPL residents
held a press conference outside his Tucson office calling for accountability
and support.
McCain has been intimately involved with the land dispute in his
roles as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and as
Arizona Senator
In October 1996, he pushed Public Law 104-301 through Congress,
making the Accommodation Agreement a requirement for Dineh residents.
Non-signers would be evicted. This law passed five months before the Federal
Court fairness hearings were held to determine whether the AA was a just
settlement to the Manybeads lawsuit.
Passage of the law defied the concerns of numerous Dineh HPL
residents documented in letters sent to McCain, the Senate Committee on
Indian Affairs, and other Congressional members – letters which never
received any response other than being reported in the federal record
Sen. McCain, as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian
Affairs, sent a letter to Flagstaff Attorney Lee Brooke Phillips dated April
10, 1996. The letter indicates that he put his faith in Phillips who
represented the Dineh HPL residents in the Manybeads lawsuit negotiations
and two pro-AA residents who appeared before Congress on March 28, 1996
rather than in the many letters he received from people from the land during
the months thereafter.
In the letter, he and Senator Kyl raised some of the questions
that other concerned residents had asserted continuously. Phillips’ position
remained, after the AA was ratified and later signed by the majority
homesites, that the AA was the best possible compromise that could be
agreed upon among the Dineh HPL residents and the Hopi Tribal government
after years of negotiation
On Tuesday, Dineh HPL resident and AA signer Kee Watchman said
of McCain, “It’s kind of difficult for me to understand where he stands
because the way I have seen they have passed the Senator Bill 1973 [PL
104-301] when we been trying to ask them not to pass. But he did it. Never
came back to sit down with the Dineh people. He done it, so to me it seems
like they have no respect for my Indigenous Peoples of the Black Mesa area.
They have no respect for the right of the Indigenous Peoples and the Human
Rights
Over the years, Dineh HPL residents and other Dineh people have
asked how this veteran could be forcing so many Dineh veterans and their
families off this land they fought for or even gave their lives for. Many
Dineh people served in this country’s defense with McCain
“I want the land that I live on back and that way the future
generations will have a place to go to,” said Genevieve Greyeyes about her
current residency in the Coal Mine Chapter area of the Dineh HPL. “He
[McCain] has to listen. I want to get my land back in a way that I live
peacefully,” she said through translator and Dineh HPL resident Tom Bedoni
Her husband, Huck Greyeyes, described how life has been full of
turmoil since the Relocation Act passed in 1974, and how living under Hopi
and BIA jurisdiction has been devastating for his extended family and the
Dineh HPL communities
“We even get harassed for bringing firewood to warm our homes,”
Greyeyes said.
In the late 1970s and 80s, life with the Relocation Act under
Hopi and BIA jurisdiction became so unbearable that all of the Greyeyes’
close relatives and neighbors left. Huck Greyeyes described, “Their way of
life is destroyed. Your Alter, your spiritual prayer is taken away from
you,” and their relocated relatives are left heart-broken
“We been suffering all this time. Even our homes were bulldozed.
It bothered us physically and mentally,” Huck Greyeyes said, referring in
part to an historical and significant multi-generation ceremonial hogan that
the Office of Hopi Lands disassembled in April 1996 against the Greyeyes’
wishes.
The Hopi Tribe later told the elderly couple that the structure
had become Hopi Tribal property when Genevieve Greyeyes’ recently deceased
brother had relocated from it. Genevieve’s father had built the hogan for
her parents’ wedding, and it was in use for a ceremony at the time Hopi
officials took it down.
After signing the Accommodation Agreement in March 1997, the
Greyeyes could legally build on their ancestral homesite for the first time
since the 1974 Congressional Act, and just this year they finally had the
resources they needed to re-construct the hogan
“Before we lived under Hopi government, we had livestock,
cattle, sheep,” but now their permit numbers are not enough to support the
family, Huck Greyeyes said. “These days Hopi Tribal Council and United
States government, they’re telling us no.
Kee Watchman remembers when officials from the U.S., Hopi and
Navajo governments and attorneys visited residents in their homes just
before the 1997 deadline to sign. “Good things was being offering to these
people. Up to this day, everything has been changed,” he explained
first-hand.
“People have been told ‘You need to cut down your animals,’
instead of to increase their animals,” as residents had been led to believe
at informational meetings before the AA deadline to sign, Watchman said


Copyright © 1999-2000, The Navajo Times

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