leave their homelands or forfeit rights. Navajo and Hopi communities who had long been good neighbors were pitted against one another for control of the “resources.” My family was lucky to have just missed the line of forced relocation. But many families on and around Black Mesa were not as lucky.
Then, as if we owed the coal company more, for decades Peabody took our region's sole source of drinking water, mixed it with coal, and sent it hundreds of miles away, into what is known as coal slurry transport. It remains the only slurry transport existing in the United States, as it is such a shameful use of water. With bulldozers and chains, Peabody stripped the land of pine and juniper trees, sagebrush and wildflowers. For decades they have disturbed the red healing clay, Chii , and turned the earth gray. To power the Southwest, Peabody has dynamited hundreds of feet into Black Mesa for coal and water. Our land will never be the same again.
I grew up into a land that has been torn apart physically, culturally, spiritually, and socially by America's need for energy. Black Mesa is a female: Her head is Navajo Mountain, north of my home. Her body is the mesa stretching across the northeastern corner of Arizona. The coal is her liver—that organ that filters poisons from our bodies. And the water is her lifeblood;this is what we are taught. Peabody has ripped her apart. As Diné people, we become a reflection of her, our mother—the Earth.
But in the 1960s, my people were promised riches in exchange for coal, jobs and electricity in exchange for our water. From an early age, I learned that coal meant jobs. Just about everyone I knew growing up had at least one relative that worked at the coal mine, yet I didn't see the promised riches. Like so many others, I grew up hauling water in fifty-five-gallon barrels over many miles to provide for my family's weekly water needs. With vehicles always breaking down from endless driving on dirt roads and bills that needed to be paid, the extreme lack of good-paying jobs is still a constant threat.
I'm thirty-two years old now, and most home sites still have no electricity or running water, no lights or refrigerators, just newer ice chests and fresh flashlight batteries. Navajo communities are disappearing as mothers and fathers are forced to leave their children with aging grandparents in order to find work in the cities off the reservation, while families living around the mine suffer from all sorts of respiratory illnesses.
So where are all the riches we were promised, the lights and income? The answer: Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles—we have been sending it by train and slurry line for decades. Today's reality on the reservation is a stark reminder of the fairly recent colonization of our lands, always for mineral wealth. We were forced into concentration camps by U.S. Cavalry in the 1860s so the U.S. leader Kit Carson could search for gold freely. In the 1920s when coal, oil, and gas were found beneath our lands, the Diné were persuaded to set up a Navajo government system reflecting the United States' so that mineral leases could be signed “legally.”
Today's reality on the reservation is a stark reminder of the fairly recent colonization of our lands, always for mineral wealth .
As I learned more about our history, connecting the dots with what I saw growing up, I knew it needed to be stopped and that I needed to act. There became no way to look at Black Mesa and be awed by Peabody's lights; seeing those flashing lights every night only made me angry and frustrated.
Going to college seemed the best way to learn how to fight these injustices and better understand them. But after several years and only one semester shy of graduating from Stanford University, I left it all behind to come home again and fight.
_________
I REMEMBER SUMMER 2002 LIKE IT WAS yesterday. Driving to the public hearing took ages, as if we were actually driving through the ancient millennia
Then, as if we owed the coal company more, for decades Peabody took our region's sole source of drinking water, mixed it with coal, and sent it hundreds of miles away, into what is known as coal slurry transport. It remains the only slurry transport existing in the United States, as it is such a shameful use of water. With bulldozers and chains, Peabody stripped the land of pine and juniper trees, sagebrush and wildflowers. For decades they have disturbed the red healing clay, Chii , and turned the earth gray. To power the Southwest, Peabody has dynamited hundreds of feet into Black Mesa for coal and water. Our land will never be the same again.
I grew up into a land that has been torn apart physically, culturally, spiritually, and socially by America's need for energy. Black Mesa is a female: Her head is Navajo Mountain, north of my home. Her body is the mesa stretching across the northeastern corner of Arizona. The coal is her liver—that organ that filters poisons from our bodies. And the water is her lifeblood;this is what we are taught. Peabody has ripped her apart. As Diné people, we become a reflection of her, our mother—the Earth.
But in the 1960s, my people were promised riches in exchange for coal, jobs and electricity in exchange for our water. From an early age, I learned that coal meant jobs. Just about everyone I knew growing up had at least one relative that worked at the coal mine, yet I didn't see the promised riches. Like so many others, I grew up hauling water in fifty-five-gallon barrels over many miles to provide for my family's weekly water needs. With vehicles always breaking down from endless driving on dirt roads and bills that needed to be paid, the extreme lack of good-paying jobs is still a constant threat.
I'm thirty-two years old now, and most home sites still have no electricity or running water, no lights or refrigerators, just newer ice chests and fresh flashlight batteries. Navajo communities are disappearing as mothers and fathers are forced to leave their children with aging grandparents in order to find work in the cities off the reservation, while families living around the mine suffer from all sorts of respiratory illnesses.
So where are all the riches we were promised, the lights and income? The answer: Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles—we have been sending it by train and slurry line for decades. Today's reality on the reservation is a stark reminder of the fairly recent colonization of our lands, always for mineral wealth. We were forced into concentration camps by U.S. Cavalry in the 1860s so the U.S. leader Kit Carson could search for gold freely. In the 1920s when coal, oil, and gas were found beneath our lands, the Diné were persuaded to set up a Navajo government system reflecting the United States' so that mineral leases could be signed “legally.”
Today's reality on the reservation is a stark reminder of the fairly recent colonization of our lands, always for mineral wealth .
As I learned more about our history, connecting the dots with what I saw growing up, I knew it needed to be stopped and that I needed to act. There became no way to look at Black Mesa and be awed by Peabody's lights; seeing those flashing lights every night only made me angry and frustrated.
Going to college seemed the best way to learn how to fight these injustices and better understand them. But after several years and only one semester shy of graduating from Stanford University, I left it all behind to come home again and fight.
_________
I REMEMBER SUMMER 2002 LIKE IT WAS yesterday. Driving to the public hearing took ages, as if we were actually driving through the ancient millennia
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