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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 17, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Big Coal is behind Big Mountain evictions

By Mahtowin

Under heavy coercion from big energy interests, the federal government and its puppet Hopi Tribal Council, most of the more than 250 Dineh (Navajo) households living at Big Mountain, Ariz., have now signed an Accommodation Agreement with the Hopi tribal council.

On March 31, the Dineh (Navajo) resisters at Big Mountain faced a final deadline to sign the Accommodation Agreement. Residents who signed the Agreement will be given leases on the land for 75 years.

Residents who refused to sign by the deadline will be served federal eviction notices. This will allow the Hopi tribal council and federal marshals to begin removing people from their land within 90 days.

As a result, many who did not want to sign the leases did so because they feared being evicted from their own lands.

Many Dineh believe the Accommodation Agreement is unfair, restrictive and intolerant of their traditional practices and way of life. Restrictive provisions in the leases force residents into a "catch-22" situation. The Hopi tribal council can terminate the leases simply by accusing the Dineh of violating its terms-which include restrictions on burying relatives, gathering green boughs and herbs, rebuilding ceremonial structures, and increasing the size of livestock herds.

Many complaints were lodged about the intense pressure that was brought to bear against the traditional Dineh, many of them elderly, who held out at Big Mountain. On March 31 demonstrations supporting the people of Big Mountain were held in Flagstaff, Ariz., San Francisco and New York.

Louise Benally, one of the women who refused to sign the agreement, said in a news release: "Big Mountain is sacred land to us. More than 12,000 of our people have already been pushed off the land.

"This isn't about Hopi versus Navajo, it's about corporate greed and the struggle to protect our ancestral lands from mining operations that pillage the earth and destroy our communities."

Big Mountain = Big Coal

For 23 years, the traditional Dineh residents of Big Mountain have heroically fought efforts to relocate them from their traditional lands.

Working through the federal government and puppet tribal governments, big business has been trying to clear the land. They want to get at the biggest unexplored coal lode in the continental United States.

Big Mountain is part of northern Arizona's Black Mesa. Mining giant Peabody Western Coal Co. currently operates the biggest coal mine in the world in Black Mesa. Without question, mining interests are behind the drive to evict the remaining 2,000 Dineh residents from Big Mountain.

The Hopi and Navajo tribes once jointly controlled this mineral-rich region just southeast of the Grand Canyon. That all changed in 1974 when the U.S. government partitioned the land, forcing more than 12,000 Dineh to relocate.

Many of those relocated were shipped off to Sanders, Ariz. These "New Lands," as the Dineh call them, are the site of the second biggest nuclear spill in U.S. history. The land has also been poisoned by uranium mining.

The Dineh were never informed of the potential hazards; some had even built homes out of the uranium tailings. Many families that relocated have been torn apart by alcoholism, abuse, suicide and other consequences of being torn from their traditional way of life and lands.

Who's really in charge here?

The mainstream media have presented the problem at Big Mountain as an "age-old conflict between the Navajo and Hopi."

This is far from true. Hopi and Dineh people lived peacefully side by side for thousands of years.

The current conflict stems from a 1974 federal law partitioning the former Hopi-Navajo Joint Use Area. The land was divided based on coal deposits, not on the Indigenous residents' traditional land-use patterns.

The mainstream media are rubbing their hands together at the sight of one Native nation evicting another. One such story begins: "Forced expulsions have played a major role in American Indian history. This time, one Indian tribe is poised to begin evictions of members of another next week because of a land dispute in Arizona."

This is a stomach-turning effort to take the focus off the role of the federal government and energy corporations. To blame the Native nations themselves is to intentionally ignore how the energy companies and Washington worked hand in glove in the 1920s and 1930s to create tribal councils, which were meant to act as front groups to facilitate the approval of mining leases on Hopi and Navajo lands.

Mining revenues now account for half the Navajo tribal Council's budget and 80 percent of the Hopi Tribal Council's.

The federal government created and completely controls the notoriously corrupt tribal council systems through agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is part of the Department of the Interior. The tribal councils do not represent traditional Hopi or Dineh people.

The entire tribal government system established by Washington is merely a neocolonial facade to mask the centuries-old U.S. war against Indigenous people.

U.S.-sponsored tribal councils are like the wizard of Oz. Once you set aside the smoke and mirrors meant to give the appearance of a sovereign entity, all you find behind the curtain is Uncle Sam's leering face, corporate dollars bulging from his pockets.

Further, in this latest round at Big Mountain, the federal government offered the Hopi tribal council an out-and-out bribe of $50 million-to be paid if the council could get the majority of the Dineh households to sign the lease agreements.

At least 20 households have refused to sign the leases. It remains to be seen when eviction efforts against them will begin.

But the struggle at Big Mountain is not over yet. Many traditional residents-including those who signed the leases-will continue to resist and will not voluntarily leave the lands of their ancestors.

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