UNITED STATES: New Problems For Native Americans In Arizona

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Sep 20 1997 (IPS) - A small group of Dineh (Navajo) native Americans in Arizona is caught in the middle of a squeeze by federal government agents and a rival Hopi community to force them to quit an area where they have lived for centuries.

At the heart of the problem is a “relocation” agreement approved by Congress late last year which leases some 400,000 hectares of land to the Dineh for 75 years – provided the obey the Hopi tribal governmet. In March, the heads of households of most of the 3,000 strong community signed agreements which means they will move into new settlements in a Hopi area while still having the leasehold on their old tribal lands around Big Mountain.

About 200 Dineh who refused to sign say they are now being harassed for refusing to leave their lands. The complain that agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have begun to rigidly enforce quotas on livestock owned by the resisters.

Sheep form the backbone of their economy but the agreement restricts each extended family to owning 25 animals despite the fact that many families have as many as 30 individual members.

“People are afraid that this is only the first step. Soon, they believe, the rangers will soon come around to tell us that we have to leave,” says Grace Yellowhammer, one of those who wants to stay.

“There have been quotas for livestock since 1974. There is nothing new about our agents checking to make sure that there are no violations,” says Bob Caroline, a BIA official in Keams Valley, Arizona, who helps oversee the Hopi territories. Other federal officials, however, confirm that they will ask those who did not sign the relocation agreement to leave their present homes by the year 2000 unless they sign the agreement.

“On July 1, we began to visit all the families that have not signed the agreement to tell them that they have three years to leave and collect relocation benefits. They will be able to move to the new houses that we will build for them,” says Paul Tessler, spokesman for the federal Relocation Commission in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Tessler refused to speculate on what means the government would use to evict anybody who continues to resist relocation in the year 2000.

Roberta Blackgoat, the chairwoman of the Sovereign Dineh Nation, says that those “who continue to resist are political and religious prisoners.”

Members of the Dineh tribe say that this agreement is morally repungant. “It especially saddens me to see the elderly people who have lived there all their lives — and to see them faced with the decision to sign or not to sign,” Jackson Gibson, a Dineh from the Smith Lake community in New Mexico, said in a newspaper interview. “In all these years, they could have come up with a better solution. Not this. Not forcing people from their native land.”

“Everyone here talks about ‘the American Dream’, but we as indigenous peoplecontinue to only have nightmares,” adds Yellowhammer, spokesman for the Traditional Dineh Elders.

A further element in the tangled web of interests is the British- owned Peabody coal mining company that operates near the disputed area. In a previous relocation project involving the Navajo and Hopi, the company agreed to pay some 41 million dollars annually in royalties to the tribes for operating two mines that produce about 1.5 million tonnes of coal a year.

Tribal leaders, however, deny that the current problem has anything to do with the coal mining.

“The relocation of the Navajo is not because of Peabody’s mining activities but is due solely to the efforts by the Hopi government to claim Navajo homelands,” Navajo tribal president Peterson Zah wrote in a letter to the company two years ago.

The Hopi agree. “They’re saying we want to get it so we can mine it, and that’s just not true. The tribe has set aside the Big Mountain area as a wilderness area,” says Clayton Honyumptewa of the Hopi tribe’s land management office.

Peabody’s coal-mining operations lie 20 kms from the homes of the Dineh sheep herders ir homes who are concerned that, despiote a current drought, the company continues to draw down 5.4 billion litres of water a year from the only water source in the desert area for its mining operations.

Company officials deny their operations affect local residents, noting that “scientists estimate that less than one- tenth of 1 percent of the water stored in the Navajo aquifer will be used, and they believe that all of the water will be replenished naturally 10 years after mining concludes.”

The Dineh or Navajos of Arizona have faced hardships in being forcibly moved in the past. In 1864, thousands of Dineh died when U.S. government agents forced them to relocate to Fort Sumner, New Mexico so that miners could search for gold and other precious metals on their lands, in what is now known as the “Long March.”

Those who survived managed to return to their lands four years later when the gold petered out and the current dispute began in 1882 when the government created a one million hectare reserve for the Hopis on land already occupied by the Navajo.

The Dineh were again evicted from their lands in 1974 when Peabody, now owned by the British multinational Hanson , arrived to dig for coal. But the families who currently live on Big Mountain refused to join the 10,000 others who left their lands.

Today the only positive note that the Dineh have reported is the fact that the accommodatin agreement lifts a 20 year old construction, allowing families to upgrade their homes without having to seek permission from the federal government or the Hopi tribe. Each family gets a parcel of 1.2 hectares of land with up to four hectares for farming.