Bitter Water: Diné Oral Histories of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute

Epilogue

she is standing outside of her traditional navajo hogan in Thin rock Mesa, Arizona, wearing ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, a dark-colored velveteen blouse, and a handkerchief she ties into a scarf the way most navajo woman do. she is standing beside a small white cardboard poster taped to a wooden Bureau of indian Affairs survey stick; it is a protest sign she carried in an important protest against forced relocation. After an interview with a journalist, she’s probably smiling at the simplicity of her statement written in bold black magic marker: “The Creator is the only one who will relocate me.” The black-and-white image of roberta Blackgoat will be imprinted on my mind and consciousness for the rest of my life. she carried the sign in a protest outside the White house in Washington, D.C., a moment immortalized in the John running photo featured on the cover of emily Benedek’s The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute. in the uncropped version of this photograph , Mae Tso carries the United states flag upside down as a sign of distress. The land is now quiet. it is still vast. But, it is empty. “for Pauline Whitesinger and the U.s. and hopi Government, it’s a war of attrition now,” writes sean reily in the Los Angeles Times. The media, it seems, is the only source of comfort and is the resource that can offer some measure of accountability for state, federal, tribal, and other entities.1 The Black Mesa indigenous support Web site encourages and acknowledges that it is important for advocates, leaders, government agencies, and supporters to “humble themselves and learn from the clarity of the elders.” on the navajo and hopi Partitioned Lands it cannot be put any more simply: today, families continue to refuse to be forced from their homes. Because of the relocation law, whole communities of navajo families continue to face imminent exclusion from their lands where they’ve lived all of their lives. Within a 1,500-square-mile piece of land in northeastern Arizona, human rights have become a concern reaching to the level of the United nations. Today, the idea of protest encompasses a huge cross section of navajo society. Today, with a few keystrokes on a BlackBerry, mainstream society has the ability to address issues such as saving the san francisco Peaks, a mountain near flagstaff considered sacred by many southwest native American tribes. The land spoken of here, a significant portion of the four Corners area, has long been considered a “national sacrifice area.” on a huge portion of the perimeter of this area, traditional navajo families continue to live on land now considered hopi epilogue 88 epilogue Partitioned Lands by the U.s. government, and under the book-length provisions of the relocation law non-hopi residents can be excluded and relocated from the land before, and, or on January 1, 2075. A part of this collection of oral traditions became caricatures of stories about the navajo nation Government, and they become the beloved Coyote’s antics, who is now a Washington, D.C., lawyer helping to pass and implement the relocation law. now, late in the year 2010, families living within the hopi Partitioned Lands community and families affected by relocation have organized into nonprofit organizations such as The forgotten People, who have filed a lawsuit against the navajo hopi Land Commission seeking a full accounting of monies that were to be used to help families affected by relocation. A series of three articles appeared in the August 2010 issues of the Gallup Independent documenting The Forgotten People v. the Navajo Hopi Land Commission.2 The voices from the translations in the present volume continue to address significant issues in navajo life today. nonprofit advocacy groups like Black Mesa Water Coalition, To nizhoni Ani (forest Lake speaks), Black Mesa Trust, save san francisco Peaks, and the forgotten ones (Bennett freeze Community) all have a history of activism, and continue to address, question, and protest the legacy of Peabody Western Coal Company. Powerful investigative work such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning article “The Black Mesa syndrome: indian Lands, Black Gold” by Judith nies, and panels armed with persuasive evidence pointed straight to the fact that the so-called navajo-hopi Land Dispute arose because many navajo families, unfortunately, sat on billions of tons of low-sulfur coal. Peabody Western Coal Company has been in operation for over...