White Man's Justice

I		n 1882, U.S. President Chester Arthur outlined a rectangle on a map, confining the Hopi people to an arbitrary box, and halving their original land. In the century since, the Hopi have seen even those lands reduced to a small island in the middle of that box. The final outcome of
a century’s patient work has been that the Navajo have been given nearly HALF of the 1882 Reservation outright, and, until the 36 remaining dissenters on Hopi land either sign a lease agreement mostly simply asking that the Navajo who don’t want to leave abide by Hopi law on Hopi land, the BIA continues to hold jurisdiction in nearly half of the lands supposedly “returned” to the Hopi – Navajo squatters not included.

“Let’s clear this up,” says Alph Secakuku, author of FOLLOWING THE SUN AND MOON - THE HOPI KACHINA TRADITION, from a couch in his shop on the First Mesa, “The Hopi and the Navajo have NEVER had good relations.” Within the past two hundred years, the Navajo have stolen Hopi crops, raped Hopi women, stolen Hopi livestock, and murdered Hopi children. The Hopi understandably call the Navajo the “tesavu” – “head-bangers” or “beaters” is one translation. There are others with different meanings.

During our monthly TOP e-mail review of articles, staffer Wanda Ballantine wrote of June’s point/counterpoint articles on the Navajo-Hopi land dispute: “Well, I've read them both and bow to those more knowledgeable than I about the situation - they both sound reasonable.”

And that’s exactly the case: The Big Mountain/Sovereign Dineh Nation position SOUNDS reasonable on the face of it. The sad fact is that no one has bothered, in the thousands of pages written by “concerned” activists and scholars, to ask the Hopi side of this issue. Only the Navajo/SDN position is presented in the media, or on the Internet. To refute their position requires a visit to the disputed lands, to witness, with one’s own eyes, the actual sites and homesites in question. I have seen these things with my own eyes.

Two days before we arrived, the May 29, 1997 NAVAJO TIMES said this: “[Navajo Nation President Albert] Hale and other tribal officials have been urging tribal ranchers to give their lands a three or four year break so that vegetation has a chance to grow.” The Navajo Partitioned Lands (NPL) near Big Mountain are so overgrazed that one can tell which side of the Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL)/NPL fence one is on just by looking at the grass. On the Hopi side, the grass is fine.

Big Mountain is neither a mountain, nor is it big, which should be a tipoff. It is a modest rise in the desert. The chaparral is much like that of Santa Fe: Pi�on, sagebrush, snake bush, rice grass, squirrel-tail grass, sweet grass, and an occasional clump of prickly pear cactus. These hardy plants are separated on the range by naked sand and bentonitic clay.

Big Mountain has been turned into a wasteland by the “Traditional Navajo” of a thousand SDN press releases. The only plants left growing are the tough pi�on trees. The sagebrush has been hacked down wholesale to cover the dismantled [Lakota Sioux] “sun dance” lodge, and thrown into a nearby arroyo, an invitation to wildfire. The outhouse has been removed, but the pit remains.

The kitchen foundation remains. A huge hole filled with trash sits on the denuded hillside. Automobile tracks scar nearly every inch of the gentle rise called “Big Mountain.” The tenuous topsoil has blown away, leaving only a reddish sand lacking even the “foam” of bacterial colonies which make other plant life possible. Nothing will grow on Big Mountain for decades, and yet the “Big Mountain” group is responsible. There are no rabbit or prairie dog holes on Big Mountain. I could find not so much as an ant hill.

This is practicing sacred tradition? This is the treatment of “sacred land”? The breadth of the lie is nearly staggering, yet I have witnessed what I report with my own eyes.

For many years, SDN agitators have taken great pains to point out that “Traditional Hopi Elders” say that there is no land dispute, and that the Navajo and the Hopi live in peace. It was crucial to this story that we find out who these “traditional Hopi elders” were, what it meant to be a “traditional” Hopi, and how the “traditionals” felt about the land dispute.

Gary Tso, a Hopi ex-marine preparing to complete his degree at the University of Arizona was the last and youngest to tell us the same thing. “To be a traditional Hopi,” he said, “you have to practice the religion, and you have to plant corn.” You must practice important portions of the religion in the kivas with your kin and your clan.

Of the “traditional” Hopi who claim to all passing media that there is no land dispute: “No one sees them in the kivas,” says Donnita Lomatska, Administrative Secretary to the Community Services Administrator for Hotevilla Community on the Third Mesa. Donnita points out, as have several before her, there are only about 8,000 Hopi living on the Three mesas at the center of the Reservation. “Everyone knows everyone else.” She is the niece of Martin Gaswesoma and granddaughter of Dan Evehama.

It was explained to us again and again, by waitresses, by administrators, by surveyors, by housewives and by elders that no one clan has the entire Hopi religion. It is meant this way. You have to practice the religion – that is, you must be in the kivas, which are the “secret” aspect of the religion not allowed to tourists and visitors. Farrell Secakuku, the Chairman of the Tribal Council, “is the first fully initiated adult Hopi to serve as Chairman. He holds a first priesthood in the Snake Clan,” says Alph Secakuku, himself a priest. It is impossibly rude, however, to pass judgment on another religion’s doctrinal differences – which is precisely what SDN activists have been urging their European and (white) American activist allies to do for some time now.

The Hopi cross-section that we spoke to were universally skeptical about self- styled “elders” who traveled to the United Nations, or around the world claiming to speak for the Hopi. No one person has the entire religion, remember? we were told. It seems ironic that SDN press releases have bewailed for more than two decades (under a variety of organizational names) that the “traditional Navajo” were not being allowed to “practice their religion” and yet we Bahanas (Whites) have had no compunction about interfering in Hopi religion.

And, worse, says Milland Lomakema, Sr., the world-renowned Hopi artist, Executive Director of the Hopi Arts & Crafts Guild and member of the Cultural Center’s Museum Board, “We have been denied access to our holy sites, but you haven’t seen any press releases about it.”

Hopi religion and Hopi land are intimately and inextricably bound together. 104-year-old “Elder of Elders” [as Bahana author Thomas Mails describes him in Hotevilla and The Hopi Survival Kit] in Dan Evehama told us when asked if the Navajo have stolen Hopi land: “Yes!” in unequivocal terms. The Hopi would like their land back from the Navajo.

When we interviewed her, Lomitska sat in front of a Hotevilla press release asking concerned Bahanas NOT to contribute to “Touch The Earth Foundation, Inc.” and “Don’t Waste Arizona, Inc.” which solicit contributions for Hotevilla, saying that they need blankets and mittens. “Not a penny ever reaches town,” she said. “Look around you. Do we look like we don’t have blankets?” Solar cell arrays provide electricity for many Third Mesa homes. Native Sun, Inc., a Hopi company on Third Mesa, is one of THE cutting-edge companies in solar-cell technology.

[On page 383 of the trade paperback edition of The Hopi Survival Kit, (Penguin/Arkana, 1997, 383 pp.) Thomas Mails says that you can "help" Hotvela (sic) by sending money to Don't Waste Arizona, Inc."]

The Tribal Chairman is a Hopi elder. Wayne Taylor, the Tribal Vice-Chairman, is also a fully-initiated Hopi. His brother, Arnold Taylor, Sr., is Manager of the Department of Natural Resources.

Arnold Taylor’s job and his religion are the land. And, in a dry country, he admits that every time he goes to Phoenix, the waste of "all these fountains bothers me." This is a man who loves the land. I am reminded of my late father, a Forest Service engineer to whom every forest was a cathedral.

“My job,” says Taylor, “is to preserve the land for the generations to come.” Taylor would like the land back. During the past winter, Taylor’s “Hopi Rangers” – so often depicted in press releases and, subsequently, the mainstream media as jack-booted thugs – were delivering firewood, food and clothing to Navajo on the Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL) who had been isolated by snows and the all-but-impossible morass that the clay roads of the reservation turn into when water is applied.

A “traditional Hopi Elder” then, in this debate, has generally been anyone who would agree with the Dineh Alliance/Sovereign Dineh Nation. Anyone else is called a “puppet” of Peabody Coal and the Federal Government. This is not merely untrue, but it is a monstrous slander.

Most of the country of the HPL is four-wheel-drive roads. We spent a day driving those roads, and saw many NPL and HPL Navajo homesites. I saw “traditional” Navajo double-wides with “traditional” Navajo electricity in nearly all cases, “traditional” Navajo air-conditioning in many cases, and, too often, “traditional” Navajo SelectTV satellite dishes. (Supposedly, none of the sites have been "improved" or "repaired" since the 1966 Bennett Freeze, but I can't believe that no roof has sprung a leak in 30 years. The Navajo living on HPL have never shown much inclination to obey the law in the past quarter century, and one doubts that they have in this matter.)

There were often “traditional” Navajo GMC Jimmys with “traditional” four-wheel drives. I do not know if they had “traditional” Navajo stereos or A/C. I didn’t want to pry. Most had “traditional” Spirit Catchers hanging from their rear-view mirrors, but, Joseph Day, of the Tsakurshovi gift shop points out, “the Spirit Catchers come from another tribe’s tradition.”

An oft-repeated charge is that “traditional Navajos” will be relocated to the nuclear wastelands on the Rio Puerco below Church Falls, New Mexico. We asked Navajo Nation Engineer Marty Thompson, who stated categorically: “I did the tests on those wells and they’re clean. That spill was back in 1979, and the relocation land is a long way downriver from Church Falls.” Indeed, it is 47.1 miles from Church Falls, New Mexico to Sanders, Arizona as the crow flies but more than 70 miles as the Rio Puerco meanders. And, significantly, this is a Navajo, and not a Hopi issue: The Hopi have no say in it.

The Hopi reservation is completely surrounded by an historically hostile tribe: the Navajo
(clicking on the image will take you to the Hopi Tribal Chair's page)

Grants, New Mexico. Hopi katsinas ("kachinas") are widely forged with Navajo sales of "authentic" kachinas around the land-locked Hopi Reservation a long-time source of resentment. Similarly, "Kokopelli" artwork has been arrogated for profit by non-Hopis -- both "native" and white -- throughout the Southwest during the 1990s. (photo: jayne williams � 1997)

The Hopi Tribal Council has declared a 20-year moratorium on all mineral exploration and extraction. Not so much of a shovelful of Hopi earth is being mined in HPL. But on Navajo Partitioned Land (NPL), the stripmine comes right up to the fenceline on one side of the cattle guard. The Peabody mine is fifteen miles from Big Mountain, as the weasel flies, and over twenty by four-wheel-drive dirt roads. Even in Nevada’s famous Ruby mine, it has taken nearly a century for strip-mining to move as much as ten miles over land no one cares about. [But then, "Big Mountain" is wherever (seemingly) the SDN happens to want it when they point their fingers.]

Within 300 yards of the strip mine, on HPL, we saw a dried-up well, the result of Peabody’s usage of the Hopi aquifer to send coal slurry through a pipeline. Arnold Taylor tells us: “Peabody would have us believe that [the very marked drop in the water table] comes from the last ten years of drought. But no sensible person would use that water for industrial purposes when we are so water poor.”

If Taylor is the “puppet” of Peabody Coal Company, we couldn’t see it. Or, as Kim Secakuku, the Tribal Public Relations Officer told us, laughing: “See my strings?”

There is no doubt that governmental and industrial chicanery created the Tribal Council many years ago, but even Donnita Lomatska at Hotevilla (which doesn't bother sending a representative) admits that the current Tribal Council is of, by and for the Hopi People.

There are no McDonalds on the three mesas. There is only one motel, perhaps twenty rooms or less, in the Cultural Center and operated by the Tribe. The Hopi are perhaps the only people in North America who consistently heed speed limit signs. The only “brand name” recognizable is the sweetly dilapidated Texaco station in Polacca, at First Mesa. There are generally only five or ten brands of cigarettes for sale in the store. The gas station carries four brands: Marlboro, Marlboro Lights, Camels, and Salems. There is no need, seemingly, for the absurd quantities of supermarket items common in every store in America: twenty brands of coffee, thirty brands of toilet paper.

We were astonished that for some time, everyone that we spoke to THANKED us for asking. No one, it was explained again and again, ever came to ask the Hopi side of a news story on the dispute.

Dr. Robert G. Breunig, Curator of the Santa Barbara Museum of Anthropology says: “I’ve been coming down here since the early ‘Seventies, and nobody’s told the Hopi side yet. Every story I’ve read in the media has been wildly distorted.” But if you don’t believe him, or me, go and ask the Hopi. They’ve been waiting a quarter of a century for you to ask.

Suggested Reading:	Pages From Hopi History, by Harry C. James, University of Arizona Press, 1974
all readily available	*Hopi*, Suzanne & Jake Page, Abradale Press, 1982