The Shame Continues at Big Mountain

In 1979, Katherine Smith, a Navajo grandmother, confronted tribal police and Bureau of Indian Affairs crews with a shotgun, firing a blast over their heads. This was the first shot in a resistance to the forced relocation of 12,000 Navajo from their traditional lands on Big Mountain in northern Arizona. “The federal government took me to prison because I wouldn’t relocate,” Smith says, “but I will go to prison again if they try to take me from my land.” And that fate is precisely what Smith and 200 holdout Navajo families are facing this spring, climax to the most savage forced relocation of Americans since the internment of the Japanese Americans in World War II.

The whole affair has been played in the press as a century-old land dispute between the Navajo and the Hopi. The truth is somewhat different and has to do with coal. The coal lies in the richest 100 square miles in North America. The ardent desire of mining and oil companies to extract it was thwarted by Navajo refusal to lease the land and the fact that the Hopi had no central government.

Enter John Boyden, an attorney, who ingratiated himself with the Hopi and soon concocted a “Hopi tribal council” consisting of pro-mining leaders from only three of the 12 Hopi villages.

In 1962, Boyden got his clients to file a suit demanding that the federal government concede that the Hopi had equal rights to the coal deposits under Navajo-controlled lands on Black Mesa. The suit prevailed. In 1966, Boyden signed leases to Peabody Coal covering 100 square miles of coal reserves. The Navajo Tribal Council, not wanting to be left out, signed similar deals. It emerged that Boyden also was a hired agent of Peabody Coal.

To consolidate the mineral wealth, Boyden sought to partition the “joint use lands” occupied by the Hopi and Navajo. To further this aim, he needed Congress to pass a law realigning the reservation boundaries. He hired a public relations firm to concoct a scenario of perennial internecine Hopi-Navajo enmity, buttressing the theme that the only way to protect the Indians from themselves was to divide the land between the tribes.

In 1974, Congress passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, dividing 1.8 million acres between the two tribes. Any member of either tribe on the wrong side of the line was forced to move. There were 100 Hopi on what was now Navajo terrain, and 10,000 Navajo on lands now officially Hopi. Coincidentally, the Hopi side contained most of the known coal reserves. The bill’s language was written by Boyden.

As an inducement for the Navajo to relocate speedily, the law passed by Congress required an immediate 90% reduction in livestock grazing on the lands now assigned to the Hopi. Hopi tribal police were assigned the right to impound Navajo livestock. Navajo families also were offered $5,000 to abandon their small adobe shelters and move to government-built tract housing.

Many of the relocated Navajo were ill-equipped to make a go of things in an urban economy. The $5,000 soon went and many lost their homes. These Navajo now suffer far higher rates of unemployment, alcoholism and suicide than other Navajos.

Today, 200 Navajo families still are clinging to their ancestral homes. In 1993, with winter approaching, Hopi rangers and BIA agents began confiscating the Navajos’ firewood, along with their axes and saws. They demolished all new construction projects. That November, the BIA began daily raids, rounding up all the free-range Navajo livestock they could find, mostly sheep. The agency increased the fee to recover their animals tenfold.

With the Navajo holdouts still displaying unbending resistance, the Clinton administration propelled a law through Congress in November 1996 requiring that the Navajo families agree to the mediated settlement by April 1 of this year.

Now the remaining Navajo families must either move to wretched circumstances in Tuba City or Sanders or sign a lease with terms that translate as enforced relocation by another route. Under the 75-year lease the families must limit their activities to within 13 acres of their existing home sites and confine their livestock to the designated areas. Three citations and they lose their homes. The Navajo cannot sublease their homes or operate any businesses from them. They must renounce any claim on sacred sites in the area and are prohibited from burying their dead on the land, a stipulation that strikes at the very core of Navajo custom.

The Navajo families fight on notwithstanding. “Our way has no word for relocation,” says Roberta Blackgoat, a Navajo leader of the resistance. It means the same as death. To go away from your home and never come back.