The Next Eco-Warriors (7 page)

PHOTO BY CY WAGONER

ON THE NAVAJO RESERVATION in the 1980s, where I grew up, there were few lights in the dark night, other than the moon and the stars. Sitting outside and looking up upon the stars, my dad would tell me Diné winter stories of how First Woman and Coyote put the starlights in the sky. First Woman arranged with purpose and intention, while Coyote simply threw them randomly into the sky, the stars in the end creating their own pattern. The story reminds us of this world's many dualities and the struggle to balance them. Growing up, I would look out from the top of our small mountain and imagine the creation stories playing out across the dazzling points of starlight. On a moonless night, the sky became an endless dark canvas, and the brightly shining stars painted beautiful glittering images of men and women, animals and insects, and the worlds before this one. Where the dim shadow of the night sky touches the dark line of Black Mesa—the black mountain our home faces—that perfect set of intentional and random sparkling lights met a harsh glare of red and white illumination. These were the incandescent red and white bulbs flashing, unchanging atop the northern end of Black Mesa. The only artificial lights as far as I could see were these, the mine lights, Peabody Coal Company's mine lights to be exact. Still there today, they illuminate the coal mine's aircraft landing strip, then slide down Black Mesa's side, revealing the coal conveyor belt that strips our land of life and fuels madness elsewhere.

As a kid on our rural piece of “the rez” in northeastern Arizona, I used to think Peabody's lights were pretty amazing, glaring across a landscape of various shapes and shades of darkness. When you don't grow up surrounded by artificial lights and neon signs, these small flashy effects can really capture your attention. In my mind, it meant that one day we would have all the big city luxuries. Only later did I understand the beauty and power our culture carries regardless of these electric lights. Only later did I realize the full cost we pay for these flashing lights.

Since 1970, Peabody Western Coal Company, a subsidiary of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world, has operated two coal strip mines on Black Mesa. Together these mines made the Black Mesa operation one of the largest coal strip-mining operations in the United States. Coinciding with the mine opening, the United States Congress drew a line in the sand, deciding
for
the Navajo and Hopi people that our land would be put to use. To make way for mining, twelve thousand Navajos and sixty Hopis were forced to leave their homelands or forfeit rights. Navajo and Hopi communities who had long been good neighbors were pitted against one another for control of the “resources.” My family was lucky to have just missed the line of forced relocation. But many families on and around Black Mesa were not as lucky.

Then, as if we owed the coal company more, for decades Peabody took our region's sole source of drinking water, mixed it with coal, and sent it hundreds of miles away, into what is known as coal slurry transport. It remains the only slurry transport existing in the United States, as it is such a shameful use of water. With bulldozers and chains, Peabody stripped the land of pine and juniper trees, sagebrush and wildflowers. For decades they have disturbed the red healing clay,
Chii
, and turned the earth gray. To power the Southwest, Peabody has dynamited hundreds of feet into Black Mesa for coal and water. Our land will never be the same again.

I grew up into a land that has been torn apart physically, culturally, spiritually, and socially by America's need for energy. Black Mesa is a female: Her head is Navajo Mountain, north of my home. Her body is the mesa stretching across the northeastern corner of Arizona. The coal is her liver—that organ that filters poisons from our bodies. And the water is her lifeblood;
this is what we are taught. Peabody has ripped her apart. As Diné people, we become a reflection of her, our mother—the Earth.

But in the 1960s, my people were promised riches in exchange for coal, jobs and electricity in exchange for our water. From an early age, I learned that coal meant jobs. Just about everyone I knew growing up had at least one relative that worked at the coal mine, yet I didn't see the promised riches. Like so many others, I grew up hauling water in fifty-five-gallon barrels over many miles to provide for my family's weekly water needs. With vehicles always breaking down from endless driving on dirt roads and bills that needed to be paid, the extreme lack of good-paying jobs is still a constant threat.

I'm thirty-two years old now, and most home sites still have no electricity or running water, no lights or refrigerators, just newer ice chests and fresh flashlight batteries. Navajo communities are disappearing as mothers and fathers are forced to leave their children with aging grandparents in order to find work in the cities off the reservation, while families living around the mine suffer from all sorts of respiratory illnesses.

So where are all the riches we were promised, the lights and income? The answer: Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles—we have been sending it by train and slurry line for decades. Today's reality on the reservation is a stark reminder of the fairly recent colonization of our lands, always for mineral wealth. We were forced into concentration camps by U.S. Cavalry in the 1860s so the U.S. leader Kit Carson could search for gold freely. In the 1920s when coal, oil, and gas were found beneath our lands, the Diné were persuaded to set up a Navajo government system reflecting the United States' so that mineral leases could be signed “legally.”

As I learned more about our history, connecting the dots with what I saw growing up, I knew it needed to be stopped and that I needed to act. There became no way to look at Black Mesa and be awed by Peabody's lights; seeing those flashing lights every night only made me angry and frustrated.

Going to college seemed the best way to learn how to fight these injustices and better understand them. But after several years and only one semester shy of graduating from Stanford University, I left it all behind to come home again and fight.

_________

I REMEMBER SUMMER 2002 LIKE IT WAS yesterday. Driving to the public hearing took ages, as if we were actually driving through the ancient millennia that formed the red rocks and painted dunes surrounding us. The destination that day was Tuba City, Arizona—one of the “big cities” of the reservation. The little grocery store sign reads
YA'AT'EEH
(Navajo for
welcome
). There were two traffic lights, a strip of four-lane road lined by gas stations and fast-food joints, a trading post, a hotel for tourists, and federal institutions aplenty.

Some people might see a third world community, right at the intersection of poverty and the potential for modern prosperity. I see “home.” I didn't grow up here, but it's fairly similar throughout the reservation—communities struggling, under the weight of McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, to find a balance between being Diné and being “American.”

That day, my car, full of friends and organizers, was heading to the Tuba City Chapter House—the local government office, which is essentially a large meeting room with linoleum floors and florescent lights. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC ), which regulates California utility companies, was holding a public hearing. The bigwigs had come out—commissioners and their staffers—and we rarely had visitors like that. This was a major meeting; they came to decide whether to give over a billion public dollars to keep one of Southern California's main power plants, the Mohave Generating Station, open. The plant provided power to the big cities of the Southwest. It is fed coal and water solely through a 275-mile (442.6-kilometer) long steel straw stretching all the way from my home, the Black Mesa region of the Navajo Nation.

Pulling up into the dirt parking lot of the Chapter House, we passed each other some of the stickers that read S
HUT
D
OWN
M
OHAVE!
in bold letters, slapping them on to our jackets and shirts. At first, nobody got out of the
car; silently, we stared at the gate entrance. At the entrance stood a group of older Navajo men wearing Peabody Western Coal hats.
This is gonna be ugly
, I thought. I recognized a couple of the men as my friends' parents and clan relatives. We must have been pooling our strength silently in the car, because collectively we felt the push to keep going. Luckily, the worst we got as we squeezed through the gate's entrance were harsh stares and murmurs in Navajo. These were their jobs after all that we were threatening.

We arrived before the meeting began, but the list to speak had already filled three pages. I put my name down and my heart beat fast. When I looked at the list, it was filled with the names of Navajo employees of Peabody Coal Company.
Where were all the community people we had urged to come?
I wondered. We had spent days driving throughout the Black Mesa region, letting people know about this meeting, offering to pay peoples' gas expenses, telling them what's at stake. Many said they would come. My heart sank.

Inside the Chapter House, all the folding chairs were set out and filled; still more people stood against the walls. At the front of the room sat the commissioners, a professionally dressed group of older white men and women. The rest of the room was mostly Navajo with a few non-Navajo supporters mixed in. There were Navajo Peabody people, government people, grandmas and grandpas, and us—the only young people. We called ourselves the Black Mesa Water Coalition, a year-old group of which I was a leading member.

It turned out that more people opposed to the mine did show up, but in good Native time—late. We spent most of the morning listening to Peabody employees tell the CPUC commissioners why they had to keep the power plant open: jobs, college for their kids, a chance at the “American Dream.” The same story you hear from many continuously oppressed communities. I grew more and more irritated hearing it.

But when I heard my name called as one of the next on the list to speak, my palms began sweating and I wondered if it was normal for my heart to beat this fast. I waited against the wall below the podium for the speaker before me to complete his three minutes. The mother of a good friend of mine from high school had just finished speaking. She worked for the mine, and she spoke about needing the coal income for her kids' education.

Walking down from the podium, she made a beeline for me. I braced myself; this was going to be painful. I hadn't seen her since my high school graduation, and now to see her here like this with my sticker blaring on my chest. I prepared for the worst. But she didn't attack me with mean words; instead she came over, leaned in close to me, and whispered, “Enei, think about what you are doing, think about what you are saying, think about my son, his college education—don't take that away from him,” and then she left me.

Her words jabbed me harder than any insults could have. For a few seconds, I blinked back tears. Was I about to ruin people's lives? And then I got mad. Why did we have to be beholden to this exploiting corporation just to go to college? Peabody has already destroyed so much here. It was not me that was doing the harm.

When I found myself at the podium looking down at my notes, all I could see were indecipherable amounts of scribbles. I took a deep breath and just told the decision makers my truth from my heart:

That CPUC hearing went on late into the night. This was just the beginning for us, young people picking up the reins of community organizing from so many older and exhausted community leaders. And it was this meeting that put many of us face-to-face with our first challengers—our own people, friends, family members, and relatives. If I had been alone at that meeting, I might not have had the courage to step forward and confront it all. But we were together, and so we kept right on going. For the next few years we organized just about anything we could think of—spiritual runs, protests, community meetings and trainings, nonviolent direct actions. With no money in our pockets but with passion in our hearts and bullhorns in our hands, we worked to elevate our community's voices.