Ruth Benally, Dineh Elder, Big Mountain resident, matriach and activist. Published with permission from the Benally family.
In a remote part of the Navajo reservation lays an area known to the locals as Big Mountain. Its residents, who refer to themselves as Dineh, have called that land home long before Europeans occupied North America. The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the U.S and also sits next door to Hopi land, home to some of the oldest settlements that are still occupied and considered sacred to the people.
Big Mountain has dirt roads, no electricity and no running water. The roads are incredibly hard to navigate without a local guide and nearly impossible to pass in the winter. The families that live here still speak Dineh and practice their traditional culture.
Right now, Senator John McCain and government agencies are enforcing a process known as the Relocation Act. Efforts to remove the Dineh from their ancestral land and mine coal and uranium have been going on for fifty years at least. Some families have managed to resist this diabolical plan and are holding on tenaciously.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) use some pretty undignified tactics to try to evict families including impounding the Dineh's livestock upon which they rely to live on. This was happening fifteen years ago when I was doing humanitarian support work on Big Mountain, and it is still happening right now.
On April 5, 2016, reports rapidly spread on the Internet that the Hopi Rangers had impounded cows that belonged to Dineh families and were busy organizing their transport to auction. Under the Rangers care, it was being said on the Emergency on HPL-BIA War Against Navajo Grandmothers Facebook page that none of the animals were being fed or watered, and calves were being separated from their mothers. According to the Facebook page, the Hopi Rangers took sixty-six cows and then asked a staggering $400 per cow to return them to their families. For people living in poverty, this amount is impossible to meet.
The excuse for the impoundments is that the cows are negatively impacting the rangeland. However, how just sixty-six cows do this, I am not sure. We are not talking about massive herds of animals here like the cattle ranchers who are regularly allowed to chew up public land. We are talking small herds of up to 100 animals, mainly sheep but some cows. Having witnessed the brutality of these roundups and the injuries sustained by the animals, I can attest to the lack of food and water the cows and horses receive at the hands of careless rangers.
This issue is complicated by multiple levels of deceit and many years of exploitation. I will not attempt to explain the entire sordid story here, but it is a national disgrace that still, the Indigenous people's of North America face daily humanitarian abuses, poverty, and oppression that is shocking. Orion Magazine did a good job of explaining the Dineh's situation, as did Vice Magazine more recently.
Government agencies have exploited a story made up many years ago by people who were keen to extract the coal and uranium from the land and created a so-called land dispute between the Navajo and Hopi peoples. The elders of both tribes say there is no land dispute, but what is going on is an attempt to remove people to make it easier for companies like Peabody Coal to access and exploit the natural resources.
As we speak, the families caught in the middle of this mess face daily harassment and threats. When their livestock was taken on April 5, swift negotiations ensued to retrieve the animals, but the families are being forced to pay over $4,000 to get them back. So, people's animals are stolen by a government agency and then they are told to pay over $400 a head to get them back? Where is the fairness in that?
The entire situation is a humanitarian crisis that has long been ignored. Last year, the AP reported that the relocation had cost the federal government about $500 million more than its initial budget of $41 million. The land they are forcing families to relocate to in Sanders, AZ is downstream from Church Rock, the site of the worst uranium spill ever recorded in the U.S, which happened in 1979. The area was never adequately cleaned up.
The story is getting really old--find natural resources that you can sell, forcibly remove the indigenous population, move them somewhere toxic and make millions.
How do members of Congress like Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Ken Calvert of California, who are actively playing a role in this relocation, sleep at night?
Thankfully, this part of the story ends well with the return of the cattle to the families but not without loss, extremely challenging negotiations and a whopping $4,000 fee.
We must stop this endless, horrific treatment and persecution of the Indigenous tribal people's of this continent and indeed all Indigenous peoples. Let us all work to rectify the wrongs capitalism, and white patriarchal colonization has done to them. Enough is enough.
For more info and to support the Dineh click here.
Correction: This post previously identified Rep. Ken Calvert as a U.S. senator from California. Calvert is a U.S. Representative for California's 42nd congressional district.