Before a screening of In the Light of Reverence at Arizona State University earlier this year, Cal Seciwa (Zuni), the
director of ASU’s American Indian Institute, unfurled a canvas banner
across a table (see photo below). It was a prototype for a billboard
protesting the Salt River Project’s planned 18,000-acre coal stripmine,
which threatens to dry up a desert lake in New Mexico the Zuni believe
is the home of Salt Mother, an important protector spirit.
“We had signed a contract with Clear Channel, which owns virtually all
of the billboards in Phoenix,” said Seciwa, “and we mailed it to them
with a check, but the company’s president called and said they couldn’t
put this message on a billboard. So now freedom of speech has joined
freedom of religion as a casualty of our struggle.”
Cal and I stretched the banner out and taped it to the wall of the
screening room at KAET, the local public television station that was
hosting our film screening as part of an ASU conference on “Ethics When
Cultures Clash.” The station manager walked by, looked quizzically at
the banner, stopped, and a deep frown slowly appeared.
“Is there a problem?” Cal asked.
“Yeah, I think there might be,” replied the station manager.
“Kind of proves the point of this conference, doesn’t it?” said Cal.
After a long pause, the station manager said, “You’re right. Leave it up.”
While liberty hangs by a few strips of duct tape in public television
stations and universities across America, in the corporate-government
world, it is all but dead.
The
Zuni battle is one of dozens across the United States in which new
permits issued by the Bush administration threaten culturally
significant places, or where protections previously granted are being
reversed. In many cases, administration officials hired straight from
the energy industry are approving new energy extraction projects, and
overturning established federal policies intended to protect sacred
places on public lands. The Interior Department permit approving the
new Salt River Project coal mine near Zuni Salt Lake was championed by
Steven Griles, a former mining industry lobbyist, and signed by Rebecca
Watson, a long-time advocate for mining interests.
Another troubling case is Indian Pass, in the California desert, where
the Clinton administration completed a six-year public process by
denying a permit for Glamis Gold’s cyanide heap-leach open-pit mine in
an area vital to the Quechan people. A network of trails and ceremonial
sites there has been used by the Quechan for 10,000 years. Soon after
being sworn into office, Interior Secretary Gale Norton re-opened the
permit process for the gold mine, and though DOI and Glamis officials
met numerous times before Norton’s decision was announced, members of
the Quechan Nation read about it in the newspaper. They were not
consulted as required by law.
An incensed Senator Barbara Boxer (D, CA) triggered an investigation by
DOI’s Inspector General when she wrote, “Secretary Norton worked
previously for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which advocates
for mining concerns; Deputy Secretary Steven Griles worked previously
for the National Mining Association; Counsel to the Secretary Ann Klee
worked for the American Mining Congress and is married to a partner in
the law firm (Crowell and Moring) that represents Glamis Gold Ltd.;
Assistant Secretary of Land and Minerals Management Rebecca Watson
worked for the law firm that represents Glamis Gold Ltd. and
represented at least one gold mining company; and Timothy McCrum, a
member of Secretary Norton’s transition team, represents Glamis Gold
Ltd. and did at the time he participated on the transition team.” On
March 12, Inspector General Earl Devaney concluded “no undue influence
or conflict of interest affected the decision-making process.” The
report documented 30 contacts between the Interior Secretary’s office
and Glamis, including nine face-to-face meetings, and none with the
Quechan.
Meanwhile, at northern California’s Medicine Lake, a vision questing
area of great importance to the Pit River Tribe, Bush administration
officials in the BLM and Forest Service in November 2002 reversed
minimal protections provided just two years earlier, and approved a
geothermal power plant within one mile of the lake. Calpine Corp. is
drilling exploratory wells, and a humming industrial labyrinth of roads
and transmission towers, lit 24 hours a day, is being planned for this
remote mountainous area east of Mount Shasta. The leases were initially
signed and then renewed for 10 years without any
government-to-government consultation, and no environmental impact
statement was prepared. “Enron and others manipulated an energy crisis
and Governor Davis panicked,” says Pit River activist Mickey Gemmill.
“Now, California taxpayer money is subsidizing the desecration of a
place of prayer and renewal—and the electricity will go out of
state.”
At Black Mesa, in northern Arizona, Peabody Energy publicly stated its
intention to stop pumping 3.3 million gallons of groundwater every day
for its 273-mile-long coal slurry pipeline, but then Peabody applied to
the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) for a permit to expand the coal
stripmine and increase pumping by 32 percent. As word spread through
Hopi and Navajo villages and opposition mounted, OSM cancelled public
hearings on the proposal. Then, in an attempt to secure an alternative
water source, Senator Jon Kyl (R, AZ) tried to attach a rider to an
appropriations bill that would have authorized a new pump station on
the Colorado River inside Grand Canyon National Park, and a pipeline up
Jackass Canyon to Black Mesa to replace the groundwater that is being
pumped into the slurryline. A firestorm of protest stopped the rider,
but it will likely be revived in some form.
Native activists are fighting hard. The Zuni Tribe is planning a breach
of trust lawsuit against DOI to require a new EIS that will adequately
study the complex hydrology of the area, and recently formed a Zuni
Salt Lake Coalition. The Quechan Tribe is fighting to pass legislation
in California to require backfilling and reclamation of open pit mines,
as well as another state bill that would protect sacred places. The Pit
River Tribe and environmental allies have filed suit to challenge the
validity of the leases around Medicine Lake. The grassroots Hopi
organization Black Mesa Trust has sued DOI and also gained standing
with the California Public Utilities Commission in an effort to shut
down the air-polluting Mohave Generating Station, which consumes the
coal and water from Black Mesa.
A new Sacred Lands Protection Coalition has linked many native
communities and tribal leaders in a broader resistance movement, and
the coalition will soon expand to include environmental and religious
groups. These efforts led to a series of Congressional Oversight
Hearings last year on threats to sacred lands. Members of the coalition
are also pressuring Rep. Nick Rahall (D, WV) to rewrite and strengthen
his Native American Sacred Lands Act through closer consultation with
tribal leaders and religious practitioners.
Other battles rage on, from the Missouri River, where Army Corps of
Engineers dams and reservoirs erode cultural sites and burials, to Mt.
Graham, where two of seven planned telescopes have been built on the
sacred peak, to the Arctic Refuge, where caribou calving grounds are
threatened by oil exploration, to Bear Butte, where a proposed rifle
range threatens to destroy the silence needed for vision quests, prayer
ceremonies and sweat lodges. The attack on sacred places goes on.
New from the Sacred Land Film Project
Our DVD edition of In the Light of Reverence includes seven additional scenes, an extended interview with Lakota
scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., a new short film on Zuni Salt Lake and
Quechan Indian Pass, and two interviews with the filmmakers. Our new
48-page Teacher’s Guide contains 23 lesson plans in Social Studies, the Environment and Language Arts. You can order In the Light of Reverence on VHS or DVD from Bullfrog Films, (800) 543-3764, www.bullfrogfilms.com.
The Teacher’s Guide comes free to schools that purchase the film, or
you can download it at no charge at www.sacredland.org/teach.html. A
compilation of essays, The Sacred Land Reader, is available free online at www.sacredland.org/reader.html.
What you can do: To help support these grassroots struggles, we have created a Sacred
Land Defense Team. You can join by visiting our Web site at www.sacredland.org; by emailing your contact info to slfp@igc.org; or by mail: Sacred Land Film Project, P.O. Box C-151, La Honda, CA 94020.
Christopher (Toby) McLeod directs Earth Island’s Sacred Land Film
Project. He produced the award-winning PBS film on Native American
sacred places, In the Light of Reverence (2001).
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