With a Thanksgiving holiday release of “Moana,” Disney’s Polynesian cartoon extravaganza can simultaneously expand its lucrative enterprise of exploiting marginalized, indigenous peoples (Pocahontas, Lilo and Stitch, Frozen) while perpetuating American amnesia.
A note about Thanksgiving: Early feasts of giving thanks celebrated some notable atrocities committed against Native peoples, including the 1637 massacre of 700 Pequot Indians by white Christians and the 1676 butchering and beheading of Wampanoag Sachem Metacom, whose severed head was then displayed on a pike for 25 years at Plymouth. Ultimately it was President Abraham Lincoln who declared it a national holiday in 1863, less than a year after he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota men, which remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Given the pre-Halloween rollout of the Maui skin suit so that children would unwittingly promote “Moana” like human billboards, I doubt the choice of a release date was any less thought out. Some of the most experienced and powerful business minds in the world own and operate Disney — they’re not the type to leave a hundred-something million-dollar investment to chance.
Opening dates, promotion, and merchandising are carefully planned well in advance to achieve maximum financial gain. The skin suit and Thanksgiving release shouldn’t be thought of as unintended cultural faux pas — these were calculated risks. To give the benefit of the doubt to a $50-billion corporate predator waiting to vacuum up a few billion more off of our culture(s) is to agree with the offense.
Most indigenous peoples under U.S. control, certainly Hawaiians, have yet to carve out a meaningful space to represent ourselves, what we value and our reality in mass media and film largely because America’s master narrative relies on our subjugation. The truth of what matters to us undermines the colonizer’s imagineered innocence. The narrative of Hawai’i as “the Aloha State” is a perfect example — every non-Maoli living and vacationing here is able to do so because of the theft of our nationhood and the complete appropriation and subversion of our land and culture.
While there are certainly other oppressed groups, our oppressions aren’t any more equal than our successes. Hawaiian world—indigenous world is all buss up, and our narratives are convoluted. But the settler world isn’t, and neither is its story.
Our hopes, dreams and struggles are inconvenient to what Disney has chosen to produce about us. Worse yet, we’re expected to shut up and enjoy the ride everyone’s taking on our back. Yes, some of our own people, grateful for any acknowledgment, don’t recognize an insult or culture theft when they see it. Others will happily join in with the massive, commodifying monstrosity of “Moana” and buy Moana gear and computer games. (I heard that the Ala Moana Disney Store is already well-stocked.)
One Maori writer, who likes the Maui skin suit, said it’s like dressing up as Santa Claus. He’s not far off, seeing as how we’re the ones doing all the giving. He reminded me of something funny that Haunani-Kay Trask, one of our beloved sovereignty leaders, once said to me: “Yah, the haole, they stole everything we gave them.”
Being culturally poached and misrepresented isn’t flattering — it’s a threat. The historical fact is that colonization in the Pacific, and everywhere for that matter, has had catastrophic consequences for indigenous peoples in every conceivable way. And native collaboration, while highly problematic, doesn’t legitimize hijacking or pimping our knowledge, heritage and identity.
Having said that, not knowing who the members are of the Oceanic Story Trust, a group that was hand picked by Disney to shepherd the cultural content and merchandising, we can’t ask these Pacific Mouseketeers what the capital F they were thinking when they helped Disney strip mine our culture(s) for the sole purpose of making a profit.
Although bad publicity in the form of complaints that the skin suit is racist motivated Disney to take it off the shelf, they did it with a condescending, “We regret that the Maui costume has offended some,” version of an apology. I suppose that’s the best we can expect from an entity whose bottom line is protecting its investment.
But Hawaiians and other indigenous Pacific Islanders are the ones who need to think hard about what something of this magnitude will mean. Given that it’s shaping up to become this region’s cultural heist of the century (so far), we may want to try to make native sense of the intent and the processes at work here, especially us Hawaiians.
I say especially Hawaiians because so much is being done to us politically, materially, culturally and spiritually these past few years. From the mass desecration project of the Thirty Meter Telescope to the Obama administration’s determination to force feed us federal recognition against our will, ours is a never-ending struggle to simply survive in our homeland as who we are.
The cultural imperialism of Disney mirrors the military imperialism of the United States and the other industries it uses to erase our indigenous belonging: tourism and real estate. Disney’s Aulani Resort, and now its “Moana,” secures its place in the economically enforced ethnocide and culturcide that is steadily replacing us with settlers.
If the promotional trailer is anything like the film, Disney’s about to get even richer by exploiting and mocking us in deeply genealogical and spiritual ways—turning Tutu Pele into an ugly lava monster and Maui into a ridiculous, clowning sidekick. The noted psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer Frantz Fanon was so on the mark when he said, “… Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”
Disney has reduced us and our world to a cartoon at a time when our political future is hanging in the balance, when Hawaiians absolutely need to be heard and taken seriously, not distracted by or silenced for entertainment. Disney is trying to do to our culture and identity what America is doing to our land and nationhood: we are being carved up, sold off, and drained of our mana.
Since the Maui skin suit debacle, Disney’s 21st century iteration of the white supremacist ideology that informed people like British Major General Horatio Gordon Robley, a proud collector of Maori heads, and that guy who tried to sell a Hawaiian kupuna skull on E-Bay, I’ve been thinking in metaphors. I’m looking at what’s happening right now, but looking, too, at the horizon, at what’s coming toward us, imagining what might follow, hoping that whatever it is, Hawaiians and all Pacific Islanders can face it together instead of letting it further divide us.
I have no doubt that Disney’s “Moana” will materially and psychologically aid and abet the colonial project of indigenous erasure and removal. It’s a cultural tsunami and it will impact the entire region. However, unlike natural disasters, this man-made disaster will play out over many months and years and will continue for as long as Disney can suck the marrow from our spiritual and cultural bones.
Anne Keala Kelly is the award winning filmmaker of “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i,” and a journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation and Indian Country Today, and on the Pacifica Network and Al Jazeera.
Survival International has learned that the Peruvian government is developing a “Master Plan” for a new national park that could pave the way for large-scale oil exploration. This will threaten the lives and lands of several uncontacted tribes.
The area, known in Spanish as the Sierra del Divisor [“Watershed Mountains”], is part of the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier, the region straddling the Peru-Brazil border that is home to the largest concentration of uncontacted tribal peoples on the planet.
A new plan for the area currently being drafted by Peru’s national parks agency SERNANP could enable oil companies to enter the park. It has further been reported that the new government wants to change the law to make it even easier to open up national parks to oil and gas operations.
The Sierra del Divisor National Park was created in 2015 to protect the region. The new plan could wipe out the uncontacted Indians, not all of whom have been recognized by the authorities.
A contacted Matsés woman said: “Oil will destroy the place where our rivers are born. What will happen to the fish? What will the animals drink?”
In 2016, Canadian oil company Pacific E&P cancelled a contract to explore for oil on nearby contacted Matsés territory, in the face of stiff opposition from the tribe.
However, it still has a contract to explore in the Watershed Mountains.
In 2012, it conducted the first phase of exploration, which Survival International and contacted Matsés campaigned against.
The more vulnerable uncontacted members of the tribe are still at risk, and not in a position to consent or object to the project. The environment that they have depended on and managed for millennia could be destroyed.
The oil exploration process uses thousands of underground explosions along hundreds of tracks cut into the forest to determine the location of oil deposits.
With a new Peruvian government in place, Survival and the indigenous organizations AIDESEP, ORPIO and ORAU are urging the government to think again.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “It’s in all our interests to fight for the land rights of uncontacted tribes, because evidence proves that tribal territories are the best barrier to deforestation. Survival is doing everything we can to secure their land for them.”
Resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock has gained unprecedented coverage. At the center of the story is a thousand-plus miles long pipeline that would transport some 500,000 barrels of oil per day from North Dakota to Illinois. The pipeline is backed by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. And It faces a huge line of Indigenous nations who’ve come together to say “No.”
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe opposes the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, because it crosses sacred grounds within the boundaries of the reservation and threatens water sources in the larger region of the Missouri River.
There was no prior consultation or authorization for the pipeline. In fact, the construction of the pipeline is a blatant violation of treaty rights. The territorial and water rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe are protected under the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851) and the Sioux Nation Treaty at Fort Laramie (1868)—as well as subsequent treaties.
Indigenous nations across the USA mobilized to protect Standing Rock. There are thousands of people now standing their grounds, including over a hundred Nations from across the Continent. Tara Houska, from the Ojibwa Nation, says this gathering of tribal nations at Standing Rock is unprecedented since Wounded Knee in 1973.
#NoDAPL Peaceful Prayer Demonstration led by the International Indigenous Youth Council at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation on Sept 25, 2016. Photo: Indigenous Environmental Network
Though it’s making less headlines now, the ongoing pipeline resistance has faced the same brand of repression that other megaprojects face in Guatemala, Peru and elsewhere around the world: with violence and impunity. Most recently, over 20 water defenders were arrested on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to trespassing. Earlier this month, pipeline guards unleashed attack dogs (biting at least 6 people), punched and pepper-sprayed Native American protesters.
Such attacks rarely make it to the media, and when they do the media often ends up feeling some of the legal pressures used against native nations. Democracy Now released video footage of dogs with blood on their teeth, which went viral. As a result, Amy Goodman was charged for criminal trespass. An arrest warrant was issued under the header “North Dakota versus Amy Goodman.” The defense of Native territory was combined with claims that “journalism is not a crime.”
Waves of support emerged everywhere. A coalition of more than 1,200 archeologists, museum directors, and historians from institutions like the Smithsonian and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries denounced the deliberate destruction of Standing Rock Sioux ancestral burial sites. In Washington DC, hundreds gathered outside President Obama’s final White House Tribal Nations Conference in a rally opposing the North Dakota Pipeline.
Unprecedented mobilization led to unprecedented politics. On September 10, the US federal government temporarily stopped the project. A statement released by three federal agencies said the case “highlighted the need for a serious discussion” about nationwide reforms “with respect to considering tribes’ views on these types of infrastructure projects.”
Dave Archambault, Standing Rock Sioux Chairman, took the case to the United Nations. He denounced the destruction of oil companies and the Sioux determination to protect water and land for unborn generations. The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, responded by calling on the United States to halt the construction of the pipeline saying it poses a significant risk to drinking water and sacred sites.
“I urge the United States Government to undertake a thorough review of its compliance with international standards regarding the obligation to consult with indigenous peoples and obtain their free and informed consent,” the expert said. “The statutory framework should be amended to include provisions to that effect and it is important that the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Advisory Council on Historic Preservation participate in the review of legislation.”
Many more standing against pipelines
Standing Rock has become emblematic of a much broader battle against predatory development. The invasion of Indigenous territory without prior consultation is unfortunately all too common. The disregard of state treaties and environmental regulations is not an exception, but the norm.
Across the Americas, there are hundreds of nations resisting megaprojects on their lands like Standing Rock. Many of these struggles are taking place now in North America. People know that Native Americans protested the Keystone XL pipeline in Oklahoma. But there are many more pipelines that receive little or no media attention.
In Canada, the Energy East Pipeline would carry 1.1 million barrels of crude per day from Saskatchewan to Ontario and on to Saint John, New Brunswick. The pipeline will secure crude exports to the more profitable markets of Europe, India, China and the U.S. But it threatens the lands of more than 30 First Nations and the drinking water of more than five million Canadians.
Nancy Morrison, 85, of Onigaming and Daryl “Hutchy” Redsky Jr., 7, of Shoal Lake 40 stand together at Kenora’s second Energy East pipeline information session.
There is the Northern Gateway Pipeline, which Canada’s Federal Government conditionally approved in June 2014 without prior consultation. The Yinka Dene Alliance First Nations refused the pipeline permissions to enter its territories. There are eight First Nations, four environmental groups and one union now challenging the pipeline in court. Last June, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the project.
The Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation are continuing to resist the Pacific Trail natural gas pipeline in British Colombia. Coast Salish Peoples on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border are opposing Kinder Morgan’s proposed TransMountain pipeline project. In Minnesota, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians are fighting against a set of Enbridge pipelines.
There are many other pipeline struggles around the world, including in Peru, where the Wampis are cleaning up oil spills on their own; and Ecuador, where urban youth and ecologists have joined Indigenous communities in defending the Amazon from further oil drilling in the Yasuni.
What is at stake is Indigenous territory coupled with the greater need for healthy land and clean water for posterity. Resisting pipelines is to defend nature from the tentacles of extractive industries that continue to place corporate interests ahead of human rights and needs even as the climate crisis pulls us to the point of no return. Standing Rock is about Indigenous self-determination as much as it is about restoring relations of reciprocity between humans and nature. Without respect to Indigenous nations there will be no reversing of climate change.
The legal precedent of Bagua
Peru may offer inspiration to redefine rights of extraction–Peruvian courts just absolved 52 Indigenous men and women in the well-known case of #Bagua.
Also known as “Baguazo,” the case refers to the 2009 massacre in the Amazon. Hundreds of people from the Awajún and Wampis nations blocked a road in the area called Curva del Diablo (Bagua, Amazonas) to contest oil drilling without prior consultation on their territory. Several weeks of Indigenous resistance led to a powerful standoff with former-Peruvian President Alan Garcia responding with a militarized crackdown. The military opened fire on protesters on the ground and from helicopters in what survivors described as a “rain of bullets.” At least 32 people were killed, including 12 police officers.
Peruvian forces open fire on the Awajun and Wampis. Photo: unknown
The government tried to cover the massacre by claiming that Indigenous protesters had attacked the police, who reacted in self-defense. Yet autopsies showed that the police were killed by gunfire. The Indigenous protesters were only armed with traditional weapons—they had no firearms of any kind. Nonetheless, 52 peoples were charged with homicide and instigating rebellion in what became the largest trial in Peruvian history. Bagua’s indigenous resistance for water and land is told in the award-winning documentary “When Two Worlds Collide.”
Seven years later, the Superior Court of Justice of Amazonas (Peru) absolved the 52 accused on the basis of Indigenous autonomy over territory. The court determined that Indigenous roadblocks were a “reasonable decision- necessary and adequate- as well as proportional” to defend nature and the “physical and biological integrity of their territory which could have been affected by extractive industries without prior consultation.”
The sentence states that it is “evident that the Indigenous Nations Awajún and Wampis have decided to block circulation on the roads (…) in their legitimate right to peaceful expression based on territorial and organizational autonomy and their jurisdictional authority recognized by the Constitution.”
This marks an important precedent. Peruvian courts showed their autonomy in rejecting fabricated accusations against peaceful Indigenous protesters defending nature. This will hopefully show that the defense of nature, like journalism, is not a crime. Most importantly, the court respected the organizational and territorial autonomy of Indigenous Peoples. Indeed, Indigenous Peoples were right to close the road rather than have their rights violated.
In Bagua as in Standing Rock, Indigenous Peoples have the sovereign authority to block roads to protect territory, water, and the well-being of generations to come. It is time that all courts respect such inalienable rights with the same fervor that Indigenous Peoples defend their territories.
1851 Ft. Laramie Treaty Territory, Cannon Ball, ND—Hundreds of tribal members and allies marched onto active and ongoing construction sites of the Dakota Access Pipeline yesterday. Water protectors brought offerings of prayer, ceremony, drums, and tribal nation flags to construction sites to expose illegal company actions.
Julie Richards, founder of Mothers Against Meth Alliance (M.A.M.A.) based in Pine Ridge, South Dakota stated, “Our ancestors fought for our rights to clean water and to have a good way of life and now we’re fighting to make sure that our daughters and great granddaughters can also have those rights and a better life. All this land is sacred to us—it’s our ancestral homelands and part of the designated treaty territory.”
On September 9, 2016, the United States Army Corps of Engineers issued an order to temporarily cease all work within 20 miles of the Lake Oahe/Missouri River but Dakota Access Pipeline construction crews have used the public’s perception of halted activity to aggressively continue destructive construction within the buffer zone. Each morning hundreds of workers employed to lay and weld pipes, underbore roads, and install valve controls travel by the busloads to dozens of sites, working 6-7 days a week. This activity violates both Federal treaties with the Oceti Sakowin and the Obama Administration’s orders to halt construction.
“We need to be aware that this 20 mile buffer zone is imaginary. They’re still laying pipe—moving it towards us—towards the water we’re protecting. Progress on easements is continuing even though they don’t consider it construction,” stated Kate Thunderbolt, a water protector.
Ms. Thunderbolt went on to emphasize that the action demonstrates how the gathering of over 250 tribes, the largest in decades, represents an ability to escalate the force of peaceful resistance to stop the pipeline.
“We want a unity action to bring all the camps within Oceti Sakown together as one. With our unity we will bring the power of the people to stop this oncoming black snake. From each camp within Oceti Sakown we have the power to come together to show the world we are in unity in stopping their construction of destruction,” added Thunderbolt.
Water protectors have taken it upon themselves to defend their indigenous rights and say if construction continues daily then action to stop construction will also continue daily.
The Red Warrior Camp is preparing for Winter camp. If you’d like to make a donation please visit their website at www.oweakuinternational.org.
Featured image: The San Juan River still turns a muddy orange after a heavy rain, as sediments from the Gold King Mine spill are stirred up from the bottom. Suzette Brewer
SHIPROCK, New Mexico—On Friday, as the Obama administration temporarily halted construction of the Dakota Access pipeline due to concerns of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, another water-related human tragedy continued to unfold within the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico.
A year after the Gold King Mine spill that turned the San Juan River bright orange with millions of gallons of toxic chemicals, Navajo families continue to struggle against the ongoing, catastrophic effects on their water supply that threaten both their health and the economic stability of an already fragile community. On a daily basis, tribal members along the San Juan River say, they are still confronting the environmental, agricultural, health and spiritual fallout from the disaster that has pushed some to the brink of despair and left many others teetering on poverty.
In August 2015, more than three million gallons of toxic acid sludge and heavy metals, including lead, mercury, cadmium, beryllium, arsenic and dozens of other dangerous contaminants, was released into the Animas River at its headwaters in Silverton, Colorado, the largest tributary to the San Juan River.
Home to Shiprock, the most populous community in the Navajo Nation, the San Juan supplies water to nearly 1,500 farms and 1,200 ranches that have been devastated in the wake of what the Navajo Nation contends was “a preventable tragedy.”
The disaster, which resulted from abandoned and poorly maintained mines, has left many tribal members depressed and fearful, saying they don’t trust that the waterways are safe for them, their crops or their livestock. This leaves hundreds of farmers and ranchers without the means to earn a living in one of the poorest regions in the United States.
Meanwhile, Navajo leaders say their communities situated along the river have been “torn apart” over whether to use the water from the San Juan for their irrigation canals, livestock and ceremonial purposes. They have been left stranded, the leaders say, with no clear answers or assurances that the river upon which they have lived and survived for thousands of years will ever be restored.
“It’s hard to even gauge the scale and significance of what the Gold King spill has done to our communities,” Shiprock Chapter president Duane Yazzie told Indian Country Today Media Network. “They began mining in the 1870s, so the net effect in the last 150 years is that these mining companies can inflict any damage they want without any liability whatsoever. Congress, who has the authority to fix this, has been asked to do so for nearly a century, but they won’t. And yet we’re left to clean up the mess.”
Experts agree that there are hundreds of abandoned mines in and around Silverton, Colorado, many of which interconnect and flow into the headwaters of the Animas River—which feeds into the San Juan and directly into the tribe’s irrigation canals. For decades, said Yazzie, it was public knowledge that the mines were being improperly managed with bulwarks that had been poorly conceived and constructed, causing a massive buildup of water pressure within the mines.
When subcontractors went in to do maintenance, the mine blew out a massive cocktail of toxic water that polluted rivers and waterways for dozens of communities downstream. The tribe, however, maintains that its communities are particularly vulnerable and the most at-risk because of their unique cultural, historical, agricultural, geographic and economic dependence on the San Juan River.
Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conceded responsibility, the Navajo Nation says the agency’s response has been “slow and inadequate.” They say the mine owners continue to squabble and engage in finger-pointing and blame-shifting after one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
The ensuing domino effect of the spill has led to a bitter legal imbroglio involving the Navajo Nation, New Mexico, Colorado, the mine owners and the EPA. Subsequently, New Mexico has sued Colorado, for example, and both states have sued the EPA.
The Navajo Nation, however, infuriated by the EPA for its “reckless negligence” and its unwillingness to reimburse the tribe for the more than $2 million incurred in costs related to the catastrophe, sued the agency along with the mine owners in August. In its petition, the tribe alleges that, collectively, “Defendants failed at virtually every step, in most instances advancing their own interests,” and were negligent in their maintenance of mines that were “known and substantial risks.” The EPA did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
The Navajo Nation also named Gold King Mines, Sunnyside Gold, Kinross Gold, Harrison Western, and Environmental Restoration in the lawsuit in seeking redress for the enormous amount of economic, agricultural and cultural damage done to the Navajo communities who rely on the San Juan River for their entire way of life. The 48-page petition alleges that the EPA, its subcontractor and the mine owners “consistently acted improperly, shirked responsibility, and failed to fulfill their moral and legal obligations… [and] must be held accountable for the harms caused to the San Juan River, the Nation, and to the Navajo people.”
The damage to the Navajo communities that depend on the San Juan River, Yazzie concurs, has become incalculable.
“Indians have been expendable for a long time, it doesn’t matter what damage we’re subjected to,” said Yazzie, a hint of anger flashing in his eyes. “Our people are torn [about using the water], but what choice do we have? Just like the people from Flint, Michigan, it’s a disaster, but what choice do they have?
“The Gold King spill is so massive that we don’t even know if it’s possible to clean up.”
“Something Happened to the Water”
Allen and Bertha Etsitty were caught off guard. On August 7, 2015, two full days after the spill, the Etsittys were one their way to Shiprock when they heard over the Navajo radio station, KTNN, that “something had happened to the water.”
The Etsittys, who have been married for nearly 50 years, are retired and live on Social Security. At approximately 19 acres, theirs is one of the largest family farms on the Navajo Reservation—the income from which they use to survive throughout the year.
“We’ve been farming ever since we got married,” said Allen.
“Our parents and grandparents were farmers, too,” Bertha said, as Allen nodded. “We learned to farm from them. The river is sacred for us, it was here ever since we were kids. The river is so important to us, and it provides the food we need.”
Allen and Bertha Etsitty attend a workshop for farmers and ranchers in Shiprock, New Mexico, to get assistance in filing their EPA claims from the Gold King Mine Spill. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)
Later that day, they received a call from Martin Duncan, president of the San Juan Dineh Water Users, informing them that there had been a toxic mine spill in Colorado and that the tribe would be shutting off the main gate to the irrigation canals. That night, the Etsittys, who are in their 70s, set up camp in their fields with their son, Huron, as the three of them worked around the clock to irrigate their crops with what clean water was left before the main gate was closed.
“We flooded the fields,” said Allen. “We did everything we could do.”
Over the next several weeks, the Etsittys loaded their vehicles with 325 gallon water tanks and drove back and forth nearly 100 miles a day to get water from the tanks that had been set up by the tribe in Shiprock. All told, the elderly couple hauled more than 60,000 gallons of water in a desperate attempt to save their crops.
“We only had our regular vehicles, which aren’t built for that kind of thing,” said Allen. “We went through brakes, drums, pads, transmissions, everything, trying to keep our fields watered and save what we could.”
But it was not to be. As time dragged on and the growing season stalled, the Etsittys could only watch as their crops withered away—along with their income at fall harvest.
“Our corn didn’t even make it past the tassels. We only produced about one-quarter of what we normally grow,” Allen said, adjusting the cap on his head. “It hit us hard.”
“Our corn pollen is sacred to us for prayers and offerings,” Bertha said. “It was a loss to our traditional medicine men. Everybody was looking for corn pollen this year, and we didn’t have any.”
Allen says that prior to the disaster, they planted every square inch of their acreage with crops that included several varieties of traditional Navajo corns, squash, watermelons, cantaloupe, Navajo winter melons, and a wide variety of vegetables and fruit trees. This year, they said they did not plant the same volume because of the stigma that is now associated with crops grown with potentially contaminated water. As a result, people are buying their produce elsewhere.
“People used to come from all over the rez to buy our corn,” she said. “But now we can’t grow everything we normally would because people might not buy it, so we just planted what we could.”
Additionally, the Etsittys had to give away their pigs and sell all of their sheep, livestock and horses because they simply did not have the food and water to maintain them.
“This has been stressful for everyone here,” said Bertha, with a tired smile. “This has been very stressful for us, but we do the best we can. This River is so important to us because we need that water. But with this contamination people don’t really trust the water anymore. My grandchildren ask, ‘Grandma, where are the peaches? Where are the squash?’ We don’t have any.”
“The Dark Legacy of Mining”
Since the early 1990s, the residents of Silverton, Colorado, which had based its tourism on its historical ties to the mining industry, had vigorously rejected EPA efforts to list the area as a “Superfund site,” according to the Associated Press. Fearful that such a designation would impact the town’s tourism, Silverton and San Juan County fought federal funding and assistance, even though it would have allowed mitigation for the clean-up of toxic acid leakage and hundreds of other contaminants in what has been described as one of the “worst clusters of toxic mines” in the country.
In the subsequent decades, however, water pressure behind the cheap, poorly constructed bulkheads put in place by the now-defunct mining companies continued to build—until they inevitably burst open last year, creating an unprecedented environmental disaster. In February of this year, after national outcry over the spill, the city of Silverton and San Juan County reversed their position and asked the state of Colorado to declare the area a “disaster zone” to seek federal money for clean up.
On September 7, the EPA officially announced that Silverton will become a Superfund site under the official name of “Bonita Peak Mining District.”
Even so, the tribe continues to suffer. Last month, the Navajo Nation Attorney General’s office hosted a workshop at the Shiprock Chapter House for local farmers and ranchers to assist them with filing their claims with the EPA. One by one, tribal members filed in and quietly took their seats in the small auditorium, hoping to get answers, legal advice—anything that might help them navigate the complicated, bureaucratic maze of a government that they feel has let them down too many times to count. The exhaustion and weariness from a year-long struggle to survive was palpable.
Ethel Branch, the attorney general for the Navajo Nation, had driven up from Window Rock to facilitate the workshop. Dressed in jeans and boots, Branch introduced herself to the small audience in Navajo. In English, she then explained that the tribe was offering this assistance out of recognition that many tribal members have no legal experience or representation and needed help with filing their claims.
Branch, who was born in Tuba City and grew up in Leupp, is a Harvard-trained lawyer and is barred in the Navajo Nation, Arizona, Oregon and Washington State. The suit against the EPA and the other defendants, she said, goes far beyond financial compensation.
“At bottom, the purpose of the litigation is to make the Navajo Nation and the Navajo people whole, to clean up our river, to restore our river to its role as a life giver and protector, and to shield us from the ongoing threat of future upstream sediment suspension and hard rock mine drainage and bursts,” Branch told ICTMN. “Our farmers and ranchers deserve to be able to continue pursuing their livelihoods undisturbed―livelihoods that trace us to our ancestors, going back to time immemorial. Our people also deserve to have the food, water and financial security they enjoyed prior to the spill.”
To that end, she says the tribe has suffered tolls on their mental, physical and spiritual health from which it will be difficult to recover. Gold King, she said, was yet another in a long list of environmental incursions on the Navajo people.
“We also want to send a strong message that the Navajo Nation is not a National Sacrifice Area,” Branch said. “Assaults on our land won’t go ignored, regardless of who commits them. This is our homeland—our sacred space—and our people will not leave it. Whatever happens to the land happens to us as a people. In the past the federal government has paid no heed to our timeless connection to our land. It has left it peppered with over 500 abandoned uranium mines and mills that continue to poison our land, our water, and our people. This is unacceptable and must stop. The filing of this lawsuit is our line in the sand saying that we will hold people accountable for their violations on Navajo land and of Navajo people.”
The Navajo Nation continues to struggle with the effects of uranium mining, among other issues related to resource extraction. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)
Branch echoes the sentiments of many tribal communities across the country who continue to suffer the deleterious effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction on their water sources and lands. Tribal scientists and environmental experts say that the primary difference between tribes and their non-Indian neighbors is that they are culturally, spiritually, historically, legally and physically connected to their lands and can be “sitting ducks” for ecological disasters.
Karletta Chief is an assistant professor and assistant specialist in the Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences at the University of Arizona at Tucson. Chief, a member of the Navajo Nation from Black Mesa, became a co-principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to examine the exposures and risk perceptions following the Gold King Mine spill.
“It’s devastating to see the San Juan contaminated knowing all the ways our people use it,” says Chief, a graduate of Stanford University. “It just breaks my heart to hear how deeply wounded they are from the spill, not just financially but also spiritually and emotionally. It has definitely fueled me and driven me to do this work on behalf of our people.”
As a part of her NIH research, Chief has taken thousands of samples from the Navajo communities along the San Juan, including water from the river and soil from the banks and fields, as well as tap water and food, measuring varying river flows and testing for contaminants—chiefly, arsenic and lead. Additionally, she and her team of researchers have been conducting focus groups, as well as house-to-house interviews to assess the complexity of the impact of the spill on their lives.
In collaboration with the tribe, other investigators have also conducted blood and urine sampling of the Navajo residents to test for arsenic, mercury and heavy metal poisoning, the results of which are not yet completed. Other projects include a dietitian, a bio-statistician, a chemist and a social scientist, all working to establish the full measure of the disaster on the tribe.
“The object was to look at all the ways people might have been exposed and affected,” Chief said. “What we found is that there are 40 different ways that tribal members used the river. So it’s much more nuanced and complex than, say, a hiker, or someone who is using it for recreational purposes. That river is everything to these communities.”
Back in Shiprock, as the EPA claim workshop began to wind down, the simple human impact of the contamination of the San Juan was apparent. Frank John, a rancher who lives in Beclabito, had questions for the lawyers in attendance. He had filed a claim with the EPA last fall, he said, but gotten no response.
Frank John, a Navajo rancher, seeks information from attorneys in filing his EPA claim. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)
“Their lack of response is their response,” came the reply. “If they did not respond, then they have denied your claim.”
The attorney hired by the tribe to assist the attendees encouraged John to refile his claim online. But like many residents in his community, John said he has no internet, does not own a computer, and does not know how to use one, which puts him at a grave disadvantage in the modern era of instant technology.
After the workshop, John told ICTMN that after the spill, he hauled more than 250 gallons of water a day to water his cattle and sheep, to which he is now barely hanging on. He is tired and cannot understand why the EPA has ignored his claim. And he is more than a little suspicious of the federal government and its response to this and other environmental crises on the Navajo Reservation.
“Our fathers worked at the uranium mine—and they’re suffering,” he said. “And we didn’t cause this problem, but we have to live with it. And it’s ruined the river that I used to swim at when I was little, and I don’t go down there anymore.”
He stopped and looked away, wiping tears from his eyes.
“This is my home, and I’m not moving. The river is the most important thing. It’s sacred. It is our life.”
