by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 11, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Drew Sully / Indigenous Action
A group of Diné and Hopi people ( including traditional people and elders) upset by the latest colonial attack on indigenous peoples water rights, gathered to protest the visits of two US Senators to the Navajo Nation today. The people had gathered to say “no deal” to s2109, the bill that would allow for more water to flow into Arizona for the benefit of companies and urban growth.
Protesters chanted “water is life”, “free indian water ends now”, “let the water flow”, “sewage water for McCain and Kyl”, other chants were said in Diné.
Protesters waited for Navajo president Ben Shelly and US senators McCain and Kyl to exit the meeting in Tuba City, on the Navajo Nation. Earlier protesters marched in the streets of Tuba City, as Navajo Nation president Ben Shelly met with the senators to discuss the further dismantling of Navajo and Hopi water rights. Navajo Nation president Ben Shelly has left the meeting and said that there is no deal yet made, and that they are going to hear input from 7 of the 111 chapter houses (similar to districts) and council delegates.
Senators McCain and Kyl were in Tuba City to gain official support from the Tribal governments for their bill, Senate Bill 2109, described in a Native News Network article as:
Senate Bill 2109 45; the “Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River Water Rights Settlement Act of 2012″ was introduced by Kyl and McCain on February 14, 2012, and is on a fast track to give Arizona corporations and water interests a “100th birthday present” that will close the door forever on Navajo and Hopi food and water sovereignty, security and self-reliance.
S.2109 asks the Navajo and Hopi peoples to waive their priority Water Rights to the surface waters of the Little Colorado River “from time immemorial and thereafter, forever” in return for the shallow promise of uncertain federal appropriations to supply minimal amounts of drinking water to a handful of reservation communities.
The Bill – and the “Settlement Agreement” it ratifies – do not quantify Navajo and Hopi water rights – the foundation of all other southwestern Indian Water Rights settlements to date – thereby denying the Tribes the economic market value of their water rights, and forcing them into perpetual dependence on uncertain federal funding for any water projects.
The fight for Diné and Hopi water rights continues as several indigenous struggles persist across Arizona to protect sacred sites, stop cultural genocide, and prevent further destruction of the earth and its people for corporate profit.
From Indigenous Action: http://www.indigenousaction.org/from-the-fontlines-of-the-water-wars-dine-and-hopi-water-rights-at-risk-protesters-gather-on-navajo-nation/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 11, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Edward Helmore / The Guardian
Of the many projects commissioned by the Obama administration to showcase its commitment to renewable energy, few are as grandly futuristic as the multibillion-dollar solar power projects under construction across broad swaths of desert on the California-Arizona border.
But at least two developments, including the $1bn, 250-megawatt Genesis Solar near Blythe in the lower Colorado river valley and the Solar Millennium project, are beset with lengthy construction delays, while others are facing legal challenges lodged by environmental groups and Native American groups who fear damage to the desert ecology as well as to ancient rock art and other sacred heritage sites.
Out on the stony desert floor, Native Americans say, are sites of special spiritual significance, specifically involving the flat-tailed horned toad and the desert tortoise.
“This is where the horny toad lives,” explains Alfredo Figueroa, a small, energetic man and a solo figure of opposition who could have sprung from the pages of a Carlos Castaneda novel, pointing to several small burrows. Figueroa is standing several hundred metres into the site of Solar Millennium, a project backed by the Cologne-based Solar Millennium AG. The firm, which has solar projects stretching from Israel to the US, was last month placed in the hands of German administrators and its assets listed for disposal.
Figueroa is delighted with the news. “Of all the creatures, the horny toad is the most sacred to us because he’s at the centre of the Aztec sun calendar,” he says. “And the tortoise also, who represents Mother Earth. They can’t survive here if the developers level the land, because they need hills to burrow into.”
Figueroa, 78, a Chemehuevi Indian and historian with La Cuna de Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle, has become one of the most vocal critics of the solar programme and expresses some unusually bold claims as to the significance of this valley: he claims it is the birthplace of the Aztec and Mayan systems of belief. He points out the depictions of a toad and a tortoise on a facsimile of the Codex Borgia, one of a handful of divinatory manuscripts written before the Spanish conquest.
On a survey of the 2,400-hectare site Figueroa points out a giant geoglyph, an earth carving he says represents Kokopelli, a fertility deity often depicted as a humpbacked flute player with antenna-like protrusions on his head. Kokopelli, he says, will surely be disturbed if the development here resumes.
The area is known for giant geoglyphs, believed by some to date back 10,000 years. Gesturing towards the mountains, he also describes Cihuacoatl – a pregnant serpent woman – he sees shaped in the rock formations. All of this, he says, amounts to why government-fast-tracked solar programmes in the valley, where temperatures can reach 54C, should be abandoned. It is a matter of their very survival.
“We are traditional people – the people of the cosmic tradition,” Figueroa explains. “The Europeans came and did a big number on us. They tried to destroy us. But they were not able to destroy our traditions, and it’s because of our traditions and our mythology that we’ve been able to survive. If we’d blended in with the Wasps – the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants – we’d have been lost long ago.”
At the Genesis Solar site, 20 miles west, Florida-based NextEra has begun to develop an 810-hectare site. The brackets that will hold the reflecting mirrors stand like sentinels. Backed by a $825m department of energy loan, Genesis Solar is planned as a centrepiece of the administration’s renewable energy programme, with enough generating capacity to power 187,500 homes.
But local Native American groups collectively known as the Colorado River Indian Tribes are demanding that 80 hectares of the development be abandoned after prehistoric grinding stones were found on a layer of ashes they say is evidence of a cremation site “too sacred to disturb”.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/11/solar-power-mojave-desert-tribes
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 12, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Indian Country Today staff
The Navajo call them Doko’oo’sliid, or “Shining On Top.” To the Hopi, the peaks are Nuvatukaovi, or “The Place of Snow on the Very Top.” Whatever name they bear, the San Francisco Peaks are sacred to no less than 13 tribes. So Thursday’s decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to allow Arizona Snowbowl to make artificial snow out of wastewater is a serious blow to Native American religious beliefs.
Tribes use the peaks for various ceremonies for healing, well-being, balance, commemoration, passages and the world’s water and life cycles.
The Navajo believe the Creator placed them between four mountains: Blanca Peak in Colorado, Mount Taylor in New Mexico, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona and Hesperus Peak in Colorado. The San Francisco Peaks are the sacred mountains to the west of the Navajo homeland.
The Sacred Land Film Project points out that Navajos collect herbs from the slopes of the peaks and bury the umbilical cords of their children there.
A website dedicated to Navajo religion explains how Navajo beliefs differ from those held by Christians. “In contrast to the Judeo Christian religions which tend to celebrate people and events, and thus can be practiced anywhere, the Navajo religion is founded on relationships to specific places. The Navajo religion is defined by and cannot be separated from its relationship to specific geographical places. These sites are sacred because of special religious events which have occurred in that particular site.”
Ernie Zah, spokesman for Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly, said the decision February 9 was “a disappointment. Although the San Francisco Peaks are not within our reservation, they are within our traditional boundaries, within our realm of dwelling, and we make offerings on the Peaks, we have prayers and songs that incorporate not only the San Francisco Peaks but all elements of life, and this court decision to potentially allow the use of reclaimed water to generate snow negates our inherited traditional foundations.”
Lloyd Thompson, a Navajo medicine man, explained to the Navajo Times in 2002 that religious understanding isn’t extended to Native Americans. “If we (Navajo people) took sewer water and put it on Mount Sinai, we’d be put in jail, fined, and maybe even attacked,” he said. Mount Sinai is the site where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments from God. He also told the Navajo Times that the sewer water that would be used isn’t just contaminated with human waste but also with body parts and blood from hospitals and mortuaries.
Native American sacred sites aren’t like churches, mosques or synagogues where people can worship without interference because those buildings are owned privately. Many sacred sites are on federal land. A 2005 High Country News article discusses this aspect and asks “Can federal lands still be sacred?”
In the article Joe Shirley Jr., then-president of the Navajo Nation, said: “To Native Americans, desecrating the San Francisco Peaks with wastewater is like flushing the Koran down the toilet.”
Read more from Indian Country Today: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/10/sacred-site-faces-legalized-desecration-from-arizona-snowbowl-wastewater-97050
