Standing Rock and Big Mountain: two issues, two eras, same movement

Just a few days before the Dec. 3 Standing Rock victory--the decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to reroute the contested pipeline segment--I discovered an old photo from another battle for water rights. I was standing with friends in front of Safeway one November afternoon in Denver, circa 1980, and we were in costume, handing out flyers about the "true story" of Thanksgiving. Here I am (right) with Marty Mathers (center) and Kim Womantree, dressed as pilgrims and Indian, ready to talk about our interpretation of the Thanksgiving story as one of continuing oppression. That oppression was then taking place then on Indian land at Big Mountain in the Four Corners region. A lot of Indian water was being used there to transport coal in slurry pipes.



I don't remember that we had too many real conversations with Thanksgiving-dinner shoppers that day, but we enjoyed the event and felt we were contributing to the support work local activists were doing at Big Mountain, also known as the Black Mesa coal fields. There corporate interests, especially Peabody Coal Company, were exploiting land shared by Navajo and Hopi tribes, to mine coal at Black Mesa. The precious aquifer, the only source of water for the tribes, then became the source of water to carry the coal in slurry pipes to feed power plants in Arizona and Nevada. Billions of gallons of precious ground water.

Of course, there was no Internet then, and like the struggle at Standing Rock, this was hardly a story that made mainstream news. Nevertheless, there were stories in counterculture papers and some of our friends travelled to the area to oppose the exploitation of the land. But then the issue dragged on in the courts, as such often do, and our own political work continued on in other ways. A line from a Judy Grahn poem, "A Woman is Talking to Death", ran through my mind: "(W)e left, as we have left all of our lovers, as all lovers leave all lovers, much too soon to get the real loving done." Substitute "causes" for "lovers", and you see the parallel.

Finding these photos in my friend Vickie Barriga's collection, I wondered what had become of the Big Mountain issue, 35 years later. I found some answers in a 2014 review of Judith Nies' Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West. "The Indians were not the major players" in the deals taking place on their own land, Nies writes. "The real story was about energy and resources, about how coal was going to be used, and about who would make money." The leases the energy companies got from the US Interior Department violated every guideline the department had set up and the royalties were outrageously low. It was all done legally, Nies wrote, and Black Mesa became a "crucial resource colony for the expansion of the New West". By the late 1990s, the company strip mining Black Mesa was sold to a British takeover specialist,  Lord James Hanson. The review of Nies book reports, "At a 1996 stockholders' meeting in London, Hanson is surprised by the arrival of a delegation of Hopi and Navajo Indians who proceed to describe the effects of coal mining on their desert home: polluted water holes that kill their sheep, skyrocketing asthma rates caused by coal dust, and land stripped of vegetation that will never grow back thanks to desertification."

The parallel to Standing Rock seems obvious. Again, Native tribes--and the rural poor surrounding them-- are likely to pay the cost of our energy policy, still based in fossil fuels. There is reason to believe that Sunday's victory may be a mirage. A day later, the company building the DAPL announced they plan to continue building without rerouting. The pipeline, one of many crisscrossing the country is already more than 90 percent complete. The validity of 19th century treaty rights has long since been set aside in constitutional law. The President-Elect is an investor, and even if private gain were not an issue, he is advocating privatization of Native lands for energy development. Meanwhile, pipelines crisscross the nation, spills continue, the nation continues its dependency on fossil fuels.

Yet, there is reason to believe that Standing Rock can succeed in ways Big Mountain did not. I believe it is truly a victory, whether or not the pipeline is rerouted. As I write, about 10,000 protesters are camped at Cannonball, North Dakota, where the weather today is 4F and more snow is on the way. Clearly they have resilience and staying power. Tribes have come together. Millennials and their elders have come together, US military veterans have arrived to assist the water protectors. Thanks to social media, support has grown and mainstream media is now involved. A new generation is learning about Native American history, the risks of pipelines, the alternatives to a fossil fuel economy. This learning is all part of a movement that will certainly grow. The indefensible violation of civil rights by law enforcement on the land in recent weeks may be to this movement what attack dogs and beatings were to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s--a galvanizing force.

I think back to the struggle to save Big Mountain in the 70s and 80s with sorrow and compassion for all of us who gave up too soon, who left our causes (lovers) too soon. Protestors have tools today that we didn't even dream of: the power of Facebook as a truth-telling arena and a decentralized media, the understanding of and growth of opposition to climate change, the growth of alternative energy worldwide, and best of all, a belief in their ability to succeed. Perhaps my generation, those members who became history teachers and taught a different version of Native American history can claim some credit in the process.

Last month I attended a rally on the University of Denver campus in support of Standing Rock. I think these two photos, one of students who spoke and the other of the audience, show something of the passion and determination in this movement. I look forward to finding new ways to support their vision and efforts in 2017. Here are the photos: