Big Mountain
Native People Resist Forced Relocation and Assault on Old Ways

In the Southwest, “U.S. Out of North America” is not just another pretty slogan. In 1680, when Spain presided over the Four Corners Area, Indian ‘runners ran from village to village, launching the Pueblo Revolt, in which Pueblo, Navajo and Hopi Indians united to eliminate every Spaniard they could find, and freed the territory completely from foreign influence. It was twelve years before any of the territory was retaken by Spain and some of it never was, for instance at Hopi.

In 1977 the U.S., which thought it had won the Four Corners Area of the Colorado Plateau fair and square in 1848 from Mexico, which thought it had won the land from Spain in 1821, set out to build a fence through the big Mountain Area of Navajo and Hopi land. Navajo grandmother Pauline Whitesinger drove the U.S. fencing crews off with rocks and dirt. The next day she asked for help from the American Indian Movement. Two years later the U.S. tried again to move in, and was met by Katherine Smith and her rifle, who successfully evicted the U.S. again.

Shortly after Katherine’s confrontation with the U.S., the people of Big Mountain declared to the world the basis for their stand:

“The U.S. Government and the Navajo Tribunal Council have violated the sacred laws of the Dine (Navajo) Nation... (They have) divided the indigenous people by boundaries of politics, Euro-American education, modernization and Christianity. The U.S. denies our right to exist as indigenous people on Mother Earth. The livelihood of the Dine, the livestock, has been exterminated, and thereby starvation exists among the elders. Our sacred shrines have been destroyed.

“Our Mother Earth is raped by exploitation of coal, uranium, oil and natural gas...we speak for the winged beings, and those who have gone before us and the coming generations. We seek no changes in our livelihood because this natural life is our only known survival and is our sacred law... the genocidal system of the federal government is destroying our true exist- fence as a traditional nation at Big Mountain.”

In April of 1984 the Elders of Big Mountain held the annual Spring Gathering. At that Gathering representatives of other Indian Nations, liberation struggles, legal defense workers and support workers from all over the world gathered to share the news, stories, ceremonies and strategies for the continuing struggle of 15,000 Dine (Navajo) to remain on their ancestral homelands. These people are to be removed from the land in order to make way for coal, uranium, and other mining and minerals development and to finalize the conversion of the Navajo and Hopi reservations from a traditional subsistence economy to a modern-day cash economy.

The recent incursion of the U.S. into Navajo and Hopi lands is taking place under cover of Public Law 93–531, the so-called “Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute Settlement Act” of 1974. The Act was the result of a 24 year campaign by mineral and energy interests fronted primarily by Peabody Coal, owned by the Peabody Holding Company, a consortium which includes Bechtel, Fluor Corporation and several other companies. These same companies are engaged in similar activities throughout the world, and are especially fond of the minerals-rich lands which lie under the native populations of the world.

When the Act was passed the only dispute going on was a dispute stage-managed by a public relations firm out of Salt Lake City. The dispute in reality was between two pro-development Tribal Councils, which had been imposed upon the people by the U.S. government since the 1930’s, Councils whose salaries are paid by mineral royalties and the U.S. government. To understand the dispute it is necessary to understand that the Indian people have their own traditional ways of making decisions based primarily on a consensual process. In the Southwest, affairs are especially under the direction of the women; the society is matriarchal. And one needs to understand that during the Navajo and Hopi peoples’ mutual occupancy of these lands over the past many centuries they have been successively claimed by Spain, Mexico, and the U.S. and the Mormon state of Deseret. Throughout each of these occupations the people have maintained their own ways and traditions.

Tribal Councils—5 Agreeable Men

One also needs, to understand the history of the present-day system of Indian government which is imposed and recognized by the U.S. A basic problem the U.S. had with the Indians’ traditional form of decision-making was that the U.S. could never find anybody to sign treaties in any reliable manner. Just as’ soon as the U.S. Army would find some agreeable Indian man to surrender on behalf of a particular tribe, fighting would break out by “renegade factions” which didn’t feel they had agreed either to surrender or be “represented.” In fact the Indian people have always resisted being artificially thrown together and “represented” by a person designated by outside forces.

However, in the early 1900s the thirst for oil was large in the Southwest, and the oil companies wanted U.S. protection for their upcoming invasion and exploration of Indian lands. The protection needed to be legitimized by way of leases, and here the same old problems arose: who could sign the leases “for the Indians.” Thus was invented the tribal council, the first one ever being set up at Navajo, where five agreeable men, willing to sign leases, were designated by the U.S. as the “Business Council.” Their picture hangs today on the wall of the present tribal council. The advantages of these councils were obvious, so in 1934 the New Deal and the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) gave one to every Tribe in the U.S., whether they wanted one or not.

In this and other ways the U.S. government and corporations have forced steady pressure on Indian people since the 1800s, and have created division among the people, one most readily characterized as Traditional versus Progressive. “Progressives” want to “progress” into the modern industrial cash economy, tend to be the most academically advanced, Christianized and most respectful of European governmental forms. The Traditionals practice the old ways and customs, and find their strength in the land, family, spiritual practices and oral teachings.

Traditional Native Americans refused to have any part of this new imposed government, especially the Navajo and Hopi, who repeatedly disbanded the councils. The U.S. would never give up, however, and as soon as the people disbanded one government, the U.S. would hold another election, with whoever received a “majority” becoming the new council. Among the thousands of Navajo and Hopi Indians it was never that difficult for the U.S. to find a few men willing to “represent” their kin, so the Councils continued to reincarnate, in fact were even described as “democratically elected.” For instance in the first “IRA” election at Hopi less than 15% of the Hopi voted, and those voting were demonstrably from the ranks of those most assimilated into the dominant cultural mores, and included members of the Tribe who had been banished from the villages because of their rejection of traditional values.

Hopi electoral politics have continually been dominated by Mormon-educated “progressives,” and predictably this small minority elects one another, and equally predictably the U.S. recognizes only this minority. The record shows that the U.S. bureaucrats who designed the IRA governmental system were well aware that the Traditional Indians reject candidates or propositions by not voting at all, rather than by voting in opposition.

By 1950 it had become clear that the Black Mesa, on which the Navajo and Hopi live, was possibly the richest coal seam in the world. Mormon attorney John Boyden saw the problem and set out to personally find reasonable men among the Hopi. By this time there was a “Hopi elite,” clustered around a Mormon family by the name of Sekaqueptewa. Boyden found five of them, whom the U.S. in turn designated as the tribal council, which in turn hired John Boyden as their legal counsel. Abbott Sekaqueptewa was Chairman throughout much of the “dispute”, and was known around the reservation for his vitriolic hatred of the Navajo. Under his regime dozens of lawsuits were initiated against the Navajo. Abbott remains today the largest cattle rancher of either nation. Boyden’s law firm remains the legal counsel for the Hopi Tribe even today.

John Boyden’s game was land and minerals management, and he saw clearly that there was a problem with the title to the lands which were to be mined.

The problem was that not only had the Navajo and Hopi shared the lands of the Black Mesa for centuries, but the U.S. had recognized and sanctioned that shared ownership since the late 1800’s, when President Chester Arthur designated the “Executive Order Area” in the heart of the Black Mesa in 1882.

Mormon Kidnappers

The Executive Order was issued in the context of a new strategy of assault upon indigenous people. In the late 1800s the U.S. had ceased signing treaties (which had become embarrassing since they implied incomplete conquest of the Indians), and had developed a new tactic to eliminate resistance: education. The U.S. set up a system of boarding schools to which Indian children were removed, often literally at gun point by U.S. troops, in order to be converted from “savages” into modern citizens. The stated purpose of the schools was to civilize Indian children and eliminate their native beliefs.

One of the main educational institutions to which the children were removed were Mormon schools. As recently as a few years ago Navajo continued to charge the Mormons with kidnapping two thousand children each year. Mormon beliefs were especially well matched to the goals of civilization, since the Mormon Church understood the Indians of the Four Corners to be one of the lost tribes of Israel, heathen who were dark and evil and who must be made white. [1]

Resistance to this attempted domestication and forced acculturation was especially vehement at Hopi, where the spiritual teachings of the oral tradition were thought to be working just fine. The Hopi have an especially acute sense of history derived from their prophecies and spiritual practices, and are not the non-violent people they have been stereotyped as. In fact they took part in the Pueblo Revolt and were never reconquered when the Spaniards retook most of the Southwest in 1692. To this day the Hopi have never signed a treaty with anybody.

Hopi resistance was a problem for the local U.S. Indian agent; since there was no “Hopi reservation,- no boundaries, there was no jurisdiction for his authority. Whites living among the Hopi supported the resistance, but could not be evicted. Thus was invented the 1882 Executive Order Area, an area including the present day Hopi reservation and all of the presently contested lands. The non-Indian sympathizers of the Hopi were removed.

Shared Use of Lands by Hopi and Navajo

The Executive Order Area is a 4,000 square mile rectangle, in the center of which are the Hopi villages occupied for millennia. Surrounding these villages, at least for the past five centuries, and much more according to many, are the Dine (Navajo) who live in their hogans and tend their sheep rather than living in villages. It was this configuration of village-dwelling Hopi surrounded and protected by the more widely dispersed Navajo, that was found by the European invaders of the 16^th Century.

Such shared use of these coal- and oil-rich lands was particularly inconvenient for John Boyden, who needed a clear and “quiet” title to the lands if leasing was to proceed as planned. Having found the Tribal Council which would hire him, Boyden then launched a campaign to challenge Navajo rights to the Executive Order lands. Boyden wrote a new law which several Mormon congressmen sponsored in the late 1950s, allowing the Hopi Tribe, Incorporated, to sue the Navajo Tribe, Incorporated. The suit commenced immediately upon passage of the act in 1958,e demanding eviction of all Navajo from all the Executive Use Area.

Unfortunately for Boyden, the Supreme Court heard the case in 1963, and recognized the legitimacy of Navajo occupancy and entitlement to most of the Executive Order lands, which the Court formally designated as the “Joint Use Area” (JUA). The Court found that only the 1,000 square mile area around the Hopi villages was exclusively Hopi lands, and that the remaining 3,000 square mile area was jointly used and shared customarily. The Court did, however, conclude that the Hopi Tribe deserved a better share of the material interests, but abstained from determining how to better divide the mining royalties, surface rights, and so forth.

The law firm of Boyden, Kennedy and Romney also represented Pea body Coal at this time. In 1962 and 1966 Peabody “negotiated” leases for the Black Mesa coal mine on Navajo and Hopi lands which provided for the strip mining of over two billion tons of coal over the next thirty years from lands on the northern edge of the JUA. This mine continues to be the largest coal strip mine in the world. Royalties were to be divided between the two Tribal Councils.

A Stage-managed Range War

Having failed to win the entire JUA, Boyden found hope in the language of the decision, which said that the Hopi Tribe deserved a better share of the wealth of the JUA. He devoted the next ten years to developing legislation which would gain half the JUA. The Hopi Tribe also hired the public relations outfit of Evans and Associates also located in the Mormon capital Salt Lake City, to create the image needed. A 1974 investigation by the Washington Post found that this cast of characters virtually stage-managed a “range war” between the Hopi and Navajo for several years, arranging press tours to scenes of staged confrontations between the two peoples as they fought and disputed the ownership of the land.

In 1972 Boyden had a bill introduced in Congress, this time to settle the “dispute” between the Indians. It was a bill whose time had come, mainly godfathered by Sam Steiger, longtime Indian-hater from Arizona, but also supported by Barry Goldwater, who held a grudge against Navajo chairman Peter MacDonald, who appeared to be leaning Democratic. [2] The phony range wars were important in determining the outcome, as were racism and congressional protocol, which defers Indian matters to the congressional delegation from the state in which the Indians live, in this case Arizona, where both Senators were saying a law was needed.

Thus was passed the “Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute Settlement Act of 1974,” Public Law 93–531, which mandated that the lands be partitioned and that whatever Indians were found to be on the “wrong side of the fence” would be removed. Effect of the partition was clear, since the lands were occupied by about 20,000 Navajo and 200 Hopi, the same land use pattern which had existed for centuries. It wasn’t until 1977 that the partition line was actually determined in Phoenix District Court, and that line required construction of a 300 mile fence to divide the lands.

It was construction of that fence, the last five miles of it, that was halted by Pauline Whitesinger in 1977, and the fence has never progressed since that time. But removal of the people has gone on, by means of tactics of the Indian wars of the 1800s.

Scorched Earth Campaign

Much of the lands of the U.S. beyond the original colonies were formally added to the U.S. during the 1800’s, by means of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican. War. While the early 1800’s saw the clearing of native peoples from the Southeast, the mid-century saw the conquest of Mexican territories in the Southwest, the Gold Rush and the westward expansion to California.

Most of the people in the newly conquered territories were Indian, however, and did not recognize the agreements made between rival states. So the swarms of whites heading to California through the Southwest found themselves less than welcomed by the Navajo, Hopi, Pueblo and Apache peoples whose lands they were invading. Indians who resisted were called “hostiles” by the treasure-seeking frontiersmen. In 1851 the U.S. declared war against the Navajo, who occupied the largest portion of the territory. These Navajo Wars were militarily unsuccessful until 1863, when the U.S. hired Kit Carson to organize a full campaign to remove every Navajo from the territory.

Carson’s strategy was scorched-earth, burning the orchards and crops, slaughtering the sheep which were the sustenance of the people. If was only by such classic counter-insurgency methods that Carson was able to starve the Navajo out of the canyons, where all other military expeditions Using traditional military tactics had failed.

Carson was successful, and during 1863 and 1864 removed all visible traces of Navajo occupancy from these lands, marching the survivors nearly 400 miles to Fort Sumner, where they were imprisoned. This march was known as the Long Walk and is very much alive in the memories of the people today. Thousands died on the Long Walk to Fort Sumner and during the subsequent imprisonment, until they were released in 1868, as the death toll and the accumulating embarrassment to the government grew. During this time there were hundreds, possibly thousands of Navajo whom Carson never found, many of them taking refuge in the Big Mountain area on the Black Mesa.

The removal project of the 1980’s is progressing by the same genocidal tactics of the last century, ‘ which is to remove the livestock and starve the people into “voluntary” relocation. P.L. 93–531 requires removal of the livestock even prior to any lands being made available for relocation of the people. More than ninety per cent of the people’s livestock has been confiscated since 1974, supposedly to protect the lands which the U.S. says belong to the Hopi Tribal Council from being overgrazed. An ironic theory at best, given past and present mining plans for the area.

Unity of Traditional Hopi and Navajo

At the April Gathering this year the outside supporters again heard from the traditional leadership of the Hopi and Navajo about the continuing loyalty and unity of these two peoples in opposition to the U.S. intrusion. Each year’s gatherings recount the armed resistance to the fence and review the past year’s confrontations with the Bureau of Indian Affair’s livestock confiscation crews.

It is these crews which each Spring renew their harassment and terrorism against the people, and each, year they encounter the resistance of the women, who tend the livestock. Last year Dine grandmother Mae Wilson Tso ran a BIA truck off the road and took back her horses which the BIA had impounded. The road crew beat her up and threw her in jail, where she suffered a heart attack. When she was released from the hospital she faced more than a dozen local and federal charges for assaulting law officers.

In 1982 an independent legal team was established by several members of the National Lawyer’s Guild’s Committee on Native American Struggles (CONAS). The team is known as the Big Mountain Legal Defense/Offense Committee (BMLD/OC). Though the so-called U.S. “Indian Law” is rigged to neutralize the sovereign rights of native people, the legal team has kept the heat off people to a significant degree by demanding the few rights they do have within the law. Even the worst removal laws-be they of the 1830’s or the 1970’s-at least pay lip-service to human rights with a couple of toss-off phrases about minimized hardship, due process and appeals. By forcing these issues the legal team has slowed down the removal (which has a 1986 deadline), exposed the hypocrisy and contradictions of the law, and this past Spring has started to unravel the flat-out corruption which has infested the removal.

The Biggest Real Estate Bonanza of the Century

Under P.L. 93–531 the removal is to be implemented by a Relocation Commission, which was assigned the task of designing the removal and a five year Relocation Plan. The Plan was approved by Congress on July 8, 1981, giving the people until July 8, 1986 to be off the land or face forcible removal by federal forces. The mass relocation has been described as the biggest real estate bonanza of the century. Evidence unearthed by the legal team indicates possible collusion between the Commission and real estate companies who target individual families for fleecing. Transamerica Corporation, for one, has been charged in court with using the relocation program to rip off some of the few families who have agreed to move away. In other instances the Relocation Commission has turned over replacement housing money to realtors for housing which was never provided, and the “relocatees” in whose name the money was transferred have never heard about the deal.

It is the Relocation Commission which floods the JUA with social workers and other social planners to “educate” and “enumerate” the people whom they describe as “awaiting relocation.” At each hogan the Commission workers tell the individual families that they alone are holdouts, that if they refuse to sign up for relocation they will miss out on the $5000 “incentive” bonus, that if they don’t sign up they won’t be allowed any sheep at all, and that if they wait too long there won’t be anyplace to which they can move. The alternative offered by the workers is “consumer education” in the skills of debt management, supermarket shopping, paying for utility and telephone bills, etc. All this for a people which has always been self-sufficient and always rejected electrical and phone lines, as well as the coal mining and power plants it takes to keep all of it running.

“In our native tongue there is no word for relocation. To move away means to disappear and never be seen again,” is the way Pauline Whitesinger expressed the position of the Big Mountain people on the planned relocation. Big Mountain refused to even talk to relocation workers.

Each year the Relocation Commission appears before congressional committees to request funds for its continued operation, in March of this year requesting $21 million. Due to the increasing publicity on Commission corruption, committees refused for the first time to rubber stamp the appropriation, though it may still be approved by August. The people of Big Mountain and the JUA have asked that the Commission be stopped, even before the law is repealed, in order to halt the psychological operations which are dividing people against one another. They understand the intervention on their lands to be the same as U.S. intervention in Central America and elsewhere in the world.

A Fear of All that Is Wild

The resistance of the people is rooted in their clear sense of place, on the Earth and in the basic scheme of things. Their stories and prophecies tell them that they are born of that very place, and that they are to protect the Earth as their mother. The life of these people is ceremonial, and each task during the day has a relationship to the Earth, their families, and to the well-being of all creatures.

While the history of U.S. attacks on native peoples has revealed clear material motivation, the attacks have consistently been focused against the practice of the native religions. These attacks have taken such forms as forced education in European values and languages (until recently Indian children were beaten for using their own language in school), and the attacks have taken the form of slaughter of medicine men and entire populations, as at Wounded Knee in 1890 when troops massacred hundreds of men, women and children who refused to halt the Ghost Dance ceremony.

The dominant European culture clearly fears native-spiritual traditions just as it fears all that is “wild” or natural or female. Regardless of how the U.S. has understood the native religions, its record is one of persistent assault by domestication, translation, conversion, destabilization, assimilation, and where necessary, extermination. Only one choice is to be allowed native people: join the modern monocultural, commodity-worshipping, money-based culture, or be eliminated.

Hopi and Navajo have strong prophetic traditions, maintained in the ceremonies and stories which may only be performed in certain places and at particular times. The stories maintain their strength in their native language, and they are not written down or reduced to words on paper. The assault on native peoples often takes the form of attacks on their languages and oral traditions. The people are defending their traditions and their right to live according to their myths and prophecies as passed down to them from their ancestors.

The people of the JUA understand that Big Mountain is a holy place, and that it has an essential role in maintaining the forces and energies in North America. The people gather their herbs and medicines there and know the mountain as a female mountain. For these reasons they defend the land with their lives.

A Worldwide Indigenous Movement

In late 1983 a medicine man from the Great Sioux Nation came to Big Mountain and brought the sacred Sun Dance, another ceremony which had been violently eliminated by the invaders in the 1800’s. The Sun Dance is a four day dance and fast under the sun, and participants say that the meaning of water for life can never be disregarded again after one has danced. The dance is an offering to the Earth Mother and the Grandfather, an offering of the flesh rather than of tokens, a recreation of the birth event. It is a dance only for native people who make a four year commitment to the dance, but the ceremony may be observed by relations, family and friends of the people in the struggle. The first dance ever at Navajo in 1983 drew over a thousand people to Big Mountain, and commenced a four year cycle of Sun Dances which does not conclude until after the 1986 deadline for removal of the people. Support workers who came to the Sun Dance joined in the fasting, danced outside the sacred arbor in support of the Sun Dancers, abstained from political pontification, and for the most part mainly cut wood, hauled water and worked. The Dance concluded with a giveaway and a feast. It should be emphasized that many of the massacres of the 1800s were launched directly to eliminate such ceremonies and sacred grounds.

The spiritual traditions of native peoples link them directly to the earth—the war of western monoculture and the state is against all three, the people, their spiritual relationship to the land, and the land itself. The native people’s reasons for not wanting to leave their homelands and burial grounds have long been clearly stated, if not understood by Euroamericans, themselves long driven from their own land base and long exiled from the earth. The genocidal crusade against the land and the people is in no way a thing of the past, but continues today at Big Mountain, the Black Hills, and elsewhere.

But we are witnessing a resurgence of native peoples’ movements in the Western hemisphere and of indigenous and land-based peoples worldwide. There are 100 million Indians in this hemisphere, united not only by Columbus’ misunderstanding of who they were and where he was, but also united by a profound understanding on their part that the European experiment, the invasion of the lost wanderers, has reached the end of the line, though the nature of the conclusion is not clear. By joining in this worldwide struggle to defend the land from government-corporate plunder, by linking our own actions of solidarity to the sacred dance of the Earth, we can take part in making the conclusion clear.

Richard Grow, Big Mountain support Group, Berkeley

Notes

1. In Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, Don Talayesva, who grew up among the “hostile” Hopi at Oraibi, Arizona, tells many vivid stories about the kidnapping of native children by educators and missionaries, of life in the boarding schools, and relations with the missionaries. On the schools, he recounts, “A few years before my birth the United States Government had built a boarding school at the Keams Canyon Agency. At first our chief, Lolulomai, had not wanted to send Oraibi children, but chiefs from other villages came and persuaded him to accept clothes, tools, and other supplies, and to let them go. Most of the people disliked this and refused to cooperate. Troops came to Oraibi several times to take the children by force and carry them off in Wagons.” The children’s clothes would be burned and their haircut, and they would be given western clothes and names. Concerning missionaries, he says, “I resented the way they meddled in our private affairs, encouraged strife among us, destroyed our Hopi way of life, and brought on droughts and diseases. While they pretended to care for our welfare, they made us feel that our gods were idols or devils, and that we were no better than dung ...” And elsewhere, “When the missionaries preached the Gospel to me, I almost always got tired, and often felt sick in my stomach and wanted to vomit ...

2. For an in-depth on MacDonald, who some called the “Navajo Shah” for the tremendous amount of power and wealth that he enjoyed as tribal chairman until he was defeated, see “The Great Indian Power Grab,” by Jeff Gillenkirk and Mark Dowie, in the January 1982 issue of Mother Jones magazine.

(This article was edited and revised by the FE staff.)

Support for the resistance struggle is organized by way of an international network of support groups. Information on the network is available from the Big Mountain Support Group, 1412 Cypress, Berkeley. CA 94703, (415) 841–6500. The quarterly Big Mountain News is available from the same address for $5 a year, and will obtain for the subscriber both the News and all alerts, press releases, etc. Also available is an 18 page pamphlet on the background of the struggle for $1.25 from the same address.

Tax deductible donations to the legal committee should be made out to the Big Mountain Legal Fund and sent either to the BMSG or directly to the Capp Street Foundation at 294 Page, San Francisco CA 94102.

Best historical references on the Big Mountain struggle are Jerry Kammer’s The Second Long Walk, 1980, and the Report to the Kikmongwi: Docket 196, Indian Law Resources Center, 1979.

Sidebar

“The white man, through his insensitivity to the way of Nature, has desecrated the face of Mother Earth. The white man’s advanced technological capacity has occurred as a result of his lack of regard for the spiritual path and for the way of all living things. The white man’s desire for material possessions and power has blinded him to the pain he has caused Mother Earth by his quest for what he calls natural resources. And the path of the Great Spirit has become difficult to see by almost all men, even by many Indians who have chosen instead to follow the path of the white man ...

“Today the sacred lands where the Hopi live are being desecrated by men who seek coal and water from our soil that they may create more power for the white man’s cities. This must not be allowed to continue for if it does, Mother Nature will react in such a way that almost all men will suffer the end of life as they now know it ...”

—Open letter from traditional Hopis to the President of the U.S., protesting strip-mining of Hopi and Navajo lands, August 1970

“The traditional people rooted in this ancient land for centuries have now been forced into the crisis by being denied their right to their land. Many traditional people refuse to assimilate into the realm of the energy world which tries to co-opt them to convert their hogans into modern homes (with electricity, gas, piped water, and modern conveniences) and their Holy Lands into coal gasification sites. The people will not move, nor will they compromise ...

—“10 Years of the People’s Struggle,”

Big Mountain News, Spring 1984