Orion Magazine Summer 98

The Black Mesa Syndrome: Indian Lands, Black Gold

by Judith Nies

Black Mesa is not black and it is not a mesa.  It is four thousand square

miles of ginger-colored plateau land in northern Arizona, a distinct

elevated landmass the shape of a bear's paw.  On a map, the Black Mesa coal

field looks like an inkblot on a Rorschach test, following the contours of

the Pleistocene lake it once was.  Over thousands of years the vigorous

forests and plant life embraced by the lake decayed into a bog which in turn

hardened to coal--some twenty-one billion tons of coal, the largest coal

deposit in the United States.

Until 1969, the coal lay untouched and so close to the surface that the

walls of the dry washes glistened with seams of shiny black.  With a

long-term value estimated as high as $100 billion, it lies completely under

Indian reservation lands, for Black Mesa is also home to some sixteen

thousand Navajos and eight thousand Hopis.  In 1966, the Hopi and Navajo

tribal councils--not to be confused with the general tribal

population--signed strip-mining leases with a consortium of twenty utilities

that had designed a new coal-fired energy grid for the urban Southwest.

 Under the umbrella name WEST (Western Energy Supply and Transmission), the

utilities promised more air conditioning for Los Angeles, more neon lights

for Las Vegas, more water for Phoenix, more power for Tucson--and for the

Indians, great wealth.

Today, thirty years after the strip mining for coal began, the cities have

the energy they were promised, but the Hopi and Navajo nations are not

rich--that part of the plan proved ephemeral.  Instead, Black Mesa has

suffered human rights abuses and ecological devastation; the Hopi water

supply is drying up; thousands of archeological sites have been destroyed

and, unbeknownst to most Americans, twelve thousand Navajos have been

removed from their lands--the largest removal of  Indians in the United

States since the 1880s.

In the following pages, I want to untangle what went wrong on Black Mesa.

When you look at the map of Arizona on this page, you see a series of lines

radiating out from the Black Mesa coal field.  Each line represents the

enormous political and economic powers that have shaped the contemporary

reality of this region.  And yet, for twenty-five years, the American press,

with few exceptions, has presented the Black Mesa story as a centuries-old

land dispute between two tribes.  The story that has not yet emerged is

about the syndrome in which transnational corporations take and exploit

indigenous lands with the cooperation of host governments.  I want to hold

up Black Mesa as a domestic example of that global syndrome, and I want to

ask why our free press has largely been unable to tell the truth about Black

Mesa. 0

Chester Arthur's Square

Surrounding the ink blot of the coal deposit on the map above is an almost

perfect square of land--one cartographer's minute by one cartographer's

minute--drawn by President Chester Arthur in 1882.  His Executive Order

created a reservation for Indians as the government might "see fit to settle

therein."

Why would Arthur, a New Yorker and a product of political patronage, give a

land grant three-fourths the size of Connecticut to a population that

consisted of eleven hundred Hopis, three hundred Paiutes, and a few hundred

Navajos? The answer has far less to do with safeguarding Indian residency

than with timber, copper, and coal.

Chester Arthur was a rich man with rich tastes and no stranger to the

alchemy of transforming government service into economic wealth.  As far as

we know, he never visited the West, but he was knowledgeable about Western

railroad charters, land grants, and mineral exploration leases.  He

understood the trick of transforming wilderness into public domain lands,

and then into prospecting leases.  He understood how business and government

worked hand-in-glove.  In those days, land development companies were

frequently subsidiaries of the railroads, and several years before the

transcontinental railroad reached Arizona in 1881, the U.S.  government had

already explored, surveyed, and mapped the mineral riches of the Arizona

Territory.  Also in advance of the railroads, the government sent the Army

to subdue the "savage tribes," such as the Navajos in the north and Apaches

in the south, who blocked access to Arizona's resource-rich lands.

"The only minerals discovered in this region are coal and copper," wrote

surveyor A.  M.  Stephen in 1879 to his superior, General Howard, who also

held the title of Indian Inspector.  "The coal deposit is lying between

Oraibi and Moenkopi," the report continues.  "The only white people...are

about twenty families of Mormons at MoenKopi [sic] and Tuba City." Stephen

accompanied his survey with a map of the coal deposit location.

Arthur understood immediately the implications of the map.  If the Mormon

families were allowed to continue to settle and improve their lands, they

would, according to the provisions of the Desert Lands Act of 1877, be able

to buy 160 acres at $1.25 per acre.  They would also gain title to whatever

mineral resources lay beneath those acres.  But if the same lands were

removed from the public domain and designated as Indian reservation lands

they would no longer be open to white settlement.  On December 17, 1882,

Arthur signed the Executive Order Reservation of 1882 "for the use and

occupancy of the Moqui [Hopi] and such other Indians as the secretary of the

interior may see fit to settle therein." By this act, Arthur kept control of

the mineral resources of the region, and set them aside for another day.

The West, American myth tells us, was a place where there was real

freedom--where you came with what you could carry and you made a life from

it.  The government was meddlesome, an intrusion, an invasion into the

individual resourcefulness of the Western pioneers.  That is the myth.  In

reality, the government and big business made it all happen.

John Boyden and the Peabody Leases

Chester Arthur's square remained untouched for seventy-five years, into the

1950s, when a Utah lawyer named John Boyden found a way to transmute the

coal of Black Mesa into gold.  A bishop in the Mormon Church and a former

U.S.  attorney, Boyden's dapper, modest appearance masked a fierce ambition

and the hardball skills of a trial attorney.  Beginning in 1957, he began to

craft the legal, political, and economic strategy which would open up the

coal deposit of Black Mesa to major energy development.

As a first step in his plan, Boyden needed the cooperation of the tribal

council of one of the Indian tribes on Black Mesa.  He approached the

Navajo, who turned him down.  He then went to the Hopi, whose leaders were

bitterly factionalized between traditionals and progressives.  Lacking a

governing tribal council since 1938, the Hopi had no legal entity to hire

Boyden, but as a law partner of the man who wrote the 1946 Indian land

claims law, Boyden was knowledgeable about both tribal council politics and

Bureau of Indian Affairs policies.  Accompanied by the government Indian

agent, he set about traveling to all the Hopi villages, and talking to all

the Hopi men who spoke English and who had been to government boarding

schools.  In the process, Boyden created a new tribal council.

Boyden was controversial from the minute he assumed his new role.  One of

his first actions was to introduce a bill in Congress creating a special

court to allow the Hopi to sue the Navajo to clear title for the coal lands.

 Thousands of Navajos had settled on Black Mesa, and no energy company would

take a chance on a lease that could be contested.  Of the bill, Hopi leader

Dan Katchongva wrote prophetically in 1956, "If [this bill] becomes law, it

will destroy our Hopi way of life, religion and law....  The majority of the

Hopis are against him as a lawyer."

The traditional Hopi were furious with Boyden's role and saw his presence as

an intrusion from Washington.  Caleb Johnson, a Hopi student at Princeton

Theological Seminary writing to the Senate on behalf of traditional Hopi

priests, made the astute observation that leadership of the Hopi and the

boundary issue were linked.  He added that leadership had a religious

component and that the man Boyden had chosen as Hopi chairman was not

respected.  "The chairman of the tribal council," he wrote, "is a man who

does not have a good record and has been convicted of a felony in a Federal

court."

Others opposed the bill too, including the U.S.  Attorney General William

Rogers, on grounds that Indian land issues and reservation boundaries

derived from treaties that were outside American property law.  But in 1962,

the special court did clarify title to the subsurface mineral estate and

divided the surface rights.  The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal,

and in 1966 the leases were signed.

At the top of the 1882 boundary (see map) are two irregular rectangles.

These represent some sixty-five thousand acres leased by the Hopi and Navajo

tribal councils to the Peabody Coal Company of Kentucky, the largest coal

producer in the United States.  The leases were signed secretly by the

tribal councils and the company in 1966, with no larger tribal referendum on

either side.  The Navajos tried to block the mining equipment by setting up

blockades in the road.  The Hopi priests eventually sued their own tribal

council, claiming the leases were illegal because they had been signed

without a quorum.

John Boyden remained the Hopi's lawyer for thirty years.  Although he

presented himself as a humble country lawyer working for the Hopi pro bono,

his fees--paid by the government out of monies held in trust for the

Hopi--totaled $2.7 million, a figure revealed only after a Freedom of

Information suit filed by the Native American Rights Fund.

Kennecott Copper and Strip Mining

Today at Black Mesa, buckets the size of a four-story building peel the

topsoil off in mile-long strips--a technique called strip mining.  Instead

of burrowing into the earth to find the mineral seam, the land over the

mineral deposit is removed.  Bulldozers shape the underlayers into enormous

slag heaps, workers dynamite the exposed mineral bed, and steam shovels load

the coal into massive transport trucks.  By the time the coal is extracted,

the land has turned gray, all vegetation has disappeared, the air is filled

with coal dust, the groundwater is contaminated with toxic runoff (sulphates

particularly), and electric green ponds dot the landscape.  Sheep that drink

from such ponds at noon are dead by suppertime.

In 1966, Kennecott, an international mining company seeking to diversify,

bought Peabody Coal.  Four years later, John Boyden moved his law offices to

the tenth floor of the Kennecott Building in Salt Lake City, overlooking the

Mormon Temple.  As Boyden leveraged this land issue into a huge case, he

violated a basic tenet of legal ethics: he represented two sides in the same

case, working simultaneously for the Hopi tribe and for Peabody Coal.

Although his former partners maintained it was "a mistake" that Martindale

Hubbell, the national legal directory, listed Peabody Coal as one of

Boyden's firm's clients, legal scholar Charles Wilkinson published an

article in a 1996 issue of Brigham Young University Law Journal reproducing

Boyden's correspondence with both parties.  When Boyden wrote to the Peabody

vice president as a Peabody attorney, he addressed him as "Dear Ed"; when he

wrote to him as a Hopi attorney, he called him "Dear Mr. Phelps."

Not surprisingly, Boyden had not done particularly well for his Hopi client

in the lease provisions: low royalty rates (the two tribal councils splita

royalty rate of thirty cents a ton at a time when the government royalty

rate for coal extracted on public lands was $1.50 a ton), few environmental

safeguards, and no provisions for renegotiation.  The worst, however, was

the provision that allowed Peabody to pump four thousand acre-feet

(approximately a billion gallons) of water a year to run a coal slurry line.

The Black Mesa Coal Slurry Pipeline

The dotted line on the map that extends 273 miles from Black Mesa to the

Mohave Generating Station represents this slurry line, the only operating

coal slurry line in the United States.  A slurry line, for those who have

never seen one, operates like a giant garbage disposal, grinding huge chunks

of coal into nugget-size pieces through enormous steel blades, mixing them

with water, then sluicing the batter through a pipeline.  For this

operation, Peabody Coal has pumped a billion gallons a year for almost

thirty years from the Black Mesa aquifer, the sole water source for the Hopi

and Navajo peoples of the region.  In these three decades, groundwater

levels have dropped, wells and springs have dried up, and the entire ecology

of Black Mesa has changed: plants have failed to reseed and certain

vegetation has died out.

"The water has become more valuable than the coal," exclaimed Hopi Marilyn

Masayesva at the government's environmental hearings.  "The water is

priceless.  No amount of compensation can replace the source of life for the

Hopi and Navajo people.  It is absolutely immoral and irresponsible for the

federal government to support a continuation of mining activities." Ms.

 Masayesva was one of hundreds of Hopi and Navajo who testified in 1989

about the negative effects of mining on their lands and against the

government's extension of the mining permit.  Thousands of years of water

had been used up in a few decades.  The government's environmental impact

report concluded, however, that water "was outside the scope of their study"

and the mining continued.

One cold March day in 1990, I visited the office of Black Mesa Pipeline,

Inc.  A dusting of snow still lay on the ground.  In the distance, a weak

sun illuminated the drag lines and I glimpsed cone-shaped piles of coal

waiting to be fed into the conveyer belt.  Lowell Hinkins, the operations

manager, assured me that there was no connection between the Indian wells

going dry and the operations of the slurry.  The pipeline wells went a

thousand feet deeper than the shallow wells of the Hopi and Navajo, he told

me.  He also confirmed that, yes, "Black Mesa is the only operating coal

slurry line in the United States.  The others are being built in China and

Russia." I had just had seen a company video that claimed coal was bringing

economic prosperity and the "finer things of life" to the Hopi and Navajo.

But it is hard to define prosperity.

The effects of coal slurry pipelines on water tables are known, and in

all-white communities where such pipelines have been proposed, citizens have

had enough political voice to defeat them.  The larger truth about the Black

Mesa pipeline must include the fact that it was built in part as an

experiment--to test and improve technology primarily intended for other

countries, like China and Russia.  The Bechtel corporation had designed the

pipeline in conjunction with a new design for an electrical generating

station--the Mohave Generating Station of Laughlin, Nevada--which was also a

test of technology for dewatering coal slurry.  The owners of the new plant

were Los Angeles Water and Power, Southern California Edison, Nevada Power

(Las Vegas), and the Salt River Project (Phoenix)--all members of the energy

consortium, WEST.  In terms of population served by the utilities, their

combined political power represented seven state governors, fourteen

senators, and at least forty-eight congressmen.

The Mohave Generating Station

When the Mohave plant was completed, Bechtel's company magazine saluted it

as "1.5 million megawatts for the West." Twenty-eight years later The Los

Angeles Times observed, "The Mohave Generating Station is the biggest

uncontrolled source of sulfur dioxide in the Southwest--a prime contributor

to the gaseous haze that clouds visibility over the Grand Canyon."  Bechtel,

of course, is famous for its multibillion dollar projects, and for shaping

the politics and technology of the markets in which it does business.  With

forty thousand employees, Bechtel has built the three largest

government-funded projects in U.S.  history--the Hoover Dam, the Central

Arizona Project, and the Central Artery Project in Boston.

When the Mohave plant opened in 1970, it raised new questions of strategic

planning.  A second plant, the Navajo Generating Station near Page, also

engineered by Bechtel, was due to go on line in 1974.  The two plants

combined would require twelve million tons of coal a year for at least fifty

years.  Black Mesa would become home to the largest strip mine in the United

States.  What to do about the thousands of Navajos who lived in the way of

the mining?

John Boyden was up to the challenge.  He went back to Congress with new

legislation to divide Black Mesa and give almost a million acres to the

Hopi.  By transferring land to the Hopi, who lived far away from the strip

mining, Navajo residents would become trespassers on the newly designated

Hopi land, and the cost of removing them would be borne by the government.

 To frame the issue for Congress, Boyden hired a public relations firm that

created a largely fictional range war between the cattle-ranching Hopi and

the sheepherding Navajo.

In 1974, Congress, somewhat distracted by Watergate, passed Boyden's bill

and granted the Hopi 900,000 acres.  The law also provided for the physical

removal of the Navajo (by the Indian Relocation Commission), but the

problem, of course, was that there was nowhere for the Navajo to go.

Congress had no plans for alternative lands, no provisions for housing or

health care or social services to acclimate the Navajo to an urban

environment.  Suicide and alcoholism became endemic among the displaced

Navajo, but by the 1980s, when the Navajo and their supporters came to

Congress to protest their situation, they had a hard time finding

 listeners.  Peabody Coal had a new parent, a private holding company which

included Bechtel.  And by then, Bechtel was entrenched in government:

Bechtel's former president George Schultz was Secretary of State; its former

legal counsel, Caspar Weinberger, was Secretary of Defense; and former

director of Bechtel Nuclear, Ken Davis, was Assistant Secretary of Energy.

 The president of Peabody Coal served on Reagan's Energy Advisory Board.

The Navajo Generating Station at Page

While the Mohave Generating Station is a model of bad technology in the

service of terrible land use, the Navajo Generating Station, at the

Arizona-Utah border, is a case study of a political process out of control.

 As soon as the Mohave plant was completed, Bechtel moved its construction

crews to the tiny town of Page, Arizona, overlooking the scenic Glen Canyon

Dam, to begin construction ona second electrical generating station--another

giant at 2,250 megawatts, the second largest utility station in the U.S.

 Somebody named it the Navajo Generating Station, a name rich in irony,

since fewer than half of Navajo families have electricity.

The U.S.  government was the single largest owner.  The Department of the

Interior needed the electricity to run a federal water project, the Central

Arizona Project (see map), locally known as CAP.  CAP is a concrete highway

for water--infrastructure that lifts the waters of the Colorado River over

three mountain ranges in order to carry it to Phoenix and Tucson.  This

engineering feat involves siphons, tunnels, dams, reservoirs, and fifteen

electrically powered pumping stations.  "With enough money, anything is

possible," an engineer told me when I asked about the economic rationale for

growing crops by means of the most expensive subsidized water in the world.

 The power to run the fifteen pumping stations comes, of course, from Black

Mesa coal.

The political issues raised by the Navajo Generating Station are unique. The

majority owner of the plant is the Bureau of Reclamation in the Department

of the Interior.  Within the same interior department is the Bureau of

Indian Affairs, the agency legally entrusted with safeguarding Indian lands

and resources.  Questions immediately arise: How can the U.S. government

exercise its trusteeship responsibility toward Indians when one of its

agencies is benefiting directly from the coal leases that it encouraged the

Indians to sign, negotiated by lawyers that it had appointed? Did the BIA

exercise its fiduciary responsibility in negotiating the leases on Black

Mesa? Who reviews conflicts of interest within the government?

In an era of transnational corporations operating all over the globe, the

methods of separating indigenous peoples from their lands and natural

resources have outstripped the capacity of any agency or nongovernmental

organization to monitor or regulate.  In what forum can we debate and

redirect such dealings, which have such profound effects on life itself?

The line on the map that runs from Lake Havasu south to Tucson represent 335

miles of the most expensive water in the world.  Phoenix and Tucson are

located in the Sonoran desert, the hottest desert in North America, and the

day I toured the control room of the Central Arizona Project, in August

1991, was a typical summer Phoenix day--113 degrees in the shade.  I chatted

with the operations manager, a retired Navy man who told me how they had

built special bridges for wildlife crossings, fenced the aqueduct so that

animals wouldn't drown, and implemented other engineering feats of

environmental sensitivity.  Looking at the pulsing computer screens and the

operators who, with a few key strokes, could release millions of gallons of

water from the Colorado River into grapefruit orchards and cotton fields

hundreds of miles away, I wondered if it wouldn't be more sensible to farm

in regions with a better water supply--like rain.

The Line That Isn't There

The line that isn't on the map is formed by a barbed wire fence: the new

boundary of the Hopi reservation follows no known topographical feature.

 Shaped a bit like a thumb, it was drawn by John Boyden in 1974, the same

year that the Navajo Generating Station came on line and the same year that

his little-noticed bill passed Congress.

The Hopi Land Settlement Act divided Chester Arthur's 1882 reservation

between the Hopi and Navajo.  Boyden drew the line so that it gave

approximately nine hundred thousand acres to the Hopi, who did not live over

the coal, and relocated, at taxpayer expense, the twelve thousand Navajos

(and sixty Hopi) who did.  The Hopi Land Settlement Act also renamed the

newly delineated land as the Hopi Navajo Joint Use Area, Hopi Partition

Land, and Navajo Partition Land.  The final version was introduced by Utah

Congressman Wayne Owens (who, when defeated in reelection, became a partner

in Boyden's law firm).

In Los Angeles, air conditioners hummed.  Las Vegas embarked on an enormous

building spree to make gambling a family vacation.  Phoenix and Tucson

metastasized out into the desert--building golf courses and vast retirement

developments with swimming pools and fountains.  Few realize that much of

the energy that makes the desert "bloom" comes from the Black Mesa strip

mines on an Indian reservation.  Even fewer know the true costs of such

development.

The Syncline and Roberta Blackgoat

Over thousands of years the Black Mesa coal field was subjected to tectonic

pressures and extrusions of molten rock hundreds of feet below the surface

that caused the coal bed to fold and curve.  Geologists call the curvature

that comes close to the surface a syncline.  (On the map, a syncline is

indicated by a wavy line with a slash through it.)

Roberta Blackgoat lives over a syncline.  A Navajo who has lived on Black

Mesa all her life, Roberta's cosmology tells her that she is inseparable

from the land that surrounds her.  When each of her children was born she

buried his or her umbilical cord in her sheep corral to connect them to the

land from which they come and the sheep who support them.  (With sheep, the

older Navajos say, "you've always got food on the table and clothes on your

back.") When I visited her in February of 1991 I asked about the new

boundary line and her view of the forces that dictated her relocation from

land her family had lived on since the 1860s.

"The coal," she answered with a shrug.  She was sitting at her loom in the

back of her hogan weaving.  I sat on a sheepskin spread over a dirt floor. I

had placed my tape recorder next to her loom.  As we talked she repeatedly

referred to the altar.  Finally I asked, But where is the altar?

Here.  Here, she answered impatiently.  Eventually I understood that the

altar was the spot where she was sitting, the hogan itself.

When I looked at the frame, I saw large logs, all placed in the direction

they grew and in relationship to the sacred mountains of Dinetah, the land

of the Navajo.  A hogan, Roberta explained, is sung into place.  Is there

also a carpenter? I wanted to know.  She shook her head.  No carpenter.

Songs.  A ceremony brings a hogan into being.  As we talked, I began to

understand that a hogan replicates the Navajo universe in miniature, and

that all human activity is directed towards remaining in balance with the

earth and universal forces.  Many Navajo people who move into the city often

build a hogan in their backyards as a place to reestablish spiritual

connection with the earth and to bring their lives into balance.

Roberta, whose grandmotherly appearance belies her forceful, astute

leadership of the Big Mountain resistance, described to me a paradigm in

 which the earth is a sacred and living organism, in which human beings and

the earth exist in a reciprocal relationship.  This reciprocity is the

foundation for her life.  We are the people of the earth's surface, she told

me, and no more important than the winged creatures or four-legged beings.

 The day before, as we rode to Keams Canyon, she tried to translate this

concept into Anglo terms.  The church is everywhere, she said.

Land is the repository for religion, economics, sociology, history, science.

And that is why she couldn't leave her land.  And what about the coal, I

asked, in the hogan.  The shuttle stopped.  Roberta spoke very clearly. "The

coal is the liver of the earth," she said.  "When you take it out, she

dies."

It was my turn to sit in silence.  Separated by only five feet of space, we

were occupying two different models of reality.  I had been taught that land

was a kind of primal flooring for human beings, of value only when prodded

into productive use.  Roberta was describing the earth as the living host

for all life.  She was talking about earth's sustaining properties in a way

that we, educated in the world of Western science, have only recently begun

to call the biosphere.

How does one calculate the true costs of extinguishing such a complex

culture?

True Costs and New Stories

Divide and conquer has a long history in America as a technique of removing

Indians from their lands, a situation that is being replicated by

transnational corporations throughout the world.  As former United Nations

Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali observed about the struggles of

indigenous peoples, "Cultures which do not have powerful media are

threatened with extinction.  The instruments of mass communication remain in

the service of a handful." Over the past twenty-five years over twelve

thousand Americans have been removed from their lands.  Over a billion

dollars of taxpayers' money has been spent to accomplish this human rights

abuse.

Yet this story has never made it onto the six o'clock news.

Today's news must be presented simply, and dramatically--with plot,

character, scene, motivation.  A complex story that blends economics,

politics, anthropology, history is hard to tell in our free press.  And a

story that examines fundamental corporate activities is hard to tell in a

corporate-owned media.  As recently as 1996, The New York Times called the

struggle between the Hopi and Navajo "a centuries-old tribal dispute." In

April 1997, The Boston Globe devoted thirty-three column inches to a story

on the Hopi and Navajo boundary issue without once mentioning the word

"coal" or stating that the largest strip mine in the United States operated

on those same lands.  In February 1998, The Los Angeles Times presented a

new spin: it is better to keep polluting than to deprive the Indian tribes

of their coal royalty checks.  Cleaning up the Mohave plant (actually it is

the Navajo plant that is the prime polluter) "pits the interests of the

environment against the economic needs of some of the nation's poorest

citizens--the Native Americans of the Southwest." The implications of that

debate, as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power general manager

told us, provide "a sneak preview of the dilemmas to come as we try to

grapple with the implications of global warming and air pollution in

developing nations that depend on the energy industry."

Hopefully, that false syllogism will be refuted when the real story of how

the Mohave plant was developed finds a public.  To date, the news of events

at Black Mesa has been shaped into the preferred narratives of corporate

America--stories of corporate might grappling with economic progress,

technological innovation, entrepreneurial capitalism, the settling of the

American West, making the desert bloom.  In the age of global capitalism in

which corporations have bought the media, it is not surprising we see few

stories about effective political resistance.  Journalists look for a

smoking gun in the corporate energy development on Black Mesa and, finding

none, abandon the story.  It is difficult to tell a story of legal theft, a

story in which corporations have the political power to pass laws.  But as

the Navajo and Hopi have tried to explain, Black Mesa, once destroyed, will

not come back.  And we are all impoverished by the forces operating at Black

Mesa, which degrade both culture and nature, and offer us instead a

pseudo-reality--a version of events that prevents clear analysis and

creative thinking.  We need new tools, new narratives, new

stories--including stories about an economics that involves morality, an

economics that helps us create the world we want to inhabit.

A year ago a delegation of Hopis and Navajos traveled from Arizona to the

London stockholders meeting of Hanson's Ltd.  (which had purchased Peabody

in 1991) to protest the company's role in the devastation of Black Mesa

lands and water.  Lord Hanson called his security guards to throw the

visitors out, but not before The Daily Telegraph reported their presence and

took a photograph of Roberta Blackgoat offering a prayer.  The prayer, she

said, was crucial.  *

Judith Nies is the author of Seven Women: Portraits from the American

Radical Tradition (Viking l977) and Native American History (Ballantine

l997).  She is a former congressional speechwriter and assistant secretary

of environmental affairs for the state of Massachusetts.  She writes on

environment and politics.

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