by Nies, Judith
*The Serpent Mound was saved from destruction in the 1890s by Frederick Putnam of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, who raised the money to save it. Supposedly, it was the women of Boston who collected the needed funds. Cahokia was not seriously studied by archaeologists until the 1960s. Today it is a United Nations World Heritage Site.
*Not everyone followed Brigham Young. The reform Mormons voted to follow another leader to St. Louis. Some went to Texas. The reorganized church under Joseph’s son went to Independence, Missouri.
*When Mormon bishop Mitt Romney ran for US president in 2012, he told the press that his father was born in Mexico. He didn’t follow up by explaining that after the first federal antibigamy law of 1862 and enforcement of a stronger act of 1880, Mormon men who had multiple wives avoided the law by moving to Mexico. His great-grandfather Miles Romney, a man of great prominence in the Mormon Church and a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, had a total of five wives and thirty-three children. One of his grandsons was George W. Romney, Mitt’s father. Another Romney grandson became a law partner of John Boyden. Before leaving for Mexico, Miles Romney lived in St. George and served as chief of police, attorney at law, newspaper editor, and architect. His name is on the brass plaque outside the St. George tabernacle, where he is listed as superintendent of construction.
CHAPTER 8
LEGAL THEFT
Tuba City began as a Mormon settlement in the 1870s. Although it is on the Navajo reservation, it is near the Hopi town of Moencopi and named for a Hopi headman called Chief Toova. At some point in 1880, the Mormon leader, Jacob Hamblin, who spoke six Indian languages including Hopi, took Toova and his wife, Talasnimka, to visit Salt Lake City.
Seventy years later Talasnimka’s great-niece Helen Sekaquaptewa recalled the first cast-iron stove on the Hopi mesas that arrived after their journey as well as her family’s long connection with Mormon missionaries and Anglo institutions. “The first full-time missionaries . . . to come to our house,” wrote Helen Sekaquaptewa, “were Brother Virgil Bushman and his wife Ruth.” Like John Boyden, they were from Salt Lake City, and they were visiting the Sekaquaptewa family because their eldest son, Emory Sekaquaptewa Jr., was having a personal crisis. Emory Jr. was the first Arizona Indian ever to get an appointment to West Point. But at some point during his stay at the military academy, he became seriously ill and was given a medical discharge. Back in the village of Hotevilla on Third Mesa, he was at loose ends about what to do next. He was twenty-two years old, filled with disappointment about his failed military career, and uncertain about what his future might hold.
The missionary Bushmans suggested that Emory Jr. might want to attend Brigham Young University (BYU), where the new president, Ernest Wilkinson—John Boyden’s former law partner—had just launched a special program for Native Americans. Brigham Young University is openly supported by the Mormon Church and has a curriculum that includes mandatory religious instruction for all students. Wilkinson was an ardent believer in Mormon education and in educating the Lamanites into the Mormon religion. “The Book of Mormon,” Wilkinson wrote, “holds that some of the ancestors of the American Indian once constituted a great Christian civilization and predicts that in modern times the Book of Mormon will speak to them as a ‘voice from the dust’ to remind them of their identity and help them rise to greatness once again.”
Soon Emory Jr. was on his way to Provo, Utah, and a degree in anthropology from BYU.* Even after Emory Jr. had departed, the Bushmans continued to visit the Sekaquaptewa household once a week, “teaching Emory [Sr.], Abbott, and me the Gospel in a systematic way. I read the Book of Mormon. It sounded exactly like the Hopi tradition.”
In 1951 John Boyden and the Mormon missionaries were able to offer the Sekaquaptewa family something quite valuable: the opportunity for their children to succeed in the white world. For parents who saw too much of the economic hardship of reservation life, the purposefulness and material success of the Mormon world seemed a compelling alternative.
Illness had also overtaken their third son, Abbott, while he was at the Indian boarding school in Phoenix. A year earlier he was struck down with an attack of arthritis so severe that he was in the hospital for a year. Helen reported that he wrote to her and told her about the kindness of the Mormon elders who had come to visit him in the hospital and introduced him to the Book of Mormon. According to Helen, Abbott said, “Here is a religion we should get interested in, and try to learn more about.” Helen herself was receptive because, as she put it in her memoir, Me and Mine, she came from a family that “had always been progressive towards Christianity.”
Although the many letters and documents discussing the boundaries for a Hopi reservation in the 1870s and ’80s do not name the “white men” who were harassing the Hopi villagers, they may well have been Mormon missionaries from Tuba City and Hamblin’s men delivering alien objects like the cast-iron cookstove. The intensely traditional Hopis would have strongly objected to the delivery of foreign implements from the Anglo world.
Although the Hopi live clustered in eleven villages at the top of six-hundred-foot cliffs at the western edge of Black Mesa, for centuries they lived by growing corn and other vegetables in distant dry washes that retained belowground water from spring and summer rains. The runoff collected in porous formations. Many of these agricultural fields were located many miles away from the villages. In 1882 Indian agent J. H. Fleming confirmed that “the lands most desirable for the Moquis, & which were cultivated by them 8 or 10 years ago, have been taken up by the Mormons.” Two years earlier, in 1880, Galen Eastman, the Hopi Indian agent, reporting to Inspector Howard, urgently requested reservation boundaries: “Believing that the Mormons are about to settle on land that ought to be embraced in a Moquis Pueblo Indian Reservation, I cannot await the tardy appearance of the expected new Agent.”
Helen reported that when Toova and her great-aunt returned from their travels to Salt Lake City, they were “like Marco Polo,” telling of large cities and clever “new things” never seen on the Hopi mesas, like “yeast, a coffeepot, a dishpan, and a Dutch oven.” Hamblin arranged for the delivery of the first cast-iron oven to their village, and she remembered from her own childhood how she had been “fascinated with the tiny door that had a slide in it to make a draft.” She also remembered that Talasnimka adopted Mormon clothing and writes that she was “wearing a cotton dress and a bonnet.”
In the 1950s while her children attended high school at the Phoenix Indian School, Helen lived in Phoenix. On Sundays she attended the meetings of the Mormon Relief Society—the Mormon women’s organization whose purpose is to “build faith and personal righteousness, strengthen families and homes, and help those in need”—on the Maricopa reservation, outside of Phoenix. By then she was a baptized Mormon, and she frequently got a ride out with Louise Udall, who came from a particularly well-connected Mormon family.
Louise Udall was the wife of the chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, Levi Udall. A Udall cousin was the mayor of Phoenix; another was married to the president of the Mormon Church. Two of her sons were en route to impressive careers in Washington, DC. One son, Stewart, was a congressman, and during the years his mother attended the Women’s Relief Society meetings with Helen Sekaquaptewa, he rose in the world to become secretary of interior. Another son, Morris, took his brother’s congressional seat and was working his way up to become chairman of the House Interior Committee, the powerful congressional committee that oversees all national legislation pertaining to mining, mineral rights, water, energy, and Indian lands. (Until 1951 the House Interior Committee was called the Committee on Public Lands, renamed in 1993 as the Committee on Natural Resources.)
By the 1960s the two women became so close that they decided to collaborate on a book together. Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa (as told to Louise Udall) was published in 1969. Described as “a little classic” and “must reading for its portrayal of life among a proud people,” the book was a portrait in
which the inevitable conversion to Mormonism was a triumph of a life journey well lived. The book contained not one mention of the great coal deposits that had been discovered beneath the Hopi Navajo lands or that the Udall sons had a major role in extracting the coal for energy for the urban centers of the Southwest, particularly Phoenix and Tucson. There was no mention of Abbott Sekaquaptewa’s negotiating the coal leases that Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall approved, no mention of the complex history that these lands contained. As Brian Morton, a scholar of the Hopi and Navajo coal leases, pointed out, “Coal mining on Black Mesa happened because of a demand for electricity in Sunbelt cities.”
“New jobs, large tax benefits, and tremendous economic advantages—not only for the two Indian tribes—but for the entire southwest,” proclaimed Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in announcing the leases in 1966. The leases ran for thirty-five years and were renewable for another thirty-five. They violated every guideline that the Department of the Interior had set up for leasing on public lands: no competitive bidding, no automatic renegotiation clauses, a fixed rate rather than a percentage royalty rate. The Hopi got $1.67 per acre-foot for water rights that in 1987 were renegotiated at $427 per acre-foot. The Navajo got $5 per acre-foot. The royalty rate on public lands for coal mining was $1.50 per ton. The Hopi and Navajo split a rate of 37 cents per ton.
Author and photographer Alvin Josephy, who was working in the Interior Department at the time and who took the photographs for Secretary Udall’s environmental book, The Quiet Crisis, later wrote in Audubon magazine that the Black Mesa leases were “a textbook example of the lack of accountability by government agencies working hand-in-glove with industry in the United States today.”
SECRETARY STEWART UDALL
Even in the glamorous, style-conscious Kennedy administration, Stewart Udall was a glittering figure. A man of great personal charm, he also had great instincts for power. Obeying the first law of the news camera, he stayed in motion. Images of the interior secretary were always appearing in magazines or on television: Stu Udall rafting rivers, Stu Udall climbing Mount McKinley (Denali) in Alaska, Stu Udall with environmentalists trekking through one of the national parks. He gave the colorless bureaucracy of Interior a new image, and in the process gave environmentalism a new platform. Like President Kennedy, he was photogenic and energetic.
He saw himself in the tradition of Harold Ickes and described himself as a New Deal Democrat, even a radical. “I was always involved . . . on behalf of minority groups and their causes. I had the kind of New Deal feelings about labor unions, economic justice, social justice. Therefore, I was pretty much, I think, in the 1950s, as a young politician, what we’d think of as a New Deal liberal. That didn’t necessarily fit my state because Arizona was growing more conservative.”
He launched his political career in 1956 as a congressman from Tucson. From the beginning he understood the key power centers in Arizona, one of which was the Valley National Bank in Phoenix. Five months into his first term, he cosponsored a bill with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater regarding the coal-rich lands on Black Mesa and received a congratulatory letter from a high official of the Valley National Bank of Phoenix. Thomas Shia was actively interested in Udall’s addition of an “interim mineral leasing” arrangement while the court case was in progress. He requested six copies of the bill, including a copy for Walter Bimson, president of the bank.
Stewart Udall was then thirty-five years old, young, handsome, personable, and in his first term of national office. Although he described himself as a small-town boy and the product of modest circumstances and small-town politics, the reality was different. His father, Levi Udall, was at that time chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, a post his uncle would take over after his father died. “I came out of a political family,” he told an oral history interviewer. “My father was a career judge, and judges were elected in Arizona. Therefore, living in a small town with a county courthouse, I grew up with elections.”
He learned about political campaigning after he came back from service in World War II, where he was in the Army Air Corps in the Italian campaign. “In the summer of 1946, my father made his big move. He was a small county judge in one of the smallest counties in the state, and he decided to run for the state Supreme Court, which had been his great ambition. . . . I was sort of his campaign aide and campaigned with him. I got my first indoctrination in politics there.”
After his father’s successful election to the Arizona Supreme Court, Udall returned to the University of Arizona, got his law degree, and in 1948 opened a law practice in Tucson with his brother Morris, known as Mo. Although the Udall brothers described themselves as lapsed Mormons, or Jack Mormons, they were known to be well connected at the highest levels of the Mormon Church. One uncle had married the sister of Spencer Kimball, twelfth president of the Mormon Church. Another uncle served in the Arizona Legislature. Their cousin Nicholas Udall was the mayor of Phoenix (from 1948 to 1952) and served with City Councilman Barry Goldwater before he became US senator. Stewart’s father was a Mormon bishop and a missionary president in the Mormon Church. Most of their male relatives had offices within the Mormon hierarchy.
The idea of male generational succession to political power is an important teaching of the Mormon Church, and in this regard the male members of the Udall family followed that expectation. After Stewart’s nomination to a cabinet post, his brother Morris took over his congressional seat, attaining the powerful chairmanship of the House Interior Committee. In 1976 he ran for US president. For more than a hundred years, four generations of Udalls have succeeded to political power in the Southwest. In 2009 New Mexico and Colorado elected the sons of Stewart and Morris to the US Senate.
Stewart Udall’s unexpected appointment to interior secretary in 1961 was crucial to the fate of the Hopi and Navajo reservation issue. In 1960 he was still an unknown second-term congressman from a minor state when he stepped into the national spotlight as head of the Arizona delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Everyone expected the western states to give their votes to Lyndon B. Johnson—a westerner, a man who understood the needs of the Southwest, and a man who referred to John F. Kennedy as “the boy.” “I understand you have to give your first vote to ‘the boy,’” he told Tip O’Neill. Massachusetts congressman O’Neill explained to him that with the Kennedy machine, there would be no second vote.
Stewart Udall was also subjected to pressure to vote for LBJ, but he stood firm for Kennedy. “Sam Rayburn called me into the well of the House,” Udall recalled, “and said he’d hate to see anyone from the West go against his friend Lyndon.” Arizona’s support for Kennedy was viewed as symbolically important in order to demonstrate that Kennedy could run well in the West. (In fact, Kennedy lost the West, carrying only three small states—New Mexico, Nevada, and Hawaii.) Udall, however, delivered the Arizona delegation to Kennedy at the convention, and his support in the face of Sam Rayburn’s pressure, as well as his own political skills, earned him the cabinet appointment. As secretary of interior, he was the kind of young, fresh face that the Kennedys were looking for. His appointment was hailed by conservationists as a brilliant choice, the finest appointment for Interior since Harold Ickes in the 1930s. In the West the interior secretary is considered a more important appointment than secretary of state.
In building a political base for his new vision for Interior’s activist mission, he copied his president, appealing to intellectuals. His book The Quiet Crisis was similar in format to Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. With a foreword by President Kennedy, it contained a series of biographies of the white, all-male leaders of the conservation tradition—John Muir, Joseph Wood Krutch, John Wesley Powell, Teddy Roosevelt, and John D. Rockefeller. The profiles had a few surprises. (There was no mention of Rachel Carson or Marjorie Stoneman Douglas.)
Stewart Udall did not see the contradictions, nor did he see himself as part of the eastern establishment. “I would characterize myself as a bit of an ide
alist I guess. I’m someone who had very strong ideas about what kind of society I wanted to see us develop in this country.”
THE UDALL-SEKAQUAPTEWA CONNECTION
Had Helen Sekaquaptewa converted to another institutional form of Christianity, the impact on her family would have been less profound. Had she become Baptist or Episcopalian, her religious affiliation would not have fed so directly into the political and economic structure of the American West. In joining the Mormon Church, the Sekaquaptewas’ religious affiliation merged with a much larger and more powerful governing reality. And by the 1960s, with Helen’s direct connection with the Udall family, she was directly involved with John Boyden’s role in shaping the new Hopi Tribal Council. Her son Abbott served on the tribal council during the 1950s and as chairman from 1961 to 1964 and then again from 1971 to 1981. In the decade from 1966 to 1976, he also served as chair of the Hopi Negotiating Committee, charged with working out a land-sharing arrangement with the Navajo. Another son, Wayne, owned the English-language newspaper and a construction firm and was president of the Mormon stake on the reservation. Emory Jr. worked as executive director of the tribal council.