by Nies, Judith
After the Goldwater-Boyden-Udall bill passed in 1958, setting up the special court, Boyden filed the necessary papers, the case was heard in 1960, and the decision was handed down on September 28, 1962. The Navajo appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Court declined to hear the case, supposedly after some influential input from Secretary Udall. Discussions were already under way about mineral leasing on the 1882 reservation.
The Hopi traditional leaders were horrified that sacred land was going to be leased for strip mining. Assisted by the Native American Rights Fund, traditional Hopi elders went to court to sue to stop the strip-mining leases, claiming that the leases had been obtained illegally at a time when the Hopi Tribal Council did not have a legal quorum as required by their constitution. They also called Secretary Udall’s approval of the coal leases “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion.”
We the Hopi leaders have watched as the white man has destroyed his land, his water and his air. The white man has made it harder for us to maintain our traditional ways and religious life. Now for the first time we have decided to intervene in the white man’s court to prevent the final devastation. We should not have had to go this far. Our words have not been heeded. We can no longer watch as our sacred lands are wrested from our control and as our spiritual center disintegrates. We cannot allow our spiritual homelands to be taken from us. The hour is already late.
Their case was filed but not heard. The Court ruled that the Hopi traditional priests had no “standing” before the Court. Only the Hopi Tribal Council had legal standing and could sue in the name of the Hopi people.
The book by Helen Sekaquaptewa and Louise Udall was published in 1969, the same year that the Mohave Generating Station opened in Laughlin, Nevada, powered by Black Mesa coal and with water piped from the Hopi-Navajo aquifer beneath the 1882 reservation. Even though the book authored by Louse Udall and Helen Sekaquaptewa contains no mention of coal or the leases that their sons had negotiated, it tells a poignant story of how American national policies successfully alienated Indians from their own culture. When viewed as a window into America’s colonial system, it both is instructive and explains how the family became John Boyden’s willing ally. Anthropologist Richard Clemmer believes that the Sekaquaptewas, like other Christian Hopi, were outside the traditional Hopi world. As Mormons, they were not followers of the Hopi way; they were ranchers, not farmers; and the sons followed professions not common to most Native people. Consequently, they needed to prove themselves through the institutions that were open to them. The tribal government became an outlet for their beliefs and a stage on which to engage issues they believed were important.
The Mormons believe in the religious instructions in Genesis. Go forth and dominate: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens and over every creeping thing.” Productivity means extracting whatever mineral resources lie beneath the land.
KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN
Helen Sekaquaptewa’s childhood was traumatic. At the age of six she was kidnapped by federal agents and transported to the boarding school in Keams Canyon to learn English and “be educated.” She did not return to her village until she was eleven. “The first English I learned was ‘get in line’ ‘get in line,’” Helen wrote. Until the official end of the Indian wars, in the 1880s, US policy had been active extermination of the Indians, coupled with a passive expectation that they would simply disappear. Indian peoples were uniformly described as “a vanishing race.”* But when it became clear that the Indians were not vanishing, new policies were put in place to deal with “the Indian problem.” Reformers in the East like Senator Henry Dawes decided it was important to break up Native landholdings and passed the Allotment Acts in which individual tribal members were to receive a 160-acre parcel of land and the remainder of the reservation would be sold as “surplus.” Indian nations lost two-thirds of their land base while the allotment policy was in force. A corollary policy was the introduction of Civilization and Assimilation, by which Indians were to be Christianized and assimilated into the American mainstream. By 1885 the government had established 106 Indian boarding schools, many of them on abandoned military installations, with the motto “Kill the Indian and save the man.” The commonly understood subtext was that in order to “civilize the savages,” it was first necessary to destroy Native American culture.
As Rayna Green has written in To Lead and to Serve about the Indian boarding school system that executed the new policy, “It was ironic, indeed, that a society that declared the education of blacks and slaves illegal insisted on teaching Indians to read and write, often sending military units to separate them from their parents and homes.”
One of the boarding schools opened in Keams Canyon, and it was for Hopi and Navajo children, although there were many more Hopi children than Navajo. The Navajo children were difficult to round up because they lived in such dispersed sheepherding camps. But the Hopi children lived in houses in compact villages located on the edge of Black Mesa. The ancient village of Oraibi was one of the first places targeted by the Office of Indian Affairs to implement the new policy and place Hopi children in school. Emory Sekaquaptewa Sr., for example, was five years old in 1906 when government officers raided the Hopi village of Oraibi before dawn, plucked up sleeping children out of their beds, tossed them in horse-drawn wagons, and took them to Keams Canyon. Once at the boarding school, they could not go home until their parents signed an agreement promising they would return their children for future instruction. The next year Helen, who was six, was snatched from her family.
Government actions in the Hopi villages made the signing of a parental consent form extremely difficult. More than seventy Hopi fathers from the families who had resisted “educating their children” were taken off to jail, leaving the remaining family members in confusion and despair. Some fathers went to jail for ninety days, others for years. Emory Sr.’s father was sent to the Indian prison in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Helen’s father was given a sentence of a year in prison at Fort Huachuca, in southern Arizona. “The posts that sent out men to kill their fathers to solve ‘the Indian problem’ became the place where Indian children were taken to be dressed in military uniforms and absorbed into the American mainstream.” Although the government policy was to keep the children for nine months and send them home for the summer, if the parents didn’t sign the form, the children didn’t get to go home. Helen and Emory Sr. didn’t get to see their parents or their village again for another five years. In the meantime, the boarding school staff became their surrogate parents. They adapted to institutional life.
Once in boarding school, they were given Anglo names—Helen and Emory—forbidden from speaking the Hopi language, and punished if they sang any of their traditional songs or did any dances. The school matrons cut their hair, gave them military uniforms to wear, and housed them in a long military-style dormitory with cots in long rows. For the next twelve years, home was a succession of boarding schools—first in Keams Canyon, then the Indian school in Phoenix—all regimented by military bugle and drill and Christian instruction. “We marched to the dining room three times a day to band music,” Helen wrote. “Corporal punishment was given as a matter of course [with] a harness strap.”
The Indian children were expected to be part of the servant class and were taught skills they were expected to use in the Anglo world. The girls learned laundry and sewing; the boys learned carpentry and construction. In military pedagogy, discipline and obedience were key educational values. Helen Sekaquaptewa said she spent years learning how to organize in parade lines, march to military music, wash and iron vast piles of laundry, clean toilets, prepare meals, and scrub floors. “It was a military school. . . . We arose to a bell and had a given time for making our beds, cleaning our rooms, and being ready for breakfast. Everything was done on schedule, and there was no time for idleness. Our clothing was furnished by the government. We had long black st
ockings and heavy black shoes, but the dresses were of good material.”
Roberta Blackgoat also went to the same boarding school and hated the uniforms because they were made of wool and were very itchy. She was ten years old when her family sent her to the Keams Canyon school, but it was during the 1920s and there wasn’t enough to eat on the reservation. She was one of the children who resisted and ran away. She told me this as we drove through Keams Canyon, waving to a spot where the school used to be. Even before the school was built, Indian agent E. S. Merrit tried to dissuade the Indian Office from putting a school in Keams Canyon. The canyon “is very unhealthy, the air at night particularly heavy & cold. . . . [T]he Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico want day schools, that is all.”
Many students tried to run away. Others feigned acceptance, never losing their Indian ways of thinking and being. But for others the uniforms and the strict discipline came to be their way of life. By the time Emory Sr. got to high school in Phoenix, the school authorities considered him so trustworthy that they sent him after the Indian runaways. “Emory would go to town,” wrote Helen, “on the streetcar and look around the streets, but sometimes they would get as far away as Glendale or Peoria. Then Emory would have to go by train, and when he found them bring them back and deliver the boys to their disciplinarian and the girls to the matron.” It was not taken lightly, these Indians who resisted becoming civilized. “Boys were put in the school jail. . . . Repeaters had their heads shaved and had to wear a dress to school.” Girls were given punishments like “cutting the grass with scissors while wearing a card that said, ‘I ran away.’” Corporal punishment “was given as a matter of course; whipping with a harness strap was administered in an upstairs room to the most unruly. One held the culprit while another administered the strap.”
The better they adapted to boarding school life, the worse they fit in when they went back to the reservation. They had new Anglo names, spoke English better than Hopi, dressed in Anglo clothes, and expected to do the same jobs they had learned in boarding school. The rift between the Hopi parents and their boarding school children was wide. Helen and Emory were good examples. They had been raised on military pedagogy: drill, discipline, the Bible.
In 1919 Emory Sekaquaptewa Sr. returned to the Hopi reservation and went to work for the BIA Agency in Hotevilla, in charge of maintaining the buildings and the power plant. Hotevilla was the new “friendly” village that had been founded in 1906 after the schism in Oraibi between the “hostiles” and the “friendlies” over education. The issue of educating their children in Anglo schools caused such turmoil in Oraibi that the village split in two between the traditional “hostile” chief and the progressive “friendly” chief, and the new village of Hotevilla was formed. Half the families of Old Oraibi resisted Anglo education and stayed put; the other half left and started a new town four miles away on the other side of Third Mesa, near the Hotevilla spring. The younger chief of Old Oraibi wanted to cooperate with the government; the old chief Yokeoma, called the Hostile Chief, resisted. In 1912 the BIA sent Yokeoma to Washington for a meeting with President Taft to force him to promise to send the Hopi children to Keams Canyon boarding school. He resisted to the very end.
When Emory and Helen married, they had a Christian ceremony as well as a Hopi ceremony. The Christian ceremony, performed by a Mennonite minister, did not sit well with their Hopi neighbors, nor did the fact that they welcomed white teachers and government workers into their home. Their third son, Abbott, was named after Helen’s good friend Miss Abbott, an Anglo teacher on the reservation. When things with her neighbors became difficult, she confessed, she used to visit Miss Abbott to “talk things over.”
While the Sekaquaptewas had strained relations with their neighbors, they were invaluable to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They were Christian, progressive in attitude, spoke excellent English, and had adopted Anglo ways. They encouraged their children to get an education and become Christians. Consequently, not one of the five Sekaquaptewa sons was initiated into the Hopi priesthood. The Sekaquaptewas were known as “friendlies” as opposed to “hostiles.” By the 1950s those terms had changed to “progressives” and “traditionals,” but the underlying attitudes remained the same. During a crucial period the Sekaquaptewa sons all occupied pivotal positions in Hopi government.
THE INVENTED RANGE WAR
The court case between the Hopi and Navajo established three things: the Hopi’s exclusive right to a land area called District 6, the principle that the Hopi would share equally in any mineral-leasing royalties on the 1882 reservation, and that only Congress had the right to draw boundary lines. Then began ten years of maneuvering and negotiations.
The actual coal-mining leases were signed with a Salt Lake City company called Sentry Royalty Company between 1964 and 1966. Sentry was a subsidiary of Peabody Coal. Immediately, Kennecott Copper bought Peabody Coal and the Sentry leases. Later some of the Hopi Tribal Council members would say they never knew they were actually negotiating with a multinational mining company. Nor did they know they were selling water rights. Time sheets and billing correspondence later confirmed that John Boyden was working for Peabody Coal and Kennecott Copper at the same time he was working for the Hopi. “Dear Mr. Phelps,” began his letters to Edward R. Phelps, vice president of Peabody Coal, when he was writing in his role as the Hopi tribal attorney. “Dear Ed,” he began when he was writing as Peabody’s attorney. He did far better in meeting the needs of the coal company than his Hopi clients. The discovery of his Peabody Coal file in the archives at the University of Utah confirmed his billing records and his correspondence for both Peabody and Kennecott. In addition, his law firm in Salt Lake City had listed Peabody Coal as one of their named clients in Martindale-Hubbell, the national index of law firms.
By 1971 circumstances had changed in relation to construction of the Central Arizona Water Project, a project of enormous importance to the people of central and southern Arizona and the politicians who had worked on it for thirty years. It appeared that it would be impossible to put another dam on the Colorado River to provide the hydroelectricity to pump 1.9 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River into Phoenix and Tucson. Instead, the Bureau of Reclamation would have to buy a fourth of the electricity from the still-to-be-constructed Navajo Generating Station. The coal supply to run that plant would require a second mining site on Black Mesa.
In 1971 John Boyden and Barry Goldwater introduced another bill before Congress, the Hopi Land Settlement Act, a bill that would actually physically divide the Executive Order Reservation, giving approximately 2 million acres to the Hopi, and removing the still-uncounted Navajo who lived in the way.
It is a maxim of public relations that to influence opinion, events need to be organized into a story, preferably a story line that the public has heard before. A theme of many Hollywood western movies was the range war, a basic conflict between homesteaders who wanted to farm and ranchers who wanted open range to graze livestock. It made for a dramatic story that people believed represented real western history. Well coached by John Boyden and the public relations firm of Evans and Associates, Abbott Sekaquaptewa appeared before a congressional hearing in 1973 and raised the issue of an oncoming range war and open warfare between the Navajo aggressors and the peaceful Hopi.
The Navajo tribe has systematically by use of force, threat, coercion, and intimidation excluded the Hopi people from the lands secured to them by the federal court in Healing v. Jones. We cannot understand how this state of affairs can be condoned by the federal government in the face of a court order to the contrary. Violence and destruction are as common today as they have been historically in this conflict. It is not beyond imagination that open warfare will once again become the order of the day.
For two years national newspapers were running photos of burned corrals, shot-up stock tanks, and roadside signs riddled with bullet holes. Sunday magazine features focused on the smoldering “range war” between the two trib
es, calling them the Arabs and the Israelis of the American Southwest. Abbott Sekaquaptewa appeared on Sixty Minutes. “Marauding Navajo tribesmen [have] always been a time of trial and tribulation for my people. Particularly during my own lifetime, the relentless Navajo dominance and forcible occupation of Hopi land has become a creature of the night, a living nightmare.”
Most of Abbott Sekaquaptewa’s testimony had been written by Evans and Associates. As it happened, Evans and Associates was also the same public relations firm for the trade association known as WEST (Western Supply and Transmission), the twenty-three utility companies that were building the power plants and paying for the strip-mined coal from Black Mesa that would run them.
People on the reservation said that it was white men from out of town who were shooting up the signs. The only national newspaper to run an alternative version of events was the Washington Post. “The locus of Hopi policy seems to be in Salt Lake City,” wrote Mark Panitch, “where the Hopi’s energetic and effective lawyer, John Boyden, and the public relations counsel are headquartered. Much of the Hopi success can be attributed to their Mormon allies.” The Mormons had excellent media and communications channels so that the Hopi side of the story dominated in the national press. Coal, the power plants, and the coal-slurry line and the importance of energy for the Sunbelt Boom often went unmentioned.
By 1973 the bill to partition the Executive Order Reservation had been revised several times, and Abbott Sekaquaptewa’s public remarks reached an operatic crescendo: