Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  At another point I looked over the edge of a deep canyon to see an Anasazi cliff house carved into the amphitheater of a canyon wall. As the sun was setting she told me we were finally getting close to her mother’s camp and pointed out a series of earthen dams at the side of the road. “Those are to catch rainwater for the sheep,” she said. “You can store up to two days of water in those little catch basins.” In a region that receives only six to eight inches of rainfall a year, every means of storing water counts.

  At dusk we finally pulled into her mother’s camp, a cluster of buildings that included a three-room house (originally built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but now unfinished because her land had been designated as part of the new Hopi lands and she was not allowed to make any repairs), a round earth-covered hogan with an inviting plume of cedar smoke coming out of the center, a sheep corral made of split cedar rails, a henhouse, and in the distance two outhouses.

  On that visit in February 1991, Roberta was seventy-four years old, a woman with round cheeks, a warm smile, and shrewd eyes. She was plainly delighted to see Vicki and welcomed me with a hug. I was fascinated with the dignified way she carried herself as well as her elegant Navajo silver necklace and a huge turquoise cluster pin. Somehow, I never expected someone who lived as a sheepherder to be so elegantly turned out. On the other hand, this was a woman who had succeeded in helping to bring the issues of Black Mesa before the United Nations and the European Parliament.

  Both Vicki and Greg, an Anglo sheepherder sent by the Big Mountain support group to help her, teased her about the dazzling white sneakers that peeked out from under her long, tiered Navajo skirt and for refusing to remove the kerchief tied under her chin. She said it was to keep her hair out of her face. Long wisps of white hair escaped from under her kerchief because her hair kept coming out of the figure eight knotted at the nape of her neck. Her voice was high and raspy. I would learn that this was her voice in English; in Navajo it was low and authoritative.

  “Why are we going to the hogan?” Vicki asked as we walked away from the house toward the sheep corral. It was February and it was cold. Greg explained that Roberta had been sick with bronchitis and she thought that sleeping in the hogan would help her get better. The land around her three-room house, hogan, and sheep corral contained an eclectic collection of objects: a pile of stacked cedar logs, several hundred-gallon barrels for hauling water, oil drums cut in half, plastic one-gallon containers, a set of iron grates in different sizes, a pile of shiny coal from the Peabody mines, and the skull of what I would learn was a coyote. It was too dark to see much else. The next morning I also saw an exercise treadmill (a gift from a visitor who thought Roberta needed more exercise, even though sometimes she walked nine miles a day taking her sheep out to graze) and ancient Anasazi pottery shards with vivid geometric designs scattered in the dirt of the sheep corral. Her lands had once held a large settlement of people called the Anasazi.

  The next morning we were getting ready to go to Holbrook, where Vicki was to give a student talk about college preparation, when Roberta asked me to check the oil in her pickup truck. I leaned into the engine, found the dipstick, and pulled it out. We agreed it needed another quart. Even though she was the subsistence sheepherder and I was the urban dweller, I was certain she knew more about the workings of a combustion engine than I ever would.

  When I went to the hogan to get the can of oil, I looked around at the interior in daylight and realized how complex it was and how superficially I had judged it the night before. From the outside it looks like a bubble of mud. (The Healing v. Jones court decision had described Navajo dwellings as “rude shelters known as hogans, usually built of poles, sticks, bark, and moist earth.”) But from the inside it was substantial and intricate. The complex log frame was made of trees that were placed in the upright direction in which they grew. The door faced the east and the rising sun. In addition to being a perfectly organized one-room home, it was a miniature version of the Navajo cosmos. Many Navajo who moved to border towns around the reservation constructed hogans in their backyards. At the time three people were living and sleeping in the hogan—Greg the sheepherder, Vicki, and Roberta. At my request I slept in the unheated three-room house, mainly because the heat in the hogan was too warm for me to be able to sleep.

  At the entrance was a box of cedar chips and logs that were used to feed the fire. Around the edge was a big cooler, which held perishable food, a fifty-pound bag of dog food, several metal folding chairs, a tool box, a coffee tin that—I knew from dinner the night before—had cookies in it, a kerosene lantern perched on a stool, Roberta’s loom for weaving, and a box of automotive supplies that held the oil. The floor was covered with strips of denim over which were laid sheepskins.

  On the wall, however, was the item that astonished me and that remained in my mind long after I left. A large Rand McNally map of the world was tacked to the curve opposite the entrance. Each continent had colored tacks that marked locations in Africa, Australia, Asia, and South America where other indigenous people were fighting global corporations, several of them the same corporations she was dealing with on Black Mesa. Roberta Blackgoat understood she was engaged in an international enterprise.

  “Those are places like us,” Roberta said, pointing to one of the colored tacks, explaining that they were locations where other indigenous people were being pushed off their lands by mining corporations. I found myself remembering the map because the people in the way of “development” in third world countries wasn’t the way I had learned about “developing nations” in graduate school. The process by which Roberta was being removed from her lifetime land and home rested on a complex mix of laws, hearings, court cases, appeals, and ongoing lawsuits and was technically “legal,” although, as Senator DeConcini said, “inhumane.” The corporations had the ear of the government agencies, and tribal councils were often compromised. Corporate money was invested at every level of the process.

  Together we walked back to the truck. Vicki put in the oil, got in the driver’s seat, and motioned to me to get in the middle, and off we went. It was a cold February day, and a light dusting of snow muted the landscape into a vast expanse of chilly pastels. As we came up over a rise, I looked out at an oceanic vista of whites, blues, pinks where the sky and the land blended imperceptibly into one another. This is what infinity looks like, I thought.

  On the drive to Holbrook I asked Roberta if she had any other children like Vicki who lived so far away. No, she said. “My other four children all live in Arizona.” (Two daughters lived in Flagstaff and Tuba City; one son worked for Peabody Coal in Page; the other son taught Navajo language at the University of Northern Arizona.) She said the reason Vicki was able to travel and live so far from home was because she had given birth to Vicki at the Indian Health Service Hospital in Tuba City. All the other children had been born on the land, and Roberta had buried their umbilical cords in the sheep corral to link them to the earth from which they came and the sheep that nurtured them.

  THE INDEPENDENT DINÉ NATION

  Roberta Blackgoat was famous among the Navajo and among Indian activists for her leadership of the Independent Diné Nation. Although she was one of approximately sixteen thousand Navajo being removed from their lands on Black Mesa, she was also chairperson of the population of Navajo who had formed the Independent Diné Nation and seceded from the authority of the Navajo Tribal Council. In 1979 she had helped organize hundreds of families to sign the Proclamation of the Big Mountain Diné (Navajo) Nation to declare their independence from the Navajo tribal government. Their proclamation made a demand for the repeal of the Hopi Land Settlement Act, Public Law 93-531, as well as a declaration of intent to present charges of genocide and racism to the United Nations. Although it was a radical act, to go outside the US legal system and present a case before the United Nations, it had a secondary purpose of preventing AIM leaders from coming in and taking over the resistance.

  At the Indian school in Holbrook we sat
at a large table of parents while Vicki gave a presentation to their children about a summer-school program that would prepare the Navajo students for taking SATs for college admission. At our table the parents went around to introduce themselves, and when Roberta said, “Roberta Blackgoat,” everyone stared. “Are you really?” said one man in disbelief. It seemed to stop conversation. One woman later took me aside and said, “I certainly admire what she has done, but believe me we are not going back to sleeping on sheepskins.”

  Shortly afterward Roberta said to me, “Let’s go look for some concrete.” I drove her truck around Holbrook to different hardware stores while she explained to me the history of Arizona laws, US laws, the fate of Navajo chairperson Peter MacDonald, and what burning coal does to the planet. Thirty years before the Sierra Club’s “Say No to Coal” campaign or Bill McKibben’s 350.org, she was describing the permanent destructive effect that carbon would have on that membrane of air, land, and water where we all live. We did not yet have the term biosphere in popular usage. She wanted me to understand that she saw it as a much larger struggle than saving her personal sheepherding camp. In 1991 climate change was still known as the “greenhouse effect.” She was describing a shift in patterns of air, groundwater, and temperature that made climate change a permanent condition. I asked her how she knew so much about politics and activism.

  WE HOLD THE ROCK

  In the mid-1960s Tuba City had a Legal Aid office staffed by an Anglo husband-and-wife legal team. Tuba City had about four thousand residents then (today it has nine thousand), a hospital, schools, a bank, and an office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that kept track of Navajo livestock grazing permits. Other activities included a field office for the Atomic Energy Commission, a uranium mining corporation called Rare Metals, and a number of outlying uranium mines. The Navajo mines supplied more than three-fourths of the uranium used in the one thousand atomic tests held at the Nevada Test Site outside Las Vegas.* Tuba City still has an abandoned uranium mine on the outskirts of town with a tailings pile covered up with black sand, still blowing dust. I didn’t know that when I bought an orange T-shirt that advertised “Tuba City: Home of the Best Navajo Taco in the West.”

  The Tuba City Legal Aid office opened the first Indian Welfare Rights organization in the country. Martha Blue, the Legal Aid attorney who ran the office with her lawyer husband, said she started the organization to help Navajo women negotiate the bureaucratic complexities of a federal program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Navajo children who should have been receiving aid were being denied by the Arizona state administrators. AFDC was a federal program designed to help children in families living below the poverty line, which meant many families on the Navajo reservation should have been eligible. But Arizona state agencies routinely made it extremely difficult for Navajo women to get benefits.

  One day a Navajo woman named Roberta Blackgoat came to her office seeking help. “From our first meeting,” Martha Blue recalled, “it was clear Roberta was different from almost all the other Navajo welfare applicants that I’d represented. First of all, she was articulate in English. Second, she didn’t seem daunted about challenging the state government or the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” Roberta’s case was a typical example of a case that shouldn’t have been denied. Two years earlier Roberta’s husband had been changing a flat tire by the side of the road and had been struck and killed by an automobile. Roberta was left with five children to support, with the youngest, Vicki, still in grade school. As the head of a traditional Navajo family who lived in the deep interior of Black Mesa, Roberta was barely getting by with sheepherding and subsistence agriculture. She needed cash for necessities such as gas and medicines and groceries. She had filed for welfare assistance through the AFDC program, and the Arizona Welfare Department denied her claim.

  On what grounds? Martha asked. Roberta said the welfare office multiplied the number of her sheep by the market value and said her wealth was too great to qualify for the welfare program. Martha, who knew that a Navajo’s sheep were like a bank account, also knew that sheep were not liquid assets and could not be counted as income. When she asked more questions, she found that they also ruled against her because of the value of her pickup truck. Much of Roberta’s small cash income came from neighbors who paid her to drive them into Flagstaff or Holbrook, where they could buy groceries and supplies more cheaply than at the trading posts. Roberta charged them a fee for gas and transportation, and those fees were how she earned enough cash to make payments on her truck. The Arizona Welfare Department claimed that she was hiding income by running a “taxi service” with her pickup truck.

  Interviewed years later, Martha Blue added, “It’s also important to know she lived thirty miles away from the nearest paved highway, on an unimproved dirt road, sometimes no wider than a track, at an elevation of seven thousand feet. The nearest garage was probably a hundred miles away. She needed a reliable recent-model automobile with good brakes that wouldn’t break down.” Roberta already knew firsthand the tragedy that came from a broken-down vehicle at the side of the road. “Unlike a lot of Navajo families, Roberta always made sure she had a relatively new pickup truck and kept it in good repair.”

  Martha had traveled all over the Navajo reservation but described her one visit to Roberta’s sheepherding camp as “the most isolated place I’d ever been on the reservation and on the worst dirt roads. I felt as though I had never been so far from the amenities of the white world. It was a profound experience to feel I was in the middle of nowhere, lost, and isolated.”

  “Roberta had had some high school education,” she continued, “maybe even graduated. Because of her knowledge of English, she’d also served as chapter secretary for the Hard Rock Chapter. That was unusual for a woman at that time.” As Martha came to know her better, she said, “I felt she also had a strong sense of fairness and an expectation that people would respond to reason.”

  Martha took Roberta’s case, they appealed, and they won. This was in 1968. But the larger case was ongoing. Other welfare rights groups representing Hispanic and African American clients in Arizona had appealed to the federal government about Arizona’s arbitrary and capricious administration of the AFDC program. As a result the federal Department of Human Services (then called the Department of Health Education and Welfare) scheduled hearings in San Francisco to determine whether Arizona was out of compliance with federal guidelines.

  Although Martha Blue was not optimistic that she could get any of her Native American clients to appear as witnesses, because it was so difficult to get traditional people to leave their sheepherding camps for big cities and Anglo proceedings that they didn’t understand, she did ask Roberta. To her surprise, Roberta said yes.

  In August 1970 Roberta, along with a friend, Desbah Slender, a Navajo woman who did not speak English, traveled by bus to San Francisco for the first time, part of a bus caravan of welfare recipients from Phoenix. (Their lawyers took a plane.) They all, witnesses and lawyers, stayed at the YWCA.

  It was in San Francisco that Martha Blue realized that Roberta was a person with unusual powers in front of an audience.

  When Roberta testified at the hearings, she was a star. Unlike many of the other women witnesses, she was not intimidated by the surroundings, the panel of lawyers running the hearing, or the aggressive questioning by the attorney for the Arizona welfare agency. She was a great witness. She was warm, self-assured, and completely Navajo. She was comfortable in whatever situation arose. Her English was excellent. When she was cross-examined, she remained unflappable. The opposition lawyer didn’t ruffle her composure or get her to contradict anything in her testimony. She was matter-of-fact, clear, lucid, well-spoken.

  Martha Blue remembered other unusual characteristics, such as her ease in strange surroundings with unfamiliar foods. When they went to a Chinese restaurant, for example, Roberta began eating with chopsticks without hesitation. She was curious about everything she saw. She didn’t see
m awed by anything, although she had never been to San Francisco before and never seemed disoriented or confused, as one might expect of a Navajo woman in her midfifties, a widow who lived a hard life in remote, isolated country. “And,” Martha added, “she has that wonderful way of carrying herself.”

  Roberta’s appearance and testimony gained positive newspaper coverage in San Francisco newspapers, and once again Martha and Roberta won their case. The hearing examiners found that the State of Arizona was out of compliance with federal welfare regulations. But the welfare hearing became only one part of Mrs. Blackgoat’s San Francisco experience. Roberta Blackgoat had arrived in San Francisco at the height of the 1970 Native American occupation of Alcatraz.

  In November 1969 fourteen activists calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes” occupied the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. The former prison had been closed and the island was empty, so the occupiers invoked an 1868 government agreement with the Sioux that granted Indians first rights to buy any government “surplus lands.” The government had declared Alcatraz Island “surplus land.” The occupying Indians offered to purchase the island for $24 in glass beads.

  Their goal was to draw public attention to the history and treatment of all Indian tribes—the unmet terms of the 363 Indian treaties ratified by the US Senate and the more than 800 treaties that the US government had signed but never kept. They asked why, in exchange for the vast land cessions the Indians had made throughout the United States, the US government had never provided the promised payments, education, economic help, health care, or trust income promised by the terms. When the tribes were strong, the government signed treaties; when the tribes were weak, the terms of the treaties were forgotten. Who was to make the Bureau of Indian Affairs accountable if not Indians themselves?