After a beautiful drive from Tucson, we arrived in Phoenix this morning and prepared to meet Lori Riddle, of Gila River Alliance for a Clean Environment.  GRACE is an amazing and wholly grassroots organization in the Aquimel O’odham community, just outside of Phoenix, in the Pima area.  Throughout the last several decades, this O’odham community has been forced to deal with an astounding variety of toxic contamination.  And yet, despite the considerable political weight of the chemical companies siting their facilities on the reservation, this community has managed to shut down not one, but two major chemical plants that were heavily polluting the area. 

Lori shared with us GRACE’s remarkable, 10-year journey towards shutting down a toxic waste treatment facility on the reservation, called Romic Southwest.  Since its inception, Romic Environmental Technologies Corporation – which handled approximately 13,000 tons of hazardous waste each year – had not been operating with appropriate permitting from the Environmental Protection Agency.  Romic racked up violation upon violation of the Clean Air Act and other applicable federal environmental statutes, and caused irreprebable damage to the land, and to the health and well-being of the O’odham people.  Yet EPA failed to fine Romic or even move towards establishing proper permits.  In fact, Arizona is no stranger to such situations: the Toxics Release Inventory reported that tens of millions of pounds of toxic chemicals were released into Arizona's air, water and land in 2005, a 15 percent jump from the previous year.

After a toxic plume was found in the community’s groundwater, directly beneath the Romic plant, the community recognized that the last straw had been drawn.  An unprecedented grassroots movement arose in the community to shut down Romic – it was, for many of the O’odham, the first time they had ever participated in public protest.  Two California environmental justice organizations, Greenaction and Youth United for Community Action, joined the campaign to educate the community and raise awareness around Romic’s unacceptable actions and legal violations.  Finally, in June 2007, in a unanimous vote (14-0) the Gila River Tribal Council decided to reject the proposed EPA permit for the plant. 

And yet, despite this enormous victory, the community still suffers from contamination from a plethora of sources.  As we have already witnessed along our way, Native American communities are often viewed by interested parties as little more than dumping grounds for the detritus of industrial processes. 

Lori shared with us a bit of her personal history – her family’s land was heavily contaminated with pesticides from aerial spraying, unbeknownst to the family for several years.  She told us about a tradition held by her tribe wherein when a family builds a new home, using adobe mud sandwiched between wooden slats, the women will sit in the corner of the home immediately upon its completion and eat just a bit of the still-soft mud from the house.  In this way, the women literally grounded the home in their bodies; by taking it into themselves, they become the home.  Lori had tears in her eyes when she said that they had used the highly contaminated soil from their land (so contaminated, in fact, that water used to irrigate food crops would bead on the surface of the soil sometimes, and fail to absorb) to build their home, and it was that soil that the women ate from the home and then literally lived within for many years. 

Lori herself is diabetic, along with an astronomically high percentage of the other Aquimel O’odham, and suffers from many of the challenges associated with diabetes.  She attributes her illness, in part, to the ill effects of these myriad sources of contamination, some of which have been affecting her since her early childhood.  At dinner, she told us that she does not feel she is long for this world – even though she is only in her 40s, she is expecting her own death. 

Along with the others, I was deeply moved by these words, and began to reflect on the connection between the illness of the land and the illness of the people who have traditionally lived so closely with the land.  When we visited the shut-down Romic plant, with its many barrels and tanks still intact, the air and the earth felt terribly sick, even dead.  For so many of us who have grown up in the urban environment, connection to the land is something that occurs in recreational contexts, or perhaps not at all.  We may not sense the grievous illness of the earth that results from everything that we consider “normal” – smokestacks, waste dumps, gas stations.  Growing up in Los Angeles, for example, I never wondered what happened to the used syringes placed in the medical waste containers in every doctor’s examination room.  In fact, this waste is usually incinerated, and that incineration often takes place on the land of communities like the Aquimel O’odham.

All of us on this delegation continue to be moved by the way in which our industrialized, consumerist society is literally built on the backs of Native American communities, as well as the way in which it is so often the women at the helm of the movements to restore balance to the earth.

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