Habib's Garden

What a day!  We were in the car for most of the day, and so I'll share just a bit about our journey with Louise Benally, of Big Mountain, an activist for the restoration of Navajo land rights after the cultural genocide resulting from forced relocation. 

In Navajo, it is said, there is no word for "relocation."  To relocate means to disappear entirely and never to be seen again.  And yet this compulsory migration off of the land which has always been home to the Navajo people -- and thus has always been their source of connection to Mother Earth, to the cycles of the seasons and of community life, and to their very livelihood and longevity -- has been an ongoing devastation since the 1970s.  (In fact, this epoch of relocation echoes that of over 100 years ago, when Navajo died by the thousands as they were forced to march away from their traditional homesteads during mid-winter towards what is now their reservation.) 

At that time, the federal government began bullying the Navajo off of their land in order to access the multitude of abundant mineral resources -- oil, gas, uranium, and coal -- buried beneath the surface.  The history of the conflict, especially as to the ways in which Hopi and Navajo were pitted against one another to sap strength from any resistance efforts, is extraordinarily complicated, but nonetheless our group's visit to Louise's land brought the reality of relocation and resource exploitation home to us in a visceral way.   

We visited Louise's own hoogan, to which she intends to return soon as a full-time resident.  As it turns out, she herself is a powerful medicine woman and healer -- she now works in the town of Flagstaff as a health educator, and hopes to restore traditional earth-based healing knowledge to her people since so few of them can afford or even physically access Western medical facilities.  She showed us plants all over her land, from lamb's quarter to juniper berries to a small red-colored ground cover, which are highly nourishing and medicinal.  Many of the plants, it turns out, relate to the woman's menstrual cycle and to the cleansing of the female organs.  "Earth is woman, woman is earth," Louise told us, and it seemed that all of these plants which offer cleansing and rebalancing of the female reproductive system are powerful gifts from the Earth herself.  I asked her if traditionally, most of the women are hormonally balanced; "oh, yes," she replied. 

She took us a ways from her hoogan to an area that had been fenced off with barbed wire.  Just across the fence was a small portion of standing, wooden fence.  Louise told us that in the past, 3,000 people would come to this site to share in the Sundance.  The Sundance is a traditional Lakota dance that had been passed along to the Navajo people in an act of solidarity among the tribes several decades ago. Yet on August 17, 2001, at 5:30 in the morning, representatives from federal, state and tribal governments raided this Sundance site with up to 60 officers, a bulldozer, a backhoe, chainsaws, and other equipment.  The Sundance tree was torn down and shredded, the entire site was bulldozed (including the sweat lodges), and one person was arrested and taken to jail without cause.  The man who was arrested, Eric Crittendon -- Louise's son -- was later murdered a few miles away, for no reason. 

This is just one of the many painful examples of the means used to forcibly disconnect the Navajo from their land and land-based traditions, in order to facilitate the easy entry of mineral industries.  Mineral extraction began in earnest several decades ago, and continues to this day.  Peabody Coal Company established its network of coal mines throughout the Big Mountain and Black Mesa regions, leading to the desecrations of the land and water that our group learned about a few days earlier during our time with the Black Mesa Water Coalition.  Louise told us that another means of driving the people off the land has been the drying up of many local springs, because of Peabody's egregious depletion of the N-Aquifer.  Now, Louise and other residents of this non-electrified region have to haul water in 55-gallon drums from several miles away.   

Louise intended to take us out to Peabody's mine, but as it turned out, the road was impassable because of a flash flood!  And so we were unfortunately unable to visit the Black Mesa coal mine.  I do, however, have a sneaking suspicion that this was for the best, and that we may have avoided deeper inconvenience or even some danger.  As we drove through the striking landscapes of the Black Mesa region and Monument Valley towards Farmington, we sang sweet songs for the earth.  We continue on towards our final day in a full flow, and continue to receive remarkable signals suggesting that we are on the right track . . .

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