Dear HCN,
A little comment about
your story on the sacred and profane colliding in the West (HCN,
5/26/97). I’m old enough to remember that when the Bureau of
Reclamation was promoting Glen Canyon Dam and the resulting
reservoir, which it called the “Jewel of the Colorado,” the Bureau
strongly argued that now, people would have easy access to Rainbow
Bridge. “They could float right under it.”
In
pre-Dambrian time, entry to the monument was only by way of a
90-mile float trip from Hite and then a boulder-hopping walk up
Aztec and Bridge creeks. Alternatively, one could approach over
land around and somewhat over Black Mountain, a more daunting
enterprise.
David Brower and the Sierra Club, et
al, fought tooth and nail to keep the reservoir from inundating the
canyon beneath the bridge, eventually obtaining a specific
prohibition in the 1956 Colorado River Storage Project Act that no
reservoir could invade the 160-acre monument. To achieve this, of
course, would require the erection of a dam to keep the reservoir
out. Environmentalists lost interest in the approved scheme,
deciding that, on balance, flooding of the monument was
preferable.
During the protracted battle to
obtain the protective works clause in the 1956 legislation, local
Indians were nowhere to be seen or heard. The sacredness issue
would certainly have added an arrow or two to the
environmentalists’ quiver. Furthermore, the Navajos held a huge
bargaining chip because the feds would have to make a deal with
them to obtain the needed property on Manson Mesa to build the
Bureau’s new village and the necessary haul roads. Then, year after
year, the Congress uniformly failed to appropriate the $20 million
needed to build the Rainbow Bridge Dam. Despite the
environmentalists’ lesser-of-evils decision not to press for the
needed appropriation, there was nothing to prevent the affected
tribe(s) from asserting the sacred site issue. The lawsuit cited in
the article, brought by eight individual Navajos and three of the
Navajo Nations’ chapters in 1974, 10 years after the reservoir
began to fill and three years after it first invaded the monument,
was far too little and too late.
As for the Park
Service, it is now intimidating citizens to keep them out of the
very place that was used to justify the monstrous reservoir back in
the “50s.
Steven M.
Hannon
Denver,
Colorado
Steven Hannon is a
lawyer and writer whose novel on Glen Canyon is about to be
published.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Too little and too late.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
