More than 1,000 Native American people gathered in
New Mexico to celebrate the 10th birthday of the Indigenous
Environmental Network. The June gathering was held on the foothills
of Mount Taylor, surrounded by the radioactive waste piles of
Jackpile, the world’s largest uranium strip mine. The mine was
worked by Atlantic Richfield/ Anaconda in the 1970s, and reclaimed,
some say inadequately, only after a fight with the Laguna Pueblo.
The location was a reminder of the weekend’s focus: to show native
people from around the world how to keep toxic messes like this one
out of their homelands.
Diné Citizens
Against Ruining Our Environment (CARE), a Navajo group (HCN,
10/31/94), hosted the gathering in an isolated forest site, and
cooked for the group on outdoor woodstoves. “At one lunch alone, we
served 2,000 pieces of frybread,” said Lori Goodman, spokeswoman
for Diné CARE.
Meeting under canvas tarps,
Diné and Pueblo people talked about fights with mining
companies and struggles to protect sacred sites. Hand-painted signs
memorialized places like Mount Graham in southern Arizona, a sacred
place for the San Carlos Apache tribe, where the University of
Arizona and the Vatican have built massive telescopes, and Red
Butte, south of the Grand Canyon, sacred to the Havasupai, where an
international mining company wants to dig for
uranium.
“We have to look at the ethics of these
developments from an indigenous perspective,” said the network’s
national coordinator, Tom Goldtooth.
The
indigenous network came into existence at the first CARE gathering,
where participants spread the word about how to win environmental
battles. Working with community-based organizers in different parts
of the Navajo reservation, CARE stopped several proposed toxic
dumps and forced the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs to produce an
environmental impact statement before approving a timber sale on
reservation lands – something the agency had never done
before.
“Before the (network) came in to being,
people were always getting railroad-ed and intimidated,” says Lori
Goodman. Today, the Indigenous Environmental Network teaches tribal
people the power of combining traditional values, such as respect,
humility and hard work, with modern tools, such as the Internet and
e-mail.
The Indigenous Environmental Network can
be reached at P.O. Box 485, Bemidji, MN 56619-0485 (218/751-4967).
Visit its Web site at
www.alphacdc.com/ien.
Diné CARE can be
reached at 10A Town Plaza, Suite 138, Durango, CO 81301
(970-259-0199).
*Cate
Gilles
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Native Americans gather to defend homelands.
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