Activist Leroy Jackson’s last letter to the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service hit home. Shortly before his death, Jackson
wrote the agency to protest any exemption of Navajo timberlands
from the Endangered Species Act (HCN, 11/29/93). The Bureau of
Indian Affairs had asked for an exemption based on tribal
sovereignty and claimed that the Mexican spotted owl was “held in
low esteem” by Navajos, Apaches and Pueblos. But the agency’s
regional director John Rogers wrote in a Jan. 4 letter to the BIA
and 37 tribal leaders that, “The Act does not exempt any land
ownership in the United States – private, tribal, state or federal
– from critical habitat designation.” Earl Tulley, president of
Dine Citizens Against Ruining our Environment, an organization
co-founded by Jackson, said that the letter brought good news
because it told the tribe and the BIA “that no one is above the
law.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Jackson’s last letter answered.
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