Robert Kennedy, Jr. Supports Efforts of Hopi People
"If you want to see what the Peabody mines on Black Mesa will look like in the future, come to New York and see what GE did to the Hudson River." Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
At a reception for Black Mesa Trust on September 18 in Flagstaff, Robert Kennedy, Jr. said "One day Peabody will walk out and leave behind a barren landscape where you will have no hope of regenerating a sustainable economy."
"The N-aquifer does not belong to the federal government or to the BIA or to Gale Norton. And it certainly doesn’t belong to Peabody. It belongs to you," Kennedy said. "Peabody is stealing what belongs to the next generation of your children."
Kennedy is an environmentalist and founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, which was started in New York as an outgrowth of grassroots efforts there to stop corporations that were polluting the Hudson.
Black Mesa Trust is a grassroots organization dedicated to stopping industrial pumping of the N-aquifer in northeastern Arizona. The aquifer is the only source of drinking water for the Hopi people and the 27,000 Navajos living on Black Mesa, which receives only 9-10 inches of rainfall a year. The aquifer also feeds the springs and seeps on which Hopi ceremonial and religious life depend. Black Mesa Trust has just been inducted into the Waterkeeper Alliance, now an international environmental group, as the Alliance’s first groundwater keeper.
The Trust’s Executive Director, Vernon Masayesva, introduced Kennedy to the standing-room-only crowd by describing a Katsina carving that was discovered a few years ago at Old Oraibi, the oldest continuously-inhabited village on the continent. Katsina carvings represent Hopi dieties and are given to children as learning tools.
"They found a tihu [Katsina carving] with the handprint [representing Black Mesa, a land formation with five fingerlike projections] on its face. The tihu carried a gourd of water on its back, and the mission of that Katsina when it came to the village was to heal the children. It was a water guardian or water keeper. Our speaker is also a water keeper."
Kennedy talked about the reason we need to protect our natural environment. "The reason we protect these natural things," said Kennedy, "is for our own sakes. Nature is part of our infrastructure. It enriches us aesthetically and spiritually.
"We will not fulfill our destiny in the eyes of our Creator if we let these things be destroyed. Nature ultimately connects us to God; it is the way God talks to us most forcefully. We know God through His creation, and when we destroy these things, it has to be a sin. God wants us to use His bounty for ourselves and for others, but we can’t use it up. We can’t treat the planet as if it were a corporation in liquidation."
Native American activist Winona LaDuke spoke in the same vein in support of the Trust’s work.
"You’re saying that what they have done to you is wrong. You’re standing up to one of the biggest corporations in the world and saying no, you cannot take our water, you cannot destroy our ecosystem, you cannot take something to make a profit and destroy our life," she said.
Indian rights attorney and University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson explained that the Peabody coal and water mining lease on Hopi land was "born in treachery."
He said, "A lawyer who represented Peabody Coal [John Boyden] dared to represent at the same time the most trusting of people, the Hopi."
Wilkinson was referring to the original lease that was negotiated in the mid 1960s. In that lease, Boyden, with the approval of the United States Department of the Interior, convinced the Hopi Tribal Council to sell N-aquifer water to the mining company for $1.67 an acre foot (approximately 325,000 gallons).
Major sponsors of the reception and fundraiser for Black Mesa Trust were Oxfam America, Sierra Club, Glen Canyon Institute, Museum of Northern Arizona, Grand Canyon Trust, Environment Now, Wild Angels, Earth Image Films, and individual donors.
Organizations supporting Black Mesa Trust efforts include Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Oxfam America, WaterKeeper Alliance, Environment Now, Grand Canyon Trust, Glen Canyon Institute, Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Association, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Flagstaff Activist Network, Sacred Land Film Project, Earth Island Institute, Wild Angels, Seventh Generation and the law firms of Shearman & Sterling and Hagens-Berman.