Meeting at Mosquito Springs
There was a meeting yesterday at Mae Tso's place for the
Mosquito Springs - Teasyatoh community. The meeting was held to
discuss what went down at the last mediation (Jan. 11th, in
Flagstaff, see the UPDATE for 1/12/94).
The meeting was held in the hogan next to the family home out
at Mosquito Springs. There were about thirty people there, mostly
elders and active adults, only about 4 kids. Who was there
included Sam and Blanche Wilson, most of the Tso family including
Mae and Haskie Tso, Juanita, Francis, Betty and her son Jared, a
couple others but not Sam or his family. Claw Nez Begay was there,
Blanche and Robert Singer and their son Derek, Tsosie Yazzie,
Hasbah Gilmore, Helene Yellowhorse, and Sarah Begay were there,
also Sarah's son William and his girlfriend. Sarah Begay is the
main person at Teasyatoh community. There were people like Mr.
Claw Nez who also showed up at Coal Mine Mesa. Sally Tsosie was
there, she is related to Alice Benally and is the mother of Clayton
Lonetree. Also Mae Denetsosie, Zonnie and John Katenay from Big
Mountain.
Most of the people there were related one way or another.
Tribal representatives included Lorenzo Bedonie and Marlin Scott,
council delegates from Hardrock and Teesto respectively, Irene
Begay and myself. Mr. Scott is the chairman of the Navajo-Hopi
Land Commission. Irene is from Birdsprings. She runs our Flagstaff
office which is in a dingy cellar hole about two blocks from the
federal magnificence of the Relocation Office.
Lee Phillips was not there. Betty Tso ran the meeting, it was
just starting when I got there at one. She updated the people
there on the Jan. 11 mediation which only a few of them had
actually attended. Mostly she talked about the task of documenting
all the sacred sites and religious land uses in the area. This is
turning into an ongoing task. A map the community drew up in 1987
was rolled out and she talked about that. It showed the rock
offerings, spring offerings, a deer "pen" or two, herb gathering
sites, and so on. Also mapped were the school bus route and
people's homesites and cornfields.
Betty asked people to map out their own sacred areas - each
family has their own, also community sites will be mapped. Some
areas may be sacred to all the Dine - like certain sites on Big
Mountain that everyone knows about.
Betty asked people to change the way they approach this task.
There is a word, beeyazaa'nii, people use to talk about laws,
regulations, court decisions etc. that come from the dominant
society. For instance, belagaana beeyazaa'nii, whiteman law, is
the word sometimes used talking about the relocation act. There is
a different kind of law, sometime people translate it as "natural
law" that the Dine' religion is based on. Betty wants people to
think along those lines, not get confused about the judge or the
court or congress. All these things are confusing and anyway don't
have much connection with religion. She asked people to keep their
minds on their religion and, i guess, make these documents more
like a prayer.
These documents will be used in discussions with the Hopi
Tribe and the U.S. negotiators, and may be given to the 9th Circuit
Court. Betty thinks they will not be turned over - there is a
reason for this - and if they are given to the 9th Circuit Court
will be kept confidential. She also feels that if the Hopi Tribe
and the Dine' families keep talking about religion there will be
progress. This is pretty much what Roger Attakai was saying at
Teesto, although in different words.
My fear is that the U.S. govt, the mediator and the Court, and
the Hopi Tribe, each in their own way, will use these documents
against the Dine'. The dominant society looks on life and religion
as separate. Jan. 11th, for instance, Vernon Masayesva told the
Dine' that their religion was ALREADY protected by P.L 93-531,
because the law has a section guaranteeing access to religious
sites and shrines. Judge McCue agreed with this position. And in
a narrow sort of way, they are right. If you think religion is a
series of things, and places and actions, something you can dissect
and box in, then yeah, the law protects Dine' religion.
But if you go out there, you can see the fences crossing Star
Mountain, fenceposts driven into peoples' hearts as much as into
the sacred ground. You can see people whose religion is in a
turmoil because their lives are turned upside down by all the
beeyazaa'nii, by the parade of rangers, bureaucrats and cops who
have made regulating Dine' life their business. And you can see
the ways that THE LETTER OF THE LAW allows the destruction of what
it was intended to protect.
The fact is that Dine' religion and Dine'life both come from
natural law, and there is no little box you can put around
religion. Religion and life are pretty much the same, so when you
make life impossible you therefore deny religion - this is not an
side-effect or unintended consequence of the belagaana
beeyazaa'nii. This is your tax dollars at work.
I agree with Ms. Tso and Mr. Attakai, and all the other who
have said the same thing, that the mediation is going in the right
direction because the people have brought the focus back to
religion. I fear tho, that the U.S negotiators and the mediator
will once more refuse to understand what is being told them. They
could easily dissect the Dine' religious "map" and work out some
facile arrangement that, while appearing to protect Dine' religion,
allows the destruction of that relation between religion, life and
natural law. And then, when the people once more refuse to accept
what is offered them, perhaps they will report that it is "Navajo
intransigence" which forces them to proceed with an eviction.
There had been a little snow Friday evening and by Saturday
morning it had been cold with lots of low, gray clouds moving in
from the south. After the meeting the clouds were breaking up into
sunshine and a breeze was coming up from the southwest. All the
countryside was lit up and looking warm.
I drove out and headed west on the graded road, looking up the
hill where Mae Tso's hogan had stood. She built that hogan as a
replacement for the one the meeting was held in, which had been
struck by lightning and spoiled for sacred uses. In 1988 the Hopi
Tribe sued the Navajo Nation over it and four other structures
which it claimed were illegal construction. We lost and were
ordered by Judge Carroll to remove the offending structures. Our
staff went out and talked four families into dismantling. Mae Tso
and her family could not be talked into it, the judge told us we
had to tear her hogan down and we didn't - couldn't, really - do
it. So the judge put a $1,000 per day contempt fine on the Nation
until the hogan went down.
In 1991, Mae Tso's hogan became the subject of one of the Hopi
Tribe's ten demands which Judge McCue told the Navajo Nation it had
to meet to show good faith. The judge talked to Mae Tso and told
her if she dismantled her hogan she would "get her land back." She
agreed, on condition that the Navajo Nation provide a trailer to
replace the hogan. 826 days after the court order, our carpenters
took down the hogan and helped move the materials onto the NPL.
You can do the math as to the contempt fines, and figure out what
it means to a Nation that hasn't even nearly got the resources to
provide the services needed by a quarter-million mostly poverty-
stricken Dine'.
It is now a couple years, and the mediator came up with a
settlement which would give back to Mae Tso and all her relatives
and descendants three acres of their land for 75 years, if the Hopi
Tribe doesn't evict them for having dead cars. We took a trailer
out to the site where the family wanted it. It was an old 14-wide
we got from BIA and was supposed to be for use as an office.
Dickerson Smith and Frank Neswood rehabbed it, put the plumbing
fixtures back, put in the appliances and cabinets. All the time I
was getting nasty memos from Property saying that we couldn't use
that trailer to house a family and it was theft of tribal property,
misappropriation, there will be repurcussions, etc. etc. And all
the time I answered the memos politely saying we could SO do it,
here's President Zah's signature on the agreement. But in the end
it didn't matter, because the propane co. didn't test the gas
pipes, one of them was loose and all the windows blew out first
time Betty tried to light the furnace.
Last summer we got some funds and Betty went down to Phoenix
to pick out a new trailer. Last week, Thomas Y-------, this
miserable bureaucrat over at Finance, sent back the purchase order
for about the fourth or fifth time. No trailer yet, just more
bureaucratic B.S. It is over two years now, President Zah's
signature is on the agreement, and we can't even come up with our
part of the deal. I get so tired sometimes, things HAVE to be done
and someone always finds a way not to do them. Think how Mae Tso
feels!
At the site of that hogan, I am told, a sacred herb has come
up from the ground. I hope it is a message. That is the way
natural law makes itself known to people.
Jon Norstog, the bureaucrat