By John Dougherty
I first met former Hopi tribal chairman Vernon Masayesva in December
1992 when I was publishing a weekly newspaper in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Masayesva called one afternoon and said he wanted to tell me a story
of great importance to his tribe. A few days later, we met at a restaurant
in old downtown Flagstaff.
Over the next few hours, Masayesva spun an amazing tale of the Hopis’ battle
with the world’s largest coal mining company over the tribe’s
most important natural resource: water.
Hopi fortunes have ebbed and flowed on the arid mesas northeast of Flagstaff
for thousands of years. The Hopi society, Masayesva said, is based on
its intimate relationship with water. The tribe’s songs, dances,
art, secret ceremonies, language, economy and religion all revolve around
water.
But in modern times, Masayesva explained, water on Hopi land was seriously
threatened. And if the water that for ages has flowed from washes, springs
and seeps (which nurtures corn, beans, squash and souls) disappears,
so, too, would the Hopi.
It was that simple to him.
You may be thinking this is an old story, but it is far from it. It is
an ongoing tale that affects Arizona and Phoenix, and there are striking
new developments. But first a little history on the Hopi vs. Peabody
Coal Company (now Peabody Energy):
The threat to Hopi water began when Peabody obtained leases to mine coal
on Hopi and Navajo land in the 1960s. There were 100 square miles of
low-sulfur coal reserves on the reservations, perfect for fueling power
plants needed to feed the growth frenzy and economic bonanza sweeping
the Southwest.
Coal from Peabody’s Black Mesa Mine was sold to the Mohave Generating
Station operated by Southern California Edison near what was then the
remote outpost of Laughlin, Nevada. Rather than trucking or shipping
the coal by rail, Peabody decided to build the world’s longest
water-slurry pipeline to move five million tons a year of pulverized
coal 273 miles from the Black Mesa Mine to the 1,580-megawatt power plant.
Peabody began pumping 4,000 acre-feet [an acre-foot equals 325,851 gallons]
of pristine drinking water a year from beneath Black Mesa. The water
was mixed with the crushed coal and injected into the slurry pipeline.
The water taken from beneath Hopi land was initially sold to Peabody
for the astonishingly low price of $1.67 per acre-foot.
Peabody essentially stole the Hopis’ water. And the company did
so with the approval of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. This theft
of the tribe’s water, Masayesva said, was just the beginning of
a massive rip-off of the Hopis’ natural resources.
The heist went unnoticed by the outside world. In fact, the coal and
water spirited off the Hopi reservation over the next 40 years helped
fuel the spectacular economic growth of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
The wealth and riches of the cities came at a huge cost to the Hopi.
Within two decades, Hopi farmers and spiritual leaders noticed a precipitous
decline in the amount of water flowing from Hopi springs, washes and
seeps. Peabody denied that its groundwater pumping had any effect on
the surface flow, claiming that it was taking water from the deep Navajo
Aquifer that was not connected to the surface.
But Masayesva told me that he and other Hopi leaders were convinced there
was a connection between groundwater pumping and reduced surface flows.
Masayesva said the risk to Hopi culture was too great to ignore.
“I really want us to go back to honor, respect and trust [in] the
ancient wisdom, go back to our relationship with water,” Masayesva
said. “Water is sacred.”
Our dinner concluded and we went our separate ways. Masayesva’s
term as Hopi tribal chairman ended in 1994, but he continued his
lonely fight to force Peabody to stop mining groundwater.
In early 1997, Masayesva called me again with startling information that
had been recently discovered by a law professor researching the history
of the Peabody coal mining operations on Hopi land. By this time I was
working at the Phoenix New Times.
Professor Charles Wilkinson of the University of Colorado had discovered
documents that revealed the Hopi were betrayed by the tribe’s most
trusted attorney who had negotiated the original Peabody coal and water
contracts on the tribe’s behalf.
“[John] Boyden violated his high duty to the Hopi by working concurrently
for Peabody Coal during the decisive years of the mid-1960s,” Wilkinson
wrote in a lengthy paper published in the Brigham Young University
Law Review in 1996.
Boyden was double-dealing. He was working for Peabody at the same time
he was representing the Hopi in negotiations to sell coal and water to
Peabody. The deal Boyden struck enriched Peabody while forcing the Hopi
to be dependent on paltry coal royalties.
Even worse, Boyden’s deal was threatening to destroy the Hopis’ crucial
link to surface water flows.
I soon found myself touring the Hopi mesas with Masayesva and meeting
with Hopi spiritual leaders who shared their songs and insight about
water.
Masayesva had scraped up funds to help finance independent hydrological
research that was providing support to the Hopis’ contention that
the groundwater pumping was depleting Hopi surface water. The U.S. Geological
Survey was also conducting independent studies supporting the Hopis’ concerns
about groundwater reduction.
I broke the story about Boyden’s betrayal of the Hopi in New Times
(“Dark Days on Black Mesa,” April 24, 1997), and soon Peabody
was on the defensive. Masayesva founded a nonprofit organization, Black
Mesa Trust, and began gathering national and international recognition
and financial support.
Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental groups — including the
Grand Canyon Trust, the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation
Association — launched an attack on the recipient of Peabody’s
coal — the Mohave Generating Station.
The environmental groups sued Mohave Generating Station’s owners
in 1998 alleging the power plant was in violation of clean-air standards.
The power plant’s owners were looking at the potential of billions
of dollars in fines. (Southern California Edison owns 56 percent of
the plant, followed by the Salt River Project, with 20 percent; Nevada
Power Company, 14 percent; and the Los Angeles Department of Water
and Power, 10 percent.)
Mohave’s operators entered into a consent decree in 1999 with the
environmental groups agreeing to either sharply reduce emissions at the
power plant or shut it down by December 31, 2005. Mohave’s owners,
led by Southern California Edison, were then faced with a crucial decision:
Were they willing to invest $1 billion worth of improvements necessary
to clean up the power plant’s emissions while at the same time
continuing to rely on Peabody’s controversial coal slurry pipeline
that appeared to be depleting springs on the Hopi reservation?
Masayesva saw an opportunity to bring tremendous pressure on the utilities,
as well as on Peabody. He enlisted the help of the Natural Resources
Defense Council, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Waterkeeper Alliance.
The pressure on Peabody to find another way to transport the coal to
Mohave became so great that the company finally announced it would find
another water source for the pipeline by the end of this year.
“Because of the international uproar over what they were doing,
Peabody was losing a big public relations war,” Masayesva told
me the other day. “They agreed voluntarily that they would cease
using the Navajo Aquifer.”
So far, Peabody has been unable to find an alternative water source
for its pipeline. But it increasingly appears that it doesn’t
matter because it is virtually certain that Mohave will shut down this
December 31 rather than install anti-pollution controls.
The imminent closure of the power plant also means Peabody will close
the Black Mesa Mine. Hundreds of jobs will be lost not only at the power
plant but at the mine.
The Hopi Tribe is expected to lose about $7 million a year in royalties — which
accounts for about one-third of the tribe’s annual operating budget.
The news of the closure of the mine and power plant is being portrayed
as a devastating financial blow to northern Arizona and, particularly,
to the Hopi. The Arizona Republic ran an October 30 story with the ominous
headline: “Power plant shutdown bringing gloom to N. Arizona.”
Masayesva says there is no need for panic. Far from it.
“The Hopi Tribe has $100 million in liquid assets,” he says.
The assets, Masayesva says, come from a land-dispute settlement the Hopi
reached with the federal government in the mid-1990s that allows some
Navajo to remain on Hopi land. The Hopi have invested the money in real
estate and businesses.
“There is no need for the Hopi Tribe to be saying they are going
to suffer grievously economically,” Masayesva says.
The Hopi and Navajo also have an opportunity to obtain significant
financial relief from Mohave’s closure. Under complex air-pollution-control
rules, Mohave’s owners will reap a huge windfall after they close
the plant through the annual sale of tens of millions of dollars’ worth
of sulfur-dioxide-emission credits.
Environmentalists want regulators to force the utilities to provide the
money derived from the sale of pollution tax credits to the tribes and
others who will need financial assistance.
“The owners [of Mohave] should provide economic transition funds
to the tribes, and have the money to do so,” the environmental
groups said in a May 25 letter to the Hopi Tribe.
Masayesva argues that the federal and state governments should also
contribute funds to the Hopi and Navajo tribes to soften the financial
blow from the closure of the mine. Arizona, which has a huge budget
surplus, has benefited immensely from the mine and power plant. The
state has received more than $20 million a year in taxes generated
by the mine, and the state’s entire economy has benefited from
low-cost power generated for decades at the Mohave Generating Station.
In addition, the federal government has a responsibility to compensate
the Hopi for failing in its trust responsibility to protect the tribe’s
resources by approving the unfavorable water and coal contracts negotiated
by Boyden.
Masayesva maintains that closing the power plant also opens the door
to a tremendous opportunity for the Hopi to transform its reservation
into an economic powerhouse based on renewable energy. He’s already
helped establish the Colorado Plateau Clean Energy Initiative that
is seeking to develop clean energy sources, including wind farms, solar
and coal gasification.
The Black Mesa Trust is working with Phoenix-based Stirling Energy Systems
to design and build two 500-megawatt solar-electric-generating stations
on the Hopi and Navajo reservations.
Earlier this year, Stirling signed contracts to build two separate
solar-generating stations of similar size with Southern California
Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company. The Hopi/Navajo plants
would cost about $1.6 billion, take two to four years to build and
employ between 500 and 1,000 workers during construction.
While dark days still loom in the immediate future on Black Mesa with
the imminent closure of the mine, it appears that the future for the
Hopi is exceedingly bright, thanks to the vision of Vernon Masayesva.
“I have done my best,” he told me. “I have accomplished
what I set out to accomplish, which was to stop [groundwater] pumping.”
In the early years of this epic struggle, Masayesva walked alone. One
man versus the world’s largest coal company. Now, miraculously,
victory is at hand.
“There are lessons to be learned that I would like to share with
the outside world,” Masayesva said. “Never doubt the power
and wisdom of our ancestors. That is how we made the difference with
Peabody.” |
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