Background

SINCE 1974, federal relocation policy has forced 14,000 Dine’ (Navajo) people from their ancestral homeland in Arizona.
This genocidal policy was crafted by government agents and energy company representatives in order to gain access to the mineral resources of Black Mesa – billions of tons of coal, uranium and natural gas.

For over 30 years, traditional Dine’ at Black Mesa have lived in resistance, steadfastly refusing to relocate as strip-mines rip apart their sacred lands and generating plants poison the desert air.

• The Black Mesa Syndrome: Indian Lands, Black Gold By Judith Nies

  • J. Nies requesting an official responseto the European Parliaments’ resolution

• Geopolitics Of The Navajo-Hopi ‘LandDispute‘ by John Redhouse (a comprehensive report)

• A brief history of relocation on Black Mesa
• Big Mountain, where the profession is hope
• Whose Home On The Range? Coal Fuels Indian Dispute. The Washington Post, 1974
• TheLong Walk
• Treaty of 1868
• Public Law 93-531. The relocation law.
  
• PL 104-301 This is the law passed by Congress in 1996, which provides the authorization to issue leases under the Accommodation Agreement.
• Manybeads Lawsuit Dismissed
  • Supreme Court rejects Navajo case
    

• An Overview Of the Dineh Analysis
• Analysis of Dineh case & needs (Center for Constitutional Rights)
• Forbidding the “G-Word”: Holocaust Denial as Judicial Doctrine in Canada By Ward Churchill (Definitions of genocide)
• UN Convention on Genocide
• UN Commission on Human Rights, 56th session, 19 March – 27 April, ’01; IITC
  
• Letter to Mr. Amor Special Rapporteur of United Nations Commission on Human Rights, by Thayer Scudder, Professor of Anthropology, California Institute of Technology 01.31.98
• Techqua Ikachi
• Subcomandante Marcos In Support of Big Mountain
• Leonard Peltier In support of Big Mountain
• “The Grandmothers were arrested“, a poem.
• 2001 Desecration of Sacred Sundance Grounds
• Anna Mae Sundance Arbor & Tree destruction 2001
• Video: “Crisis On Black Mesa” About Camp Anna Mae Sundance Ground’s Desecration, by Indigenous Action Media.
• A Short history & Report of the Annual Food and Supply Run by ClanDyken
• Documentary photo-project focusing on communities affected by grave pollution health/cultural effects on Black Mesa. There are pictures of the effects from past uranium mining on the Dineh and Pueblo country of the four corners regions.
• Sheep is Life
• The Truth About Church Rock “New Lands”. (This is an area where many Dineh have been relocated to).
• EPA description of the Church Rock nuclear waste spill superfund site that is upstream from the relocation site
• “The mining of uranium has taken a heavy toll on the Indian population in the Four Corners area. Not only did the Indians receive very little in the way of royalties for the extraction of the ore from their lands, but health and safety precautions in the mines were essentially non-existent….
  
• DVD: Broken Rainbow
  

• Further Reading:
  • The Navajo Hopi Land Dispute: An American Tragedy by David M. Brugge
  • Dine’: A History of the Navajos by Peter Iverson
  • The Book of the Navajo by Raymond Friday Locke
  • The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute by Emily Benedek
  • Struggle For The Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization by Ward Churchill
  • Cry Sacred Ground by Anita Parlow
  • Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest by Charles Wilkinson – In-depth info about Boyden history, biased against Navajos.