Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  In the spirit of the 1960s teach-in, in which minority groups taught their own history and investigated the stories omitted from mainstream history books, the Alcatraz Indians wanted Native American people to take pride in their own struggle against a powerful and predatory government. In this undertaking they successfully put Native Americans squarely in the historical and political mainstream, rather than the realm of anthropology. Their cause landed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. The boldness of the Alcatraz occupation attracted hundreds of Native Americans and minority college students from across the country who poured into San Francisco. Some took up residency in the prison cell blocks; others became staunch supporters, handling logistics and providing the occupiers with food, supplies, funding, and help. They defied federal demands to leave the island. On the front of the entrance to the prison they posted a large handwritten sign that read:

  We are Indians of All tribes! We are still holding the Island of Alcatraz in the true names of Freedom, Justice and Equality, because you, our brothers and sisters of this earth, have lent support to our just cause. We reach out our hands and hearts and send spirit messages to each and every one of you—WE HOLD THE ROCK!

  Among the occupiers was Wilma Mankiller, then a college student in San Francisco and a Cherokee originally from Oklahoma who had left with her family when she was five years old. She said later that until the Alcatraz occupation, she knew neither her family’s nor her tribe’s true history. At Alcatraz she learned the story of the “competency commissions” in oil-rich sections of Oklahoma that had the power to declare Indians incompetent to handle oil leases on their lands and appointed local lawyers as their “trustees” who often separated the Indians from their royalties and their lands. This history so influenced her that she later returned to Oklahoma, went to work for the tribal government, and eventually become the principal chief of the Cherokee. Another person involved in the occupation was Lorraine “Rain” Parrish, a Navajo social worker from the Navajo reservation who spoke both Navajo and English and arranged for Roberta’s visit to Alcatraz.

  As it had with Wilma Mankiller, the Alcatraz occupation had a powerful long-term influence on Roberta. She had arrived in San Francisco at a unique moment in resurgent Native American activism. Roberta was impressed by the boldness of the Alcatraz activists. Like many, she had also been deliberately cut off from Navajo history and her larger heritage. The boarding school she attended in Keams Canyon did not teach any Navajo history.

  The Nixon administration—not wanting to create a violent confrontation and create even more publicity—took the position of waiting out the occupation, which it did. Even so, the Alcatraz leaders’ demands for government accountability marked a sea change in Indians’ attitudes about their own identity, regardless of tribal affiliation, and the nature of the US government. Alcatraz sparked a new Pan-Indian movement of Native identity, tradition, and spirituality. By the time the Alcatraz occupation ended in June 1971, a new assertive Indian movement had been born, one that was not afraid to take on Washington. The Paiutes of Nevada, for example, sued the Interior Department for the draining of Pyramid Lake, claiming, rightly, that Indian water rights were superior to those of either California or Nevada. The two states had signed an illegal agreement, allowing California to pay Nevada for taking water pumped from the lake. The Alcatraz occupiers organized a caravan of automobiles from San Francisco to Nevada to support the Paiutes. The publicity reached network television news. Soon the Interior Department was renegotiating the California-Nevada agreement and stabilizing water levels at Pyramid Lake.

  In another Alcatraz-related event, the Taos Pueblo of New Mexico pressed for the return of the sacred Blue Lake. The legislation had been pending since the 1920s, when the corrupt interior secretary Albert Fall—of Teapot Dome notoriety—owned ranch lands adjacent to the lake and drained the water from the lake for his own use. With the help of John Ehrlichman in the White House, Congress finally passed legislation returning the lake to the Taos Pueblo. The same year the Alcatraz occupation ended, a mainstream New York press published Vine Deloria’s groundbreaking Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, a best-selling book that refuted many of the romantic notions about the American West and told the history of American expansion as a story of imperial power and conquest. Deloria, a lawyer with a graduate degree in theology, became an important voice of the new Indian movement. By 1972 America’s official Indian policy of termination of Indian tribes—first introduced by Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah in the 1950s—had changed, and three years later Congress officially repudiated termination policy (but not before thirty tribes had been terminated) by passing the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act.

  LEARNING HISTORY

  During the long drive to and from Holbrook, I asked Roberta about her childhood, where she lived, her relatives, what she learned in school, how she learned about Martha Blue, why she had gone to jail. As we drove through Keams Canyon, I asked where the boarding school had been.

  “There. That’s where I went to school,” she said, pointing to the opposite side of the road.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said, noting only a small wood-frame building hardly big enough to be a school.

  “Gone now. But that’s where the Indian school used to be.”

  “What was it like?”

  Roberta made a face of extreme distaste, as though she had eaten something sour. “Oh, I hated it,” she said, shaking her head. “They cut our hair. They took away our clothes. We had to wear uniforms. So scratchy. We had to speak only English. If we spoke Navajo, we got punishments. We had to pray every day. I hated it,” she repeated. “I got lots of punishments. Then,” she added matter-of-factly, “I ran away.”

  When she was young, around nine or ten, her mother had died, and she went to live with her father’s relatives. It was a time in the mid- 1920s when services to the western Navajo reservation—health care and food supplements—had been curtailed. Families were starving, so her father’s family sent her to the boarding school so she would get enough to eat. Each time she ran away, the family brought her back. She stayed for five years, until the ninth grade, and then was sent to the Indian school in Phoenix.* That was how she learned English at a time when most Navajo children of her generation were able to avoid boarding school. (That historic reality is noted in the signatures on the Independent Diné Nation proclamation with the column that calls for “a thumbprint” instead of a signature.)

  As we passed through the canyon, I noticed a heavy concrete bureaucratic-looking building off to the right. “What’s that?” I interrupted Vicki and Roberta, who were talking in Navajo.

  “Hopi jail,” answered Roberta.

  “Jail? I thought the Hopi were the people of peace.” (“The Hopi are a timid and inoffensive people, peaceable and friendly with outsiders,” stated the 1962 Healing v. Jones case summary.) “Why would a small community of Hopi need a jail that looks as though it could be in Beirut?” It was squat, massive, a concrete fortress.

  “For us Navajo,” said Roberta, chuckling.

  “That’s where Mom was put in jail,” said Vicki without humor.

  Blackgoat and two other ladies had blocked a backhoe that was digging up land for the fence. “You’ll have to scoop me out of the way to do this project,” she told the construction crew. She ended up spending the night in jail. I started to ask what was important about that piece of land, but Roberta changed the subject and pointed to something else in the landscape. Later I understood that she was protecting places where ancestors had been buried or a site where ceremonies had taken place. The destruction was the equivalent of running a highway through the Gettysburg cemetery.

  When the second piece of Hopi-Navajo land legislation passed Congress in 1974, the government began building a hundred-mile barbed-wire fence that looped like a hitchhiker’s thumb deep into the interior of Black Mesa. The new Hopi lands included Roberta’s sheepherding camp. Then came the administrative
orders of implementation, one of which said that she could keep no more than seventy sheep—at the time she had four hundred—and she could not repair her house, even though the roof was leaking. Although the Hopi had never lived on these new lands, thousands of Navajo families would have to be moved. The real determinant of the new boundary line, as she learned, was access to the aquifer and the location of the coal seam. The Navajo lived over the coal. The Hopi lived thirty miles away, clustered in villages at the edge of Black Mesa.

  In her short visit to San Francisco in August 1970, Roberta Blackgoat had received a full education in activism, media relations, public articulation of grievances, grassroots organizing, Indian history, Pan-Indian communication, and perseverance. She would use them all. Barry Goldwater was adamant about the physical division of the land and the removal of the Navajo. After Senator Goldwater’s visit to Black Mesa in 1978, Roberta understood there would be no help coming from his office, or from the Navajo Tribal Council, which was legally obligated to enforce the law.

  I asked her why the Navajo Tribal Council and its tribal chairman, Peter MacDonald, hadn’t been able to help. She was silent at first and then shook her head sadly. “He speaks a wonderful Navajo. The old people like him,” was all she would say. I asked about Peterson Zah, the new tribal chairman. She shook her head again. There was good reason for her sadness. While we were speaking in 1991 Peter MacDonald was being tried for various federal crimes and was on his way to a twelve-year prison term on various counts of fraud and inciting a riot. The charges were later found to be dubious, but soon Peter MacDonald was out of the way. He became an object lesson for any Native American tribal chairman who might want to be too aggressive in dealing with energy companies. After MacDonald’s experience, neither Peterson Zah nor any other tribal official was going to help the Navajo destined for removal.

  BEDO MACDONALD

  Peter MacDonald was the only four-term tribal chairman the Navajo ever had and was considered the most powerful Native American official in the country. Along with being the head of the Navajo Tribal Council, he had organized CERT, the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, composed of the thirteen tribes whose reservation lands held the largest energy reserves in the West. That initiative alone could have made him a target for the energy companies, which up until then had not had to negotiate with knowledgeable consultants, energy lawyers, or tribes that expected equitable participation.

  By 1973 he was Navajo tribal chairman and was thinking in Pan-Indian terms. His point of view was that with the amount of oil, coal, uranium, and natural gas being mined on the Navajo reservation, the Navajo people should have the highest per capita income of any reservation in the country. Instead, the leases never seemed to work to the Indians’ advantage or in their real interests. This was true of almost all the “energy tribes.” With MacDonald’s experience in business—trained as an engineer, he had been a vice president at Hughes Aircraft in California for more than a decade—and his insider experience with a huge corporation, he wanted to improve the Indians’ bargaining position. MacDonald’s template for the Council of Energy Resource Tribes was OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) and the steps the Middle Eastern countries took to get out from under the control of ARAMCO and British and American oil companies. CERT’s stated purpose was to hire legal experts outside the BIA, share information about different companies, renegotiate contracts, and increase lease royalties. This mission was not viewed as a popular institutional improvement by the energy companies or by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who approved all the leasing arrangements. (And, it must be acknowledged, it was not popular with traditional Indians within the tribes who were against mining, regardless of the economic advantages.) MacDonald was almost uniformly described as “corrupt” in the white press, but part of his problem was that he thought the chairman of an Indian tribe could operate like an Anglo businessman; another part was that the energy corporations and the utilities were deeply involved in tribal elections, both by injecting money and by supporting candidates.

  Born with the name Bedo of the Tsin Secadnii clan, he was named “Peter” by the white schoolteachers at the Teec Nos Pos school because that was the closest English approximation of his Navajo name they could pronounce. They translated his last name as “Donald.” When his grade school classmates learned the song about Old MacDonald’s farm, they started calling him Peter MacDonald, and that became his name. He came from a family that had been devastated by the livestock reduction of 1934 and ’35 in the Utah part of the reservation. Trained as a medicine man, he enrolled in the Army at the age of sixteen and was trained as a Navajo code talker in World War II. After the war he graduated from the University of Oklahoma with an engineering degree and went to work for Hughes Aircraft in California, where he had a successful career and rose to vice president. Politically, he was a Republican and a friend of Barry Goldwater. Then in 1963 he took leave from his job to return to the reservation to run the Navajo Office of Economic Opportunity. His mission was to attract new businesses to the reservation. Ten years later his story took a Shakespearean turn.

  In the beginning Peter MacDonald and Barry Goldwater were great friends. MacDonald was a Republican and liked the limelight. Goldwater wanted to showcase an Arizona Indian who was a Republican. He proposed MacDonald as a speaker at the 1972 Republican National Convention. But by then MacDonald had read the Hopi Land Settlement Bill and recognized that he was expected to preside over a disastrous relocation of thousands of Navajo. Knowing it would be a disaster for the Navajo, he hired new lawyers to lobby against the bill and defeat it. Sponsored by Goldwater in the Senate and an Arizona congressman named Sam Steiger in the House, the first bill failed.

  MacDonald’s invitation to be a speaker at the convention was soon rescinded. Goldwater spread the story that the invitation was recalled because MacDonald announced he was going to tell the bloc of Navajo votes to support George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election rather than Richard Nixon. George McGovern, however, told me in a telephone interview, “I never met Peter MacDonald, and I have no idea of who he or the Navajo were supporting in the ’72 election.”

  Two days before the Christmas recess in 1974 and in the midst of the Vietnam War, another version of the Hopi Land Settlement Bill passed the House and Senate and was signed into law as Public Law 93-531. Sponsored this time by Goldwater in the Senate and by a Democratic congressman from Utah named Wayne Owens, the bill was presented as having bipartisan support. Owens was defeated for reelection and immediately joined John Boyden’s law firm in Salt Lake City, which was moving its offices to the Kennecott Building, Peabody Coal’s new owner.

  By 1987 when relocation was well under way, Navajo chairman MacDonald was unsparing when he testified before Congress about the lack of humanity in the bill and the “botched-up” execution. He asked why no planning had been done for where these elderly sheepherding families were supposed to go. Senator Goldwater appeared before the same committee and said that “the Navajo were trespassers” and shouldn’t get any money or subsidized housing. Goldwater refused to support any money for resettlement and said it should come out of the Navajo coal royalties or other moneys the US government gave the Navajo.

  MacDonald had lost his third reelection bid to Peterson Zah in 1982 but won again in 1986. By then at least three senators and Morris Udall had proposed bills to mitigate the relocation by providing a financial settlement or a land-exchange proposal. All three bills were opposed by Barry Goldwater and withdrawn. Goldwater also suggested that the IRS do a tax audit of the Navajo Tribe and Peter MacDonald’s accounting practices, and MacDonald was charged with tax evasion.

  Goldwater retired from the Senate in 1987, and the same year Representative John McCain ran for and won his Senate seat. It made no difference. There was no softening of the Navajo relocation law. Then in 1989 the debate suddenly went off on a new track. Arizona’s senior senator, Dennis DeConcini, presided over an Indian affairs subcommittee hearing that
was supposed to deal with the issue of how the oil companies defrauded the Indian tribes through rigged meters on their pumps and falsified royalty reports, aided by a corrupt contracting office inside the BIA. Instead, the hearing topic suddenly shifted to Indian graft and corruption within Indian tribal governments. The Wall Street Journal’s page 1 subject was Peter MacDonald and his requirement for kickbacks from the corporations who wanted to do business on the Navajo reservation. The staff reporter referred to him as “an Oriental potentate” and Peter “MacDollar.”

  Suzanne Harjo, director of the Morning Star Foundation, said that two Senate staff members resigned over the changed focus of the hearings. Soon Peter MacDonald was charged with fraud over a ranch purchase that he had approved, misuse of federal funds, tax evasion, and inciting a riot in which two people were shot and killed. The charge of inciting a riot came about in 1989 when a divided tribal council put him on administrative leave while the charges were investigated. A group of MacDonald supporters stormed the council chambers. Two people were shot and eventually died. MacDonald charged Barry Goldwater with putting out a contract on him.* Although the Navajo Tribal Council later pardoned him, he served a jail sentence for eleven years.

  In 1991 when some of the less salutary aspects of energy extraction on Navajo lands began to overtake the Hopi-Navajo centuries-old land-dispute narrative, the ownership of Peabody Coal changed yet again. In 1991 Peabody Coal became a British company.

  LONDON, ENGLAND, 1996

  Peabody Coal had been strip mining on Black Mesa for twenty-two years by the time Lord Hanson bought the company. It was not a takeover, but a purchase from the private holding company composed of six of America’s largest corporations, all of whom had some connection to the exploration, mining, transport, or burning of coal.