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

by Nies, Judith

  Silk Street in London’s financial district has echoes of the legendary Silk Road, the four-thousand-mile trade route that wound from China through India, Persia, and Turkey and into eastern Europe, mixing trade goods, tribes, and religions along the way. Lord Hanson chose Silk Street’s Barbican Centre as the location for his 1996 annual stockholders meeting, because it was the year he would announce the restructuring of Hanson’s and the plan for his eventual retirement. It was the most important stockholders meeting of his career.

  Like the Australian Rupert Murdock or the American Ted Turner, Hanson had taken a modest business inherited from his father and built it into an international behemoth of construction, tobacco, and energy. Hanson’s Ltd. was a multinational conglomerate with subsidiaries on five continents. He was no longer Jimmy Hanson, but Lord Hanson, and moved in the highest echelons of Margaret Thatcher’s England. In April 1996 he was bringing together two thousand of his wealthy shareholders, the international financial press, and some well-known celebrities and government officials. The days of the multifaceted conglomerate—owning everything from toasters to oil refineries—were over, and, as Lord Hanson explained in his prepared remarks, it was time to “de-merge.”

  The meeting opened as planned with a welcome and a documentary film. Known in the British press as the Takeover King or the Silver Fox, Lord Hanson was tall, silver-haired, and impeccably turned out in Savile Row tailoring. Belying his seventy-four years, Lord Hanson bounded to the stage while a huge video screen behind the podium projected his sleek silver hair and vulpine smile. Among his peers he was known as a diplomatic and skillful corporate politician; among his staff he was known as a tyrant who ruled by fear and who could dress down a subordinate on incidental matters of punctuality, dress, or manners. Sharing the stage with him were a handful of top Hanson executives and the preternaturally handsome Roger Moore, still world famous for his movie roles as James Bond, but who was now Hanson’s spokesperson.

  After welcoming the gathering, Lord Hanson gave a flick of his hand, and the meeting opened with an artfully produced documentary telling the “Hanson story.” Roger Moore provided the mellifluous narration, explaining how Lord Hanson’s acumen had led to profitable holdings on several continents: construction materials (Kaiser Permanente Sand and Gravel), tobacco (Imperial Tobacco), and energy (Peabody Coal, America’s largest coal company).

  Moore gave a regal wave, acknowledging the applause as the lights came back up. The meeting moved along with the tight pacing and scheduling that had taken hundreds of hours of staff preparation. Lord Hanson had every reason to expect that his decision to restructure the company and protect Hanson’s future share price would be applauded by his stockholders. Following the business presentations, he confidently opened the floor for questions. Then he was surprised. He didn’t like surprises.

  A small delegation of Hopi and Navajo Indians was clustered behind one microphone, their brightly colored shirts and silver jewelry a splash of vivid color in the sea of beige and gray. The earlier documentary film about Hanson’s business investments had described the American Indians as Hanson’s “friends and business partners in Arizona” where Peabody Coal operated some of the largest strip mines in the world.

  Each member of the delegation stepped forward to explain his or her experience of living with Peabody Coal in the high desert of northern Arizona. In their unmistakably sincere voices and slow cadences, they described the realities behind the stockholders’ quarterly dividends: the toxic water that resulted from blasting the coal beds, polluted water holes that killed their sheep, coal dust in the air causing skyrocketing asthma and bronchitis rates, land stripped of all vegetation that could never be reseeded and reclaimed in the high-desert climate because of inadequate rainfall, mountainous slag heaps of gray earth that once had been valleys of piñon and juniper, thousands of ancient archaeological Anasazi sites destroyed in the dragline buckets, Hopi springs and Navajo wells going dry because of billions of gallons of water pumped out of an Ice Age aquifer to run a coal-slurry pipeline, increasing desertification, and, finally, the ongoing removal of thousands of Indian families, mostly Navajo, who lived too close to the coal. In short, they were telling the assembled shareholders about the “true costs” behind their investments.

  The audience was riveted. Lord Hanson, however, was horrified and soon furious. His subordinates saw his rage as a gathering storm. Finally, he couldn’t contain himself. “Are we going to have to listen to you all day?” he barked as an elderly Navajo woman began to speak. “Shut up! Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. You are a bloody nuisance.”

  The woman at the microphone was Roberta Blackgoat. Now in her late seventies, she was wearing her white hair knotted in the traditional loop at the back of her neck, a tiered Navajo skirt, and a heavy silver and turquoise necklace. Lord Hanson did not intimidate her. The hand that grasped the microphone was steady, and her eyes were canny. “I only wanted to offer a prayer for you,” she said in her soft, raspy voice.

  “Oh.” Lord Hanson was momentarily disarmed. “I apologize,” he said.

  In her prayer Mrs. Blackgoat called for the well-being of the thousands of people gathered at the meeting and for “balance [to] be restored to the universe.”

  In 1996 climate change was still known as “global warming.” The Hopi and Navajo, however, were describing shifts in patterns of air, water, and temperature that made climate change a permanent condition. They were describing the felt consequences of mining and burning coal and putting carbon in the atmosphere. Plants didn’t reseed. Water holes were turning to mud. Only a few people in the lay public understood that second only to Arctic ice melt, the greatest weather changes were being tracked in the American Southwest. The Indians lived in the arid high desert as sheepherders (Navajo) or dry farmers (Hopi), and they understood what they were seeing. The members of the delegation were speaking independently of their tribal councils, which now faced public criticism for having silently signed the coal leases and water rights. Roberta Blackgoat’s prayer was for the health of the planet and that narrow membrane of land, air, and water where all life takes place. Strip mining, she said, was no way to treat the earth. “Coal is the liver of the earth. When you take it out she dies,” she concluded.

  As soon as she finished, a dozen security men swarmed around the delegation and forcibly escorted them out of the room. Some in the audience cheered; others booed.

  The turmoil was just beginning. Now members of the audience had new questions. When one well-coiffed Englishwoman took the microphone to object to the way Lord Hanson had dealt with the Indian people, he responded, “Madame, let me introduce you to a broker.”

  When another asked why Hanson’s had to strip-mine on Indian lands, he answered, “Because I say so. Now belt up.”

  The next day’s newspapers reported a meeting that is every corporate executive’s nightmare. “Furious Hanson on the Warpath: Indians’ Protest Wrecks Meeting” ran the Daily Express with a large photograph of Roberta Blackgoat. The caption read: “Apology.” “Insults Fly at Hanson Meeting,” announced the Independent, accompanied by a photograph of the silver-haired Lord Hanson.

  Years later Lord Hanson’s many obituaries recounted the jeers and tumult of his final stockholders meeting, although the cause was long forgotten. Long before Hanson’s death, Peabody Coal had been sold again. Hanson’s sold it to Citizens Power of Boston (now a Peabody subsidiary) and Lehman Brothers of New York. The investment bankers were restructuring Peabody Coal as part of a private equity fund.

  LEHMAN BROTHERS, NEW YORK, 2001

  The Lehman Brothers shareholders meeting on April 2, 2001, took place only weeks before Peabody Coal was to become a public company as Peabody Energy, Inc. (ticker symbol BTU). Another Hopi-Navajo delegation was in the audience. Roberta Blackgoat, now age eighty-five, and Arlene Hamilton, organizer of Weavers for Life and Land, had bought two shares of Lehman stock to gain entrance to the stockholders meeting. Other delegation membe
rs who spoke were a Lakota Sioux chief named Joseph Chasinghorse and Navajo Leonard Benally. They mentioned the spiritual bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and predicted dire consequences if the investment bank did not stop the strip mining on Black Mesa and went ahead with its planned public offering for Peabody Energy, then and now the largest coal producer in the world.

  The next day, April 3, 2001, all four members of the delegation appeared on the program Democracy Now to describe their “friendly takeover” of the Lehman Brothers annual shareholders meeting and the reasons it was necessary. A year later Arlene Hamilton was killed in a car crash in San Francisco, and Roberta died of unknown causes while she was there attending the memorial service.

  Unlike the Hopi leader Emory Sekaquaptewa Jr., Roberta Blackgoat did not get her obituary in the New York Times, but she did succeed in making Black Mesa an international name, a name that many Europeans know better than Americans.

  In the winter of 1999, when the relocation of all the Navajo was supposed to be final, activists from the Green Party were demonstrating in front of American embassies in cities across Europe, objecting to the mass relocation of what by then amounted to fifteen thousand Navajo people. In February 2000 the European Parliament passed a resolution citing the United States for “Human Right Violations in Regard to Native Americans in the U.S.-Diné.” That resolution, sent to the American secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, also requested a congressional investigation into the relationship between the strip mining and the Navajo removal. It also called for an investigation of environmental effects: the air and water hazards from coal strip mining, the draining of the aquifer to run the coal-slurry pipeline, the destruction of thousands of archaeological sites, and—still unmentioned in the American press—the nuclear contamination of the New Lands to which the government was sending many of the relocatees. The secretary of state did not respond.

  Roberta understood the power of persistence. When she first began protesting, the Native American resisters had to stand on the street outside the United Nations with signs to present their message. By the time of her death, the United Nations had formed a Commission on Indigenous People and she had traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to testify. Big Mountain Support Groups formed in cities across the United States, Europe, and Japan. Roberta appeared before members of the International Treaty Council when they met in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and became a worrisome presence to those who expected the Navajo to disappear quietly. “The Creator Is the Only One Who Is Going to Relocate Us” is the sign she wore before armed US marshals when they came to enforce many of the “final deadlines” for removal.

  In English her voice was high and raspy; in Navajo it was strong and deep. She had an easy smile and twinkle in her eye as though she found nothing to surprise her. “I am doing this for all of us,” she told students at Harvard University in 1992, “your children and my children and their children.” During her time at Harvard, she also managed to inform students of the Native American program that the Harvard faculty member who led their program was a partner in an economic consulting group that gave expert testimony for law firms and corporations seeking mineral leases on Indian reservations. She was talking about climate change years before we had the right vocabulary to name the peculiar chemistry of global climate and the impact of coal and carbon on its composition.

  Her accomplishment was to provide focus and continuity to three decades of intense struggle—human and ecological—in an area of the United States virtually invisible on the political map. Viewed in a global framework, she took America’s closed system of Native American policy into the international arena. Her leadership—recognized by a Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Award and the American Women’s History Association’s Unsung American Woman Award—extended from an era when the ability to cheat Indians out of land and resources was considered both good sport and a minor regional issue into a new era of global environmental activism as well as awareness of the corporate backing of the extraordinarily well-funded climate deniers.

  As Daniel Peaches later said of her, “She was a hero to stand against the forces of the federal government, the Hopi Nation, and a big corporation. She did not compromise her belief or her dignity against overwhelming odds.”

  I always remembered the bumper sticker she had tacked up in her kitchen that read:

  You NEVER Fail Unless You Quit Trying

  *The most recent test was on December 7, 2012, at the Nevada Test Site. Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki formally protested.

  *She was born in 1916 and attended the Keams Canyon boarding school, a K–9 school, from 1926 to 1931. She later went to the Phoenix Indian School, also a boarding school, in the 1930s.

  *MacDonald would spend eleven years in tribal, state, and federal jails. One of the three men charged with Don Bolles’s murder said that he had also been instructed to put a bomb under Peter MacDonald’s car. Don Bolles was an investigative reporter who worked for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix and was killed by a car bomb in 1976 while he was investigating organized crime in Phoenix and a Mob-related operation called Emprise that had concessions at Arizona racetracks. Emprise and six individuals were later convicted of concealing ownership of the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. MacDonald was pardoned in 2000 by President Clinton after an appeal from Congressman Patrick Kennedy. The Navajo Tribe also dropped its charges.

  EPILOGUE

  WHO WILL PAY? GAMBLING ON THE FUTURE

  At the Plaza, one of the small downtown casinos in “old” Las Vegas, a low-stakes blackjack game is in progress. Six players sit in an arc around the dealer. Brenda is a friendly African American woman who is chatting and trading banter with the regulars who call her by name. She is also explaining the betting rules to a novice who has just slipped into an empty seat. She deals the cards crisply, effortlessly, as though the cards were extensions of her fingers. Two cards land silently in front of each player. Even though the table minimum is only $5 a hand, one of the players is betting $100 a hand and then doubling his bets when he wins. He wears a chartreuse shirt with western embroidery on the shoulders and mother-of-pearl snap buttons down the front. The large stack of chips in front of him totals several thousand dollars. He’s quiet. The man next to him—jovial, gregarious, and thoroughly enjoying himself—is losing.

  Brenda deals her own hand, placing one card face down, the other face up. The players push their bets into circles outlined on the green-felt table. After all bets are made, the players show their cards. One player triumphantly unfolds a ten of clubs and an ace (counted either as one or eleven). Twenty-one. Blackjack!

  Smiles and cheers all around. Winning chips are quickly distributed. The winner drops a $50 chip in Brenda’s tip glass, gives another $25 chip to the waitress who brings him a bourbon, and signals for the next hand. The goal in blackjack is to assemble a hand of cards with a count total of twenty-one. Unlike the players, the dealer has to make a total of at least seventeen. Any hand over twenty-one loses. You can either ask for more cards or hold the cards you were originally dealt. Technically, it should be a simple game. It is a simple game. I remember playing it as a kid at camp. It’s the betting that gets complicated.

  When former mayor of Las Vegas Oscar Goodman showed up at public events, he often brought along two statuesque, stiletto-heeled, sequined showgirls, one on each arm. The girls made him the center of attention. In order to raise money for the city, he leased the old federal courthouse to the newly named “Mob Museum” and sold the old Las Vegas City Hall to Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer. Zappos was founded in San Francisco by two Harvard graduates, and they moved it to Las Vegas because they liked the idea that Las Vegas had what they characterized as a “call-center culture” and a 24–7 time frame. (They also liked the low tax rates, especially after they sold the company to Amazon for $1.2 billion.)

  One of the former mayor’s other idiosyncrasies was that he prominently displayed a large bottle of Sapphire Blue Bombay Gin in his office from which he al
ways poured visitors a drink, regardless of the time of day. He had a contract to promote Bombay Gin. When term limits caught up with him, the current mayor, his wife, took over.

  In this atmosphere politics is seen as a diversion, a sideline of entertainment. Governance is part of the “just the right amount of wrong” Las Vegas brand. When the former governor was investigated for attempting to sexually assault a woman in the parking garage of a well-known restaurant on Flamingo Road, the tapes from the surveillance cameras mysteriously disappeared. The political atmosphere of Las Vegas does not lend itself to reality, never mind hard choices. That the Lake Mead reservoir—from which Las Vegas gets 90 percent of its water supply—is dropping more quickly than anyone foresaw is an occasion for hard choices.

  For the past four years a project to drill through canyon bedrock into the middle of Lake Mead to place an intake pipe in the center at its lowest level has encountered delays and is unlikely to be completed for another two years, even though the water surface of Lake Mead could drop below its current intake pipe. The backup plan is called the Great Basin Pumping Scheme. Over the past ten years the Southern Nevada Water Authority has succeeded in buying up water rights in mountain valleys two hundred miles away in northern Nevada. US Senate majority leader and Nevada senator Harry Reid has succeeded in obtaining a federal right-of-way to build a pipeline and pumping stations to pipe the water across federal land into Las Vegas. Almost everyone estimates that the Great Basin Pumping Scheme will cost at least $15 billion and will be the most expensive public works project in Nevada history. The question: Who will pay?