Navajo vs. Navajo

By Dan Cray/Crownpoint, N.M.

In the desiccated climate of New Mexico's San Juan Basin, a land of red sandstone mesas peppered with pinon trees, water is so precious that Navajo tradition regards it as a living entity. Survival here has long depended on the health of underground pools and streams that feed wells and the occasional surface spring. That's why Billy Martin is worried. The water supply to his tiny town of Crownpoint (pop. 2,500) is threatened, he says, by money-grubbers who don't understand water's importance to Native American culture. It sounds like a familiar story... until you realize that Martin, 69, isn't upset with white businessmen. He's talking about his Navajo brethren.

Challenging the stereotype of Indians as uncompromising conservationists, more than 200 individual Navajo landowners have quietly leased 1,440 acres to Hydro Resources Inc., an Albuquerque company that plans to mine uranium ore from a local aquifer (a layer of water-bearing rock). The company has promised a lucrative payoff: more than $40,000 for each property it leases, plus royalties as high as 25% on the sale of the uranium ore. For some Navajo landowners that could translate into more than $1 million a year--a nice paycheck anywhere, but especially in a region with double-digit unemployment and an average annual income of less than $10,000. Hydro Resources president Richard Clement Jr. says his company will eventually employ about 150 local workers to develop the site, one of the two largest beds of untapped uranium in the U.S.

But the aquifer containing the ore also supplies water to an estimated 10,000 people in and around Crownpoint, a town in which dusty yards are decorated with stripped-down car frames and visiting neighbors honk their horn rather than ring the doorbell. Less than 10% of the local Navajo stand to benefit directly from the mining leases, and many of the rest, conditioned by a history of false promises from outsiders, aren't buying Hydro Resources' assurances that their water will remain unpolluted by the mine.

The town's primary well is situated only 2,000 ft. from the nearest proposed mining site. A similar uranium-mining effort in the 1980s failed to preserve the water's purity, says Mitchell Capitan, the soft-spoken leader of a grass-roots organization opposed to the mine. "We can't afford to risk our children and our future," says Capitan. Martin agrees, "It's a disruption to Mother Earth, and it's not the Indian way."

Or is it? Hydro Resources contends that its extraction process poses no threat to the groundwater. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission concurs, and the company has been granted a license to mine. "If there's a resource there, why shouldn't our people be able to enjoy the proceeds of it?" argues Ruth Bridgeman, 79, who leased her property to Hydro Resources several years ago. Leonard Arviso, a Navajo who acts as the company's liaison to his tribe, talks not of land or money but of children who are forced to leave the community for lack of jobs. "We can respect Mother Earth," he says, "without wasting it."

Today the Navajo Nation is but one of many tribes in which some members believe they can exploit their natural resources with minimal risk while others don't want to take any chances. In Alaska spruce forests that served as traditional hunting grounds have been clear-cut by Tlingit loggers. Florida's Miccosukee Indians are attempting to build housing within Everglades National Park, while Utah's Goshute are actively seeking a nuclear-waste dump. And last year Arizona's White Mountain Apaches, protecting their logging and cattle interests, declared that federal agents would be forbidden to enforce the Endangered Species Act on tribal land. Says Rosita Worl, a Tlingit anthropologist: "There has never been more tension between the need for resources and our reverence for nature."

In Crownpoint the uranium issue has sharply divided the Navajo. At the tribe's chapter house (where the local governing body sits), a recent motion to oppose the mine sparked such furious debate that the issue was permanently tabled. "Anyone who wants to get re-elected can't touch this," says Rosemary Silversmith, the chapter-house treasurer.

The issue has split not only the tribe but also individual families. For example, Capitan, the grass-roots opposition leader, is the nephew of Arviso, the employee of Hydro Resources. And there is a generational clash as well: some younger Navajo accuse the landowners, many of them tribal elders, of selling out. "The older people always say human life is more important than material things," says LaJuanna Daye, a health-care worker, "but here they have the chance to prove it, and all we see is greed."

With the land in question a checkerboard ownership of Navajo, other private landholders and the U.S. government, the ultimate fate of the mine may depend on who wins jurisdiction in court. Regardless, the Navajo syllables To eii be iina at e (Water is life) have become fighting words in Crownpoint.