Stop Native Eviction In Arizona!

As we speak, there exist a life-threatening state of fear and anxiety in a traditional Native American community in Arizona. Big Mountain on Black Mesa is the only place in the United States where two Indian nations can still define cultural coexistence and shared territories, and now have become endangered aboriginal peoples.

The U.S. courts have ordered eviction on the remaining traditional Dineh People and keep the areas sealed and isolated. Peabody Coal Company has taken the last aquifer of clean drinking water that is sacred to the Dineh' and uses it to slurry coal for American citizens.

This leaves the people without access to or maintenance of water wells and subject to other government actions like: limitation or complete denial of crop cultivation and livestock husbandry, community and religious activities, disregard for elder residents’ safety needs to attain wood fuels for heating and cooking, deliberate breaking up of family and clan structures, controlled national media that portray the Big Mountain story as a result of legitimate and humane court decisions, Peabody mines that create daily detonation that causes micro-quakes, and massive emissions of coal dust and engine exhaust.

The United States is allowing this tragedy and genocide to be sustained under the guise that relocation is on a voluntary basis. These traditional resisters hold great knowledge and wisdom of ancient information and natural existence that are culturally irreplaceable, and it is our responsibility to stop the United States and its largest coal-producer, Peabody Energy, from executing this crime against humanity and mega-environmental destruction. It is 2009, will we let the Trail of Tears happen all over again and stand witness to it?

On December 22, 2008, Office of Surface Mining (OSM) issued a record of decision approving Peabody Western Coal Company’s mine permit revision application for the Black Mesa Complex. Through policies such as PL93-531, the U.S. has already forcibly relocated more than 14,000 Dine’ people from their ancestral homelands.

At this moment, the decision makers in Washington D.C. and Peabody Energy are planning ways to expand their occupation of sacred tribal lands to extract mineral & other resources.