Faking the Indian Wars Again

By Chris Clarke | Posted on October 3, 2009

Crossposted from Coyote Crossing

There’s a lot of superficial reporting coming out of Indian Country in northern Arizona this week, with headlines like “Hopi to Environmentalists: Keep Out” emblazoned upon them. The immediate reason is that the Hopi Tribal Council has specifically disinvited the Sierra Club, the NRDC, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Grand Canyon Trust from the Hopi Reservation.

The deeper reason is that the Hopi Tribal Council blames enviros for shutting down the Mohave Generating Station in 2005 and threatening to do the same with the Navajo Generating Station. This would undercut about a hundred percent of the Hopi Tribe’s remaining coal sales, and would certainly have a significant effect on the local economy.

Even the alternative press is reporting this one blankly, as if this is a straight bit of conflict between land users with the enviros to blame for, as the Alternet piece puts it, not putting in enough efort to help the Hopi develop a cleaner economy.

Nobody seems to be reporting that the Hopi Tribal Council has from day one been a wholly owned subsidiary of the coal industry. It is, arguably, an illegitimate government, imposed from without by industry shills in order to facilitate access to tribal mineral property.

The coal-fired Mohave Generating Station made the skies turn black throughout the airshed of the Colorado River Tribes, and its closure was possibly the single greatest quality of life improvement for those people in a generation — though you won’t read that in other reporting this week. It was closed, in part, through the efforts of a consortium of Hopi and Navajo environmentalists distressed at the effects of coal mining on their own homelands — though I haven’t seen that in any of the recent reporting either.

And I haven’t seen mention of this little bit of history, which I’ve excerpted from a longer piece I wrote in 2005 when the Mohave Generating Station closed, about how coal company advocate John Boyden founded the Hopi Tribal Council in the mid-1950s:

By the 1950s, conflict between the Mormons and the federal government was long over, and the local Mormon power structure meshed nearly seamlessly with that of the feds. In 1951 the Bureau of Indian Affairs appointed Boyden, who was then a bishop in the Mormon church, as land claims attorney for the Hopi. Boyden, who had made a fair amount of money representing Native groups as they leased land to mining companies, quickly set about remaking the Hopi political world. In 1951 the Hopi had no tribal council, and no central leadership with the legal authority to lease land to the coal companies. Boyden persuaded a group of Hopi Mormon converts that the income from coal leases would be of immense benefit to the tribe. In 1955, that group was recognized by the BLM as the official government of the Hopi, after an election with a turnout of about 10 percent.

The whole article is over at Coyote Crossing. Read it if you really want to understand what’s happening in Hopiland this week.