Latest news with #Hopi
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Utah uranium mine is first energy project approved under Trump's 14-day review process
Interior Secretary Doug Burghum. (Photo by) A uranium mine in southern Utah is the first project to be approved under President Donald Trump's emergency declaration streamlining the development of energy infrastructure. Owned and operated by the Canadian company Anfield Energy, the Velvet-Wood uranium project received a green light on Friday under the federal government's new, 14-day environmental review process for energy projects. The permitting process for similar projects has taken years in the past — but in January, Trump declared a national energy emergency, slashing the environmental review process for a number of energy projects like uranium, crude oil, natural gas, coal, biofuels, geothermal and critical minerals. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced the mining project in Utah would be the first to be reviewed. And on Friday, Anfield received approval from the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. 'This approval marks a turning point in how we secure America's mineral future,' said Doug Burgum, Department of the Interior secretary, in a statement. 'By streamlining the review process for critical mineral projects like Velvet-Wood, we're reducing dependence on foreign adversaries and ensuring our military, medical and energy sectors have the resources they need to thrive. This is mineral security in action.' Sitting near the Utah-Colorado border in San Juan County about 40 miles east of Canyonlands National Park, the Velvet-Wood project is the combination of two mines — the existing Velvet Mine, which produced nearly 400,000 tons of ore between 1979 and 1984, and the nearby Wood area, which hasn't yet been mined according to an economic assessment from Anfield. 'We are very pleased that the Department of the Interior has greenlit our Velvet-Wood project in an expedited manner,' said Anfield CEO Corey Dias in a statement. 'This confirms our view that Velvet-Wood was well-suited for an accelerated review, given that it is a past-producing uranium and vanadium mine with a small environmental footprint. The Company will now pivot to advancing the project through construction and, ultimately, to production.' Anfield has been eyeing this site for years, purchasing it in 2015 and submitting a plan of operation to the state of Utah and BLM in 2024. According to the Department of the Interior, the operation will disturb about three acres, and much of the mining will take place underground. The normal environmental review process usually takes local input into consideration, weighing environmental and cultural concerns against the project's goals. That includes a public comment period that, depending on the project, can result in thousands of comments. According to BLM documents, public input was not required because of the president's emergency order. Still, the region's tribal governments have concerns, as noted in BLM's environmental assessment. The agency met with representatives from the Hopi, Pueblo of Zuni, Navajo, Pueblo of San Felipe and Ute Mountain Ute tribes, all of whom were critical of the operation and the federal government's expedited review. 'The Tribal Nations expressed similar concerns with the emergency procedures, water impacts, transportation, and uranium contamination,' the BLM documents read, including worries that the mining and transportation of uranium ore, which would take place near Bears Ears National Monument, could impact cultural sites. Anfield also owns Shootaring Canyon uranium mill, located in Garfield County between Hanksville and Lake Powell. Just one of three licensed and completed uranium mills in the country, it hasn't been operational in years — Anfield says it plans to reopen the mill, although that will require additional licensing and infrastructure improvements. If it becomes operational, the mill will be used to convert uranium ore into concentrate to be used in nuclear reactors. This story was originally published in Utah News Dispatch.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
University of Minnesota to return ancestral remains this fall
Melissa OlsonMPR News During an annual update to the University of Minnesota Board of Regents, senior advisor to the president on Native American affairs Karen Diver said the repatriation of the Mimbres collection could begin in October. 'We anticipate working with the Hopi as the lead tribe to repatriate their ancestors and funerary objects in the fall,' said Diver. Anthropologists at the university excavated more than 150 ancestral remains and thousands of Mimbres cultural items from the ancestral gravesites of Indigenous people in the southwest during digs that took place between 1928 and 1931. The Hopi Tribe is located in northeastern Arizona. 'They have been sending representatives here, giving us guidance on how to care for their ancestors and funerary objects,' Diver said. The update from Diver marks another phase in a process that has taken place over the past three years as the university stepped up repatriation efforts. The university's regents passed a resolution authorizing the collection's return in February 2022. 'It is the moral and ethical calling of our land grant university that inspires and guides us, demanding that we act justly by repatriating that which was never ours,' wrote former Board of Regents chair Ken Powell in 2022. The return of the Mimbres collection complies with requirements of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — the 1990 law passed by Congress, which requires institutions that receive federal funds to return human remains and items of cultural patrimony to tribal nations and Native Hawaiian organizations. Diver said the Weisman Art Museum at the university has worked to build the necessary relationships with tribal nations to care for the collection as the repatriation process moves forward. 'The bottom line on this is that the tribes are happy with the way the process is going and the regard and concern that they've been given,' she said.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Yahoo
Did county officials enable Ryan Martinez's violent actions at a 2023 protest in Española?
Ryan Martinez, the gunman who severely wounded a Native American man at an Española protest against the proposed installation of a controversial Juan de Oñate statute in 2023, is serving the first year of a four-year prison sentence. Now, survivors of that shooting are suing the county officials who they say turned a blind eye to the circumstances that enabled Martinez's violent outburst. Jacob Johns, a 41-year-old Hopi and Akimel O'odham man from Spokane, Washington, who was shot by Martinez during the demonstration, and Malaya Corrine Peixinho, a 23-year-old New Mexican woman who Martinez flashed his gun at, filed lawsuits on Monday against the Rio Arriba County commissioners, the sheriff's office and the county manager. They allege that their civil rights were violated on Sept. 28, 2023, by county officials and sheriff's deputies who knew there was a threat of violence that day, yet were seen 'leaving the demonstration, disregarding the danger and failing to protect protestors.' Jacob Johns outside the Roundhouse in Santa Fe on May 12. Nadav Soroker/Searchlight New Mexico The shooting happened during a peaceful protest over the county's proposal to install a statue of Oñate, which had been in storage for years, at the county complex in Española. Community backlash was so strong that the county temporarily postponed the installation. On the morning of the canceled event, protestors flocked to the complex to celebrate. They held an Indigenous prayer ceremony and repurposed the concrete slab, fashioning the base for the statue into an altar decorated with handmade artifacts like corn and squash, woven baskets and pottery. 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' then-Sheriff Billy Mayfield wrote two days before the scheduled reinstallation. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns saw Martinez, who arrived in a white Tesla and was wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, shouting racial epithets at the Native demonstrators and pacing back and forth. Just before noon, Martinez charged the crowd; Johns hurried to step in front of him and block Martinez's path to the children and elders at the demonstration. Martinez reached into his waistband, pulled out a gun and promptly shot Johns in the chest with a hollow-point bullet, the lawsuit says. 'There were no sheriff's deputies present immediately before and when Martinez shot Johns and pointed his gun at Peixinho,' the suit alleges. He bled on the ground outside the county complex for 10 minutes before emergency personnel arrived. After receiving treatment in Española, he was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. According to his lawsuit, he briefly died during this trip. In the suit, Johns says he saw a council of spirits who asked him to give a full account of the times in his life when he chose to help other people rather than to look out for himself. Even though his shooter is behind bars, he said, he, Peixinho and their attorney see these lawsuits as a way to hold accountable the public officials tasked with keeping Española safe on that September morning. 'I would like to see the police do their job,' Johns told Searchlight New Mexico. 'I was lying there, bleeding out in their parking lot for 10 minutes, and it wasn't even the sheriff's office that apprehended the shooter — it was tribal police.' Before the shooting, a warning Two days before the demonstration, on Sept. 26, 2023, then-Sheriff Billy Merrifield — who died in April of this year — emailed county commissioners to voice his concerns over the planned relocation and installation of the Oñate statue. It had been taken down from its site in remote Alcalde in 2020, when the nation was grappling with whether to tear down, preserve or otherwise alter statues and memorials that represented controversial figures and movements in American history. Oñate is infamous for his role in the 1599 Acoma Massacre, in which Spanish soldiers under his command killed hundreds of Native people. Men 25 and older who survived had their right foot amputated, according to historical accounts, and were sentenced to slavery. In the 1990s, the right foot of Oñate's statue was cut off by a group that called itself the Friends of Acoma. In the summer of 2020, county workers removed the Oñate sculpture from its perch in Alcalde. Courtesy of Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal Commissioners planned to install the statue — which depicts the conquistador riding on horseback, sword and scabbard at his side — at a new location: the county complex in Española. Such a move, Merrifield warned, could likely end with 'deadly force, which can turn into legal liability/tort claims for the county.' The late Billy Merrifield, Rio Arriba County's sheriff at the time of the shooting. Courtesy of Rio Arriba County 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' he wrote. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns' and Peixinho's cases hinge on what the county chose to do with that warning. Their suits say that sheriff's deputies encountered an agitated, cursing Martinez that morning, describing him as 'darting back and forth' and 'acting in an obviously agitated and extremely anxious manner.' 'Due to Martinez's disruptive, antagonistic and provocative behavior, Deputy (Steve) Binns informed Martinez that he needed to leave the scene,' the lawsuit says. According to the suits, an unnamed undersheriff 'then overruled Deputy Binns and told Martinez that he could stay.' Finally, the lawsuit alleges, deputies left the scene. The absence of any armed law enforcement at this gathering is made worse by two things, they argue: the fact that county officials were warned by the sheriff of the day's potential violence, and that the Rio Arriba County Sheriff's Office building is just a couple of dozen paces from where Johns was shot. 'They were deliberately indifferent,' Mariel Nanasi, their lawyer, told Searchlight. Nanasi is a former Chicago civil rights attorney who now leads New Energy Economy, a Santa Fe–based renewable-energy advocacy group. If either case makes it to trial, the lawsuits have the potential to test the limits of the relatively young New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was drafted after George Floyd's murder and signed into law in 2021. The legislation did away with qualified immunity as a defense for government officials in New Mexico. In the years since it became law, a number of prominent cases have been filed that relied on the act. Alec Baldwin alleged civil rights violations in a January lawsuit against the First Judicial District Attorney, residents of southern New Mexico alleged violations against the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority and a University of New Mexico basketball player alleged violations after a teammate allegedly punched him. None of those cases have gone to trial. Unlike federal civil rights law, the state act has a cap of $2 million in damages. Alex Naranjo, the former chair of the Rio Arriba County Commission. Courtesy of Rio Arriba County Commission In the aftermath of the shooting, then-county commission chair Alex Naranjo — whose uncle, former state senator and local political mainstay Emilio Naranjo, played a pivotal role in securing funding for the Oñate statue back in the 1990s — said the statue wouldn't go up. Within weeks of the shooting, residents of the area sought to initiate a recall against Naranjo. When he challenged it, a judge found that there was probable cause that Naranjo violated the state Open Meetings Act by deciding to relocate and install the Oñate statue outside of the bounds of a public meeting. He has appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision. None of the county officials named in Johns and Peixinho's lawsuit would comment Tuesday morning. A long road to recovery Since the shooting, both Johns and Peixinho have faced difficult recoveries. Johns was hospitalized for more than a month and underwent numerous surgeries. Martinez's bullet pierced his abdomen, destroyed his spleen, broke his ribs and collapsed his lungs. Johns said it also damaged his pancreas, liver and stomach. Even after he was sent home to Washington, he carried wound drainage tubes — in his pancreas and liver — for six months. Johns created a visual diary that detailed his medical recovery. The nearly six-minute video captures the raw vulnerability of what it's like to heal from a gunshot wound. It captures the moment Martinez shot him and graphically shows the months of hospitalization and surgeries that followed. At one point, stray bullet fragments are visibly pushing their way out of his body, through his skin. Following one surgery, Johns is stapled up — only to later learn that his body is allergic to the staples. A video diary of Jacob Johns' long recovery from his gunshot wounds. Courtesy of Jacob Johns. Warning: This video contains graphic footage. 'Every laugh, every cough, every movement I could feel the internal tubes touching my internal organs in the most painful, horrible place I could ever imagine being,' he says in the video. After half a year of recovery, he says, he began the long, hard 'internal journey toward healing.' Peixinho knows this journey well. She was just 22 when she saw Johns knocked to the ground and then looked up to see Martinez's pistol aimed at her head. For months after, she said, loud noises triggered her. If she was in a drive-thru, she would recline her car seat and lie down to make sure a stray bullet couldn't find her. If she heard a gunshot outside her house, or a firework, or a car backfiring, the fear came back. 'There were times when I was at work and I'd hear a gunshot,' she recalled. 'I'd crawl into the trunk of my car and I'd be stuck there for hours, so mortified.' Both Johns and Peixinho said there's little solace in the knowledge that the gunman was put away. At the last minute before trial, Martinez accepted a plea deal that put him in prison for four years. Prosecutors dropped a hate crime enhancement that they had previously sought. 'Every single time I look down, I have these massive scars and these big holes in me,' Johns said. 'But it's the psychological stuff that's really been messing with me … I had to agree that my life was only worth four years.' To both survivors, the outcome was a painful reminder of the violence facing Indigenous people. Just three years before Martinez shot Johns and leveled his gun at Peixinho, a man protesting an Oñate statue in Albuquerque was shot in the back four times by an assailant armed with a .40-caliber handgun. Both Johns and Peixinho know that there's no relitigating Martinez's case. But they see their lawsuits as a step toward accountability. 'When law enforcement fails to do their job, it really puts society in danger,' Johns said. 'We really have to have faith that we're going to be protected when we're exercising our constitutional rights. A condensed version of this story is available here. Malaya Corrine Peixinho and Jacob Johns in Santa Fe. (Photo courtesy of Mariel Nanasi) Ryan Martinez, the gunman who severely wounded a Native American man at an Española protest against the proposed installation of a controversial Juan de Oñate statute in 2023, is serving the first year of a four-year prison sentence. Now, survivors of that shooting are suing the county officials who they say turned a blind eye to the circumstances that enabled Martinez's violent outburst. Jacob Johns, a 41-year-old Hopi and Akimel O'odham man from Spokane, Washington, who was shot by Martinez during the demonstration, and Malaya Corrine Peixinho, a 23-year-old New Mexican woman who Martinez flashed his gun at, filed lawsuits on Monday against the Rio Arriba County commissioners, the sheriff's office and the county manager. They allege that their civil rights were violated on Sept. 28, 2023, by county officials and sheriff's deputies who knew there was a threat of violence that day, yet were seen 'leaving the demonstration, disregarding the danger and failing to protect protestors.' The shooting happened during a peaceful protest over the county's proposal to install a statue of Oñate, which had been in storage for years, at the county complex in Española. Community backlash was so strong that the county temporarily postponed the installation. On the morning of the canceled event, protestors flocked to the complex to celebrate. They held an Indigenous prayer ceremony and repurposed the concrete slab, fashioning the base for the statue into an altar decorated with handmade artifacts like corn and squash, woven baskets and pottery. 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' then-Sheriff Billy Mayfield wrote two days before the scheduled reinstallation. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns saw Martinez, who arrived in a white Tesla and was wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, shouting racial epithets at the Native demonstrators and pacing back and forth. Just before noon, Martinez charged the crowd; Johns hurried to step in front of him and block Martinez's path to the children and elders at the demonstration. Martinez reached into his waistband, pulled out a gun and promptly shot Johns in the chest with a hollow-point bullet, the lawsuit says. 'There were no sheriff's deputies present immediately before and when Martinez shot Johns and pointed his gun at Peixinho,' the suit alleges. He bled on the ground outside the county complex for 10 minutes before emergency personnel arrived. After receiving treatment in Española, he was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. According to his lawsuit, he briefly died during this trip. In the suit, Johns says he saw a council of spirits who asked him to give a full account of the times in his life when he chose to help other people rather than to look out for himself. Even though his shooter is behind bars, he said, he, Peixinho and their attorney see these lawsuits as a way to hold accountable the public officials tasked with keeping Española safe on that September morning. 'I would like to see the police do their job,' Johns told Searchlight New Mexico. 'I was lying there, bleeding out in their parking lot for 10 minutes, and it wasn't even the sheriff's office that apprehended the shooter — it was tribal police.' Two days before the demonstration, on Sept. 26, 2023, then-Sheriff Billy Merrifield — who died in April of this year — emailed county commissioners to voice his concerns over the planned relocation and installation of the Oñate statue. It had been taken down from its site in remote Alcalde in 2020, when the nation was grappling with whether to tear down, preserve or otherwise alter statues and memorials that represented controversial figures and movements in American history. Oñate is infamous for his role in the 1599 Acoma Massacre, in which Spanish soldiers under his command killed hundreds of Native people. Men 25 and older who survived had their right foot amputated, according to historical accounts, and were sentenced to slavery. In the 1990s, the right foot of Oñate's statue was cut off by a group that called itself the Friends of Acoma. Commissioners planned to install the statue — which depicts the conquistador riding on horseback, sword and scabbard at his side — at a new location: the county complex in Española. Such a move, Merrifield warned, could likely end with 'deadly force, which can turn into legal liability/tort claims for the county.' 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' he wrote. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns' and Peixinho's cases hinge on what the county chose to do with that warning. Their suits say that sheriff's deputies encountered an agitated, cursing Martinez that morning, describing him as 'darting back and forth' and 'acting in an obviously agitated and extremely anxious manner.' 'Due to Martinez's disruptive, antagonistic and provocative behavior, Deputy (Steve) Binns informed Martinez that he needed to leave the scene,' the lawsuit says. According to the suits, an unnamed undersheriff 'then overruled Deputy Binns and told Martinez that he could stay.' Finally, the lawsuit alleges, deputies left the scene. The absence of any armed law enforcement at this gathering is made worse by two things, they argue: the fact that county officials were warned by the sheriff of the day's potential violence, and that the Rio Arriba County Sheriff's Office building is just a couple of dozen paces from where Johns was shot. 'They were deliberately indifferent,' Mariel Nanasi, their lawyer, told Searchlight. Nanasi is a former Chicago civil rights attorney who now leads New Energy Economy, a Santa Fe–based renewable-energy advocacy group. If either case makes it to trial, the lawsuits have the potential to test the limits of the relatively young New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was drafted after George Floyd's murder and signed into law in 2021. The legislation did away with qualified immunity as a defense for government officials in New Mexico. In the years since it became law, a number of prominent cases have been filed that relied on the act. Alec Baldwin alleged civil rights violations in a January lawsuit against the First Judicial District Attorney, residents of southern New Mexico alleged violations against the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority and a University of New Mexico basketball player alleged violations after a teammate allegedly punched him. None of those cases have gone to trial. Unlike federal civil rights law, the state act has a cap of $2 million in damages. In the aftermath of the shooting, then-county commission chair Alex Naranjo — whose uncle, former state senator and local political mainstay Emilio Naranjo, played a pivotal role in securing funding for the Oñate statue back in the 1990s — said the statue wouldn't go up. Within weeks of the shooting, residents of the area sought to initiate a recall against Naranjo. When he challenged it, a judge found that there was probable cause that Naranjo violated the state Open Meetings Act by deciding to relocate and install the Oñate statue outside of the bounds of a public meeting. He has appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision. None of the county officials named in Johns and Peixinho's lawsuit would comment Tuesday morning. Since the shooting, both Johns and Peixinho have faced difficult recoveries. Johns was hospitalized for more than a month and underwent numerous surgeries. Martinez's bullet pierced his abdomen, destroyed his spleen, broke his ribs and collapsed his lungs. Johns said it also damaged his pancreas, liver and stomach. Even after he was sent home to Washington, he carried wound drainage tubes — in his pancreas and liver — for six months. Johns created a visual diary that detailed his medical recovery. The nearly six-minute video captures the raw vulnerability of what it's like to heal from a gunshot wound. It captures the moment Martinez shot him and graphically shows the months of hospitalization and surgeries that followed. At one point, stray bullet fragments are visibly pushing their way out of his body, through his skin. Following one surgery, Johns is stapled up — only to later learn that his body is allergic to the staples. 'Every laugh, every cough, every movement I could feel the internal tubes touching my internal organs in the most painful, horrible place I could ever imagine being,' he says in the video. After half a year of recovery, he says, he began the long, hard 'internal journey toward healing.' Peixinho knows this journey well. She was just 22 when she saw Johns knocked to the ground and then looked up to see Martinez's pistol aimed at her head. For months after, she said, loud noises triggered her. If she was in a drive-thru, she would recline her car seat and lie down to make sure a stray bullet couldn't find her. If she heard a gunshot outside her house, or a firework, or a car backfiring, the fear came back. 'There were times when I was at work and I'd hear a gunshot,' she recalled. 'I'd crawl into the trunk of my car and I'd be stuck there for hours, so mortified.' Both Johns and Peixinho said there's little solace in the knowledge that the gunman was put away. At the last minute before trial, Martinez accepted a plea deal that put him in prison for four years. Prosecutors dropped a hate crime enhancement that they had previously sought. 'Every single time I look down, I have these massive scars and these big holes in me,' Johns said. 'But it's the psychological stuff that's really been messing with me … I had to agree that my life was only worth four years.' To both survivors, the outcome was a painful reminder of the violence facing Indigenous people. Just three years before Martinez shot Johns and leveled his gun at Peixinho, a man protesting an Oñate statue in Albuquerque was shot in the back four times by an assailant armed with a .40-caliber handgun. Both Johns and Peixinho know that there's no relitigating Martinez's case. But they see their lawsuits as a step toward accountability. 'When law enforcement fails to do their job, it really puts society in danger,' Johns said. 'We really have to have faith that we're going to be protected when we're exercising our constitutional rights. A condensed version of this story is available here. This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Why indigenous tribes oppose the use of reclaimed water at Arizona Snowbowl
Flagstaff meteorologist Mark Stubblefield has been riding the San Francisco Peaks' slopes at Arizona Snowbowl almost every winter since 1987. But in 2012, something sparked a little concern in his thoughts. 'One day, I went up there when they were making snow and I was hit by the sprinkles of water that were in the air,' Stubblefield said. 'And I thought, 'Do I really want to be breathing this stuff?'' The 'stuff' that Stubblefield refers to is reclaimed water – partially treated sewage effluent that the city of Flagstaff agreed to supply to Snowbowl for its snowmaking in 2002. Up to 178 million gallons of reclaimed wastewater are blown out into the air to make artificial snow over the course of a skiing season, geologist Richard Hereford said. It's the use of that wastewater that some of the oldest civilizations in North America say is a profound violation of their spirituality and health. The Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, Havasupai, Yavapai-Apache, White Mountain Apache, Tonto Apache, Zuni and other tribes say it ruins their sacred lands, harms the ecosystem, and continues the genocide of their ancestral culture. 'The Earth, with its air, water, food, soil, and living trees, and this mountain, are my extended family,' Navajo rights activist Cora Maxx-Phillips said. 'We need to protect it.' The Navajo Nation in 2007 sued the U.S. Forest Service, alleging the use of millions of gallons of treated sewage effluent daily to make snow on the western slope of Humphreys Peak violated 1993's Religious Freedom Restoration Act prohibiting the government from 'substantially burdening the free exercise of religion.' The case went to a federal appeals court, which found 'no plants, springs, natural resources, shrines with religious significance, or religious ceremonies that would be physically affected by the use of such artificial snow.' 'Thus, the sole effect of the artificial snow is on the Plaintiffs' subjective spiritual experience,' the court ruled. But tribal members said that finding discounts the range of peaks' status as a life-giving force that tribes hold in their hearts with deep spiritual, cultural and physical meaning. 'These mountains are beacons,' Dianna Sue White Dove Ukualla, said. She's among the last Havasupai still living 3,000 feet below the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Her people are the 'guardians of the Grand Canyon,' she said, having shaped it for more than 800 years. 'These mountains, the peaks, grow a lot of medicine, and these white trees are powerful trees in our ways, of the Supai people,' she said, pointing to the white-barked Aspens bordering the boundary of Snowbowl. She told the story of two twin heroes who were birthed in a spring at San Francisco Peaks by a healer. It highlights the Supai reverence for the peaks' snow melts that fed the aquifers and springs essential to their survival. But as Navajo activist Shawn Mulford points out, there are small signs at Snowbowl that warn people not to ingest the treated wastewater that's now being used on the slopes. The beloved spring where the twins came to life in the legend of the Supai people is now contaminated. 'We can't go there anymore because we don't know what this snowmelt has done to it,' Ukualla said. 'I want this place to restore its harmony with the trees, the animals, all that is on the land.' Those words echo loudly on the subalpine meadows of the San Francisco Peaks. 'We can't go harvest on the peaks anymore,' said Ka-Voka Jackson of the Hualapai Tribe. She's one of the 2,300 'People of the Tall Pines' that inhabit the region along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. 'And the springs we collected water from, it's not the water it used to be.' she said. Jackson said that when there's pain and destruction going on in the land, the indigenous people can't go there anymore because it's no longer a place of healing. She points to her shirt, which reads, 'No Desecration for Recreation.' The Navajo Nation said in its 2007 lawsuit the research on the environmental impacts of that snowmelt was insufficient. It still is, but tribal advocates are trying to change that. Among the few investigations that have been made, Hereford's stands out. After sampling the stormwater runoff from Snowbowl, he found there is an excess of phosphorus and nitrogen in the soil, which aren't naturally occurring. Hereford said it would take 'a whole new level of treatment' to remove those elements from reclaimed water. 'The nutrient-rich water affects the ecosystem because it acts like a fertilizer in an area that was pristine, so it disrupts it,' he continued. Others are seeking to test for other contaminants that don't break down in treated wastewater. Mulford, the Navajo activist, is planning on testing the water for sucralose, an artificial sweetener with the help of an environmental engineer from Florida. But Mulford's research is still in its early stages, and studies on how that nutrient-loaded water affects the ecosystem long-term are missing. In the meantime, the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks know nothing of the conflict between indigenous reverence and the indifference of progress. 'My ancestors have shed tears, like I do, saying that this place is holy and it's sacred, nobody paid attention, and they left this world with their tears,' Maxx-Phillips said. 'To this day, we're still shedding tears but we will never give up, that's who we are as indigenous Nations.' Natasha Cortinovis is a master's student at the University of Arizona, and is part of a student newsroom led by The Arizona Republic. Coverage of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference is supported by Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism, the University of Arizona and the Arizona Media Association. These stories are published open-source for other news outlets and organizations to share and republish, with credit and links to This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Why tribes oppose Arizona Snowbowl's use of reclaimed water
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Hopi farmers' harvests shrunk by long drought. Planting crops is ‘necessary'
Michael Kotutwa spent the summers of his boyhood planting corn alongside his grandfather. In the sandy soils of the Colorado Plateau, they buried seeds deep into the soil, awaiting rain. Planting 'felt necessary,' said Kotutwa. Every summer after his 20s, throughout two decades of university education and another six years after earning his Ph.D., he has returned to the Second Mesa to dryland farm on 9 acres of land. His grandfather planted every year until he died at 88, just as their Hopi ancestors had for over 2,000 crop seasons. Now, a 30-year megadrought in the Southwest and declining numbers of farmers on the reservation have brought challenges to that way of life. Even when planting hardy seeds that communities have selected for hundreds of generations to fit the arid environment, dryland farmers rely on winter moisture and timely summer rains to have a crop. There have been several rain busts in recent years, less snowfall, and summer heat has risen dramatically in the last century, stunting crops. At the Winslow National Weather Service station, the closest to Hopi lands, temperatures historically climbed over 100 degrees just a few days a year. In 2024, there were 31 days with three-digit temperatures in Winslow, and in 2020, there were 43. Some Hopi families' seed supplies dwindled in 2020, after Arizona was hit by one of the hottest and driest seasons on record. 'We're not building it back up to where it used to be,' Beatrice Norton, a Hopi tribal member and chairperson of Oraibi, told The Republic then. That year, only 4.3 inches of rain fell in Winslow, the nearest weather station to her town. Hopi corn requires between 6 and 10 inches of rain. The sustained drought also means there is less forage for sheep and livestock, and that the spring used to feed a few Hopi irrigated gardens, already diminished by mining operations' groundwater pumping, is under higher stress. 'This is more than an environmental crisis; it is a disruption of how our communities live, learn, and thrive together," said Trena Bizardi, senior program officer for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and a member of the Navajo Nation. At the same time, the profound transformation of the land and the seasons doesn't change the work of many to carry traditions forward, she added. 'We have this persistent spirit which is rooted in our identity.' Kotutwa, now an assistant professor of Indigenous Resilience at the University of Arizona, has experienced many years of crop loss. Yet more than worrying about the clouds that don't come, he is concerned about his community preserving its health and knowledge, and about not neglecting his cornfield to crows and squirrels. Given seeds, a gourd full of water and a planting stick from the very beginning, according to Hopi creation stories, men and women are meant to care for the crops, he said. 'The most important thing,' adds Kotutwa to the creation story, 'was that we're supposed to put faith in everything that we do.' Throughout the ups and downs of the northeastern Arizona climate and the droughts of the last century, Hopi families have continued to plant. In the 1930s, when the dust and drought hit the high plains of the midwest, Hopi families still grew nearly 4 million pounds of corn, on top of beans, melons, squashes, pumpkins, peaches, apricots, pears, apples, grapes and other garden vegetables, wrote ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan in his book 'Where our food comes from.' Some even sold the surplus. In the 1940s, when U.S. wars took the men to war, Nabhan wrote, farms around Tuba City 'produced more corn than they could consume.' Since then, coal mining operations expanded on Hopi and Navajo land, extracting increasing amounts of water and drying up natural springs. On top of that, Hopi farms have seen less rain and higher temperatures in this millennium than during the Dust Bowl — conditions that scientists project will exacerbate under climate change. A scientific study suggests that several states in neighboring Mexico, where the government has banned planting GMO corn to protect native varieties, could see a 40% decrease in yields for rain-fed cornfields under current climate conditions. 'Living out here for all my life, there's a tremendous change,' Ronald Humeyestewa, a farmer and member of the Mishongnovi tribal council, told The Republic in the dry summer of 2020. 'But I don't think Hopis will ever, ever let go of planting.' Through youth projects, seed-keeping initiatives and microgrants programs, organizations strive to build up Native food systems. Only about 15% of the people in the Hopi reservation are still farming, Kotutwa estimates. It's a big drop from the 1930s when nearly the whole community was planting and kept 63 varieties and species of fruits, vegetables and grains. 'It may not be visible to people on the outside, but everyone is still continuing in adapting and carrying all these traditions forward,' said Bizardi, with the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. Dryland farming: 'Everything depends on the corn': As crops wither, the Hopi fear for their way of life Projects like the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network are working toward seed 'rematriation,' which involves taking heirloom varieties back to their original Native lands and sharing knowledge among Indigenous communities. The Natwani Coalition, a nonprofit and affiliation of Hopi organizations dedicated to preserving farming traditions and restoring food systems, performed a comprehensive food assessment years ago and sustains youth and seed programs, micro-grants opportunities and a "farm talk" podcast. New surveys are underway in Hopi, said Kotutwa, who is leading a half-million-dollar project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to catalogue native seed biodiversity, expand cultivation, propose a model for data sovereignty, and grow a 'regional intertribal food and agricultural network' to revitalize native foodways. Under his grandfather's name, Kotutwa also opened a foundation and plans to establish a seed house and youth agricultural program that integrates the Hopi language. He has taught young people the technique: how far to space, how deep to plant, when to harvest, he said, 'but it's not about the process; It's about the why.' Farming is deeply connected to the Hopi's cultural and religious life. Communities that thrived in the desert long before Arizona was called a territory still practice dryland farming because farming is their lifeway. 'This is what you're supposed to be doing,' Kotutwa added. 'This is what you were told to do from the very beginning.' Clara Migoya covers agriculture and water issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hopi dryland farmers face reduced corn harvests due to long drought
