Navajo Diary
by Hunter Bear
"Don't worry, fellow worker, all we're going to need from now on is guts."
– Frank H. Little, Cherokee Indian, hard-rock metal miner, IWW organizer -- lynched at Butte by copper boss thugs, August 1, 1917
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I grew up within and immediately around the vast Navajo world in this region - and our family traditionally supports the Dine'.
When one cuts through the many layers of obscuring complexity in this and related situations - generated by outside and hostile non-Indian forces - one finds ignorant media and self-serving Anglo politicians and, most of all of course, utterly calculating Machiavellian corporate interests.
These predators hover from their regional bases in the Western cities - e.g., Los Angeles and Salt Lake and Denver - but their home trails go into the thickets of very far-flung global interests indeed. And these nefarious forces and their allies have always sought to divide the Indian people whenever and wherever they can - but they're having an ever-more difficult time these days as, increasingly, native grassroots people and many leaders join together across tribal lines in common cause, against the common enemy.
What's happening here is following the same basic course as that of the ever-continuing River of Death generated in the Navajo country [and that of the nearby Lagunas] - and environs - in the lethal uranium tragedy that began more than a half a century ago, and which has poisoned much earth and air and water - and which has claimed a vast number of lives, mostly native, and will take many, many more.
The traditional Navajo and the traditional Hopi long ago found common cause via the compelling urgency of these and comparable hideous dangers. Here is simply one example of several of which I'm personally aware: During one of the periods where the Navajo/Hopi land dispute in the JUA region [Joint Use Area] had become extremely heated via non-Indian corporate conniving - late 1970s into the 1980s - it was not unusual at all for the always very traditional Navajo medicine men and their Hopi counterparts to meet in common cause. I know they did because these gatherings often occurred at the main Navajo Community College [now Dine' College] campus,at Tsaile, in the large office used by a number of Navajo medicine men based at the College. I knew these men [and a number of other Dine' medicine men] well indeed - and their college office was immediately adjacent to mine. Hopi traditional leaders often came there and, too, on occasion, these congenial joint meetings sometimes moved into a large classroom which I traditionally used and in which I was occasionally present.
During this very time, much United States mainline news media were constantly talking about allegedly "irreconcilable" divisions between the two tribal nations. And increasingly, these kinds of joint gatherings - with effective action - are very much continuing in the lands of the Navajo and the Hopi.
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– Hunter Bear
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