The Shame Continues at Big Mountain

In 1979, Katherine Smith, a Navajo grandmother, confronted tribal police and Bureau of Indian Affairs crews with a shotgun, firing a blast over their heads. This was the first shot in a resistance to the forced relocation of 12,000 Navajo from their traditional lands on Big Mountain in northern Arizona. "The federal government took me to prison because I wouldn't relocate," Smith says, "but I will go to prison again if they try to take me from my land." And that fate is precisely what Smith and 200 holdout Navajo families are facing this spring, climax to the most savage forced relocation of Americans since the internment of the Japanese Americans in World War II.

The whole affair has been played in the press as a century-old land dispute between the Navajo and the Hopi. The truth is somewhat different and has to do with coal. The coal lies in the richest 100 square miles in North America. The ardent desire of mining and oil companies to extract it was thwarted by Navajo refusal to lease the land and the fact that the Hopi had no central government.

Enter John Boyden, an attorney, who ingratiated himself with the Hopi and soon concocted a "Hopi tribal council" consisting of pro-mining leaders from only three of the 12 Hopi villages.

In 1962, Boyden got his clients to file a suit demanding that the federal government concede that the Hopi had equal rights to the coal deposits under Navajo-controlled lands on Black Mesa. The suit prevailed. In 1966, Boyden signed leases to Peabody Coal covering 100 square miles of coal reserves. The Navajo Tribal Council, not wanting to be left out, signed similar deals. It emerged that Boyden also was a hired agent of Peabody Coal.

To consolidate the mineral wealth, Boyden sought to partition the "joint use lands" occupied by the Hopi and Navajo. To further this aim, he needed Congress to pass a law realigning the reservation boundaries. He hired a public relations firm to concoct a scenario of perennial internecine Hopi-Navajo enmity, buttressing the theme that the only way to protect the Indians from themselves was to divide the land between the tribes.

In 1974, Congress passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, dividing 1.8 million acres between the two tribes. Any member of either tribe on the wrong side of the line was forced to move. There were 100 Hopi on what was now Navajo terrain, and 10,000 Navajo on lands now officially Hopi. Coincidentally, the Hopi side contained most of the known coal reserves. The bill's language was written by Boyden.