Low, bruise-colored clouds are fading into black in the cool spring desert of northern Arizona. There’s a fire set amidst a ring of soft-hued stones, and it laps at the proud, impassioned features of an Indian named Vernon Masayesva.
Masayesva is scratching with a stick in the dust in the yard behind his one-story cinderblock home. He’s sketching a circular diagram to help explain the importance of water to the Hopi people.
“Water teaches us how we must live,” he says. “Its story is as small as cells and as big as the heavens above.”
Masayesva becomes animated as he speaks, his voice rising with fury, then ebbing into sing-song whispers, his features shining with a fervent zeal. As syllables flow from this proud man’s tongue the bruise-colored sky fades completely into the night. There’s a stillness to this place that feels older than the present moment, the whispers of an ancient people echoing in the inaudible softness of the wind.
“We’re taught that our ancestors, moti sinom, journeyed through three worlds. We believe Black Mesa is the final destination of our migrating ancestors. Here, on the southern fingertips of Black Mesa, our ancestors met Ma’saw and agreed to help steward the land in return for permission to remain here.”
I’m standing among a circle of fifteen or so law school students who have joined environmental law professor Charles Wilkinson for passage across the Colorado Plateau. Wilkinson has authored books on the controversies of this culturally-rich landscape, and he worked early in his career as a tribal attorney for the Hopi and Navajo nations of northern Arizona. He’s enjoyed a long friendship with Masayesva, who’s opened his home and barbecue pit to strangers this evening.
This ten-day educational pilgrimage began in Boulder, Colorado, but has threaded some of the West’s most barren desert vistas, from the oil-shale-rich Ute Indian Reservation near Durango in southwest Colorado to Mexican Hat on the banks of the San Juan River with its famed meandering goosenecks that reveal thousands of sedimentary sandstone layers that show geologic time on a scale that’s defined in the hundreds of millions of years. From Mexican Hat we turned south toward the Navajo and Hopi reservations. Tomorrow we’ll head farther west still, our journey culminating at Marble Canyon Lodge near the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
The Hopi Indian Reservation is entirely within the boundaries of the much larger Navajo Reservation. Together they occupy more than 28,000 square miles of Arizona desert, from the flooded canyons of Glenn Canyon, now Lake Powell, in the north to Flagstaff and Winslow in the south. This is country with famed monikers like Painted Desert, Monument Valley, Defiance Plateau and, indeed, Black Mesa. To those of us with white skin they’re merely unimaginable vistas: mesas, buttes and curvy canyons, pastel-colored rocks that undulate in distances difficult to ponder. But to the Indians who live here, and have for thousands of years, these places are sacred, the central pillars of a spirituality that extols harmony and balance above use or application.
Here at Masayesva’s home we’re near the Hopi village of Oraibi on Third Mesa, one of five topographical fingers that reach south from Black Mesa’s palm, the center of the celebrated Hopi symbol for water. Black Mesa is a plateau rising more than 1,000 abrupt feet above the surrounding red-rock desert to the north. But here on the mesa’s southern slopes it gradually angles downward and gives life to springs that form into rivulets that have carved the spaces between the mesa’s fingers. The Hopi have long relied on Black Mesa’s springs and its vast underground aquifer, the center of the palm, to farm and raise livestock in harmony with Mother Nature’s offerings.
“Our belief, our science, says that in the beginning was water. Next was land. With help from Father Sun all life came to be. Our ancestors were shown three simple things: an ear of corn, a gourd of water and a planting stick. They were instructed to create a sustainable society using these three things. This was the beginning of the fourth world of the Hopi.”
Black Mesa represents the earth center, Masayesva says. Beneath lie untold riches, which if used creatively with corn (mother), water (lifeblood) and planting stick (technology) will sustain future generations of Hopi children.
“We believe the Black Mesa handprint represents the spirit of Pozanghoya, a weaver. Together with his twin brother, Paloqaawhoya, echoer, they work to keep the earth in balance. We believe all waters—the aquifers, the springs, the lakes, the rivers, the oceans, the rain, the snow—are joined together. All work in harmony to sustain life.”
The aquifer breathes, he says, when it rains. The springs are where it exhales. But Masayesva says the Peabody Energy Company has dried the springs and is sucking the life from Hopi culture. In the past thirty years of Peabody’s groundwater pumping, the water pressure has vanished, the mesa’s springs running dry.
In addition to its vast aquifers, which include water that’s between 10,000 and 35,000 years old and some of the cleanest water found anywhere in the United States, Black Mesa harbors a rich deposit of anthracite, valuable for its low sulfur content and high heating value. Since 1968 it’s been mined by Chicago-based Peabody and transported by pipe 273 miles, from Black Mesa to the Mohave Generating Station near Laughlin, Nevada, where the coal is burned to generate electricity for Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix. The coal is crushed, then mixed with water pumped from the center of Black Mesa’s palm and funneled into a slurry line, the only one of its length in the country.
One of the springs on Black Mesa gives rise to Moenkopi Wash, which means “continuously flowing water place.” Masayesva says he can remember when Moenkopi Wash had enough water to irrigate fields and formed into swimming holes during hot summer months. Now the wash flows only intermittently, and ninety percent of the springs on the reservation have withered since he was a boy. He blames Peabody, which pumps 1.3 billion gallons of groundwater a year, ten times more than is used by the tribe’s 9,300 people in a region that receives an average of eight inches of rain for each of the Earth’s orbits around the sun.
“Water is at the center of Hopi culture,” he says. “Our songs honor water; our names are about water, names like Yoyoki, ‘presently raining;’ Yokawa, ‘it rained;’ and Yaeva, ‘the clouds build up.’ Our religious ceremonies honor the rain, which connects us to the creator. We are of clouds, and the clouds are of us. How we behave influences rain and snow and balance. If our thoughts are bad only the wind will come when we dance. If our hearts come together it will rain.”
If our hearts come together it will rain.
I look to the sky where clouds marched across the twilight an hour ago. I shuffle my feet in the dust and turn away from the fire, looking into the night where there are other scattered cinderblock homes positioned on dusty dirt roads. A dog appears in the lapping fringe of the firelight from around the corner of a nearby house and scurries into the parched darkness.
In the morning the skies have cleared, and it has not rained. We return to the highway, heading west toward Tuba City, then north along the crumbling escarpment of the Echo Cliffs toward the upper extremity of the Grand Canyon, where the red painted sheen of the Vermillion Cliffs stretch for fifty miles or more in the late-day sun of the Colorado Plateau.
© Greg Stahl
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*Masayesva’s quotes are reconstructed using materials from the Black Mesa Trust Web site. I’m not sure about copyright laws here, since it’s not exactly a direct citation. This scene from March 2006 is real, though, and although the exact words Masayesva relayed at that time are lost to the wind that evening, the ideas he portrayed remain the same. In other words, this is not journalism. It was written as a stab at creative nonfiction. Also, Mohave has since closed. I need to research further to understand what implications these developments have for Black Mesa coal and water–and for the Hopi tribe.
