Twenty years ago I found myself in the Four Corners area where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada meet.  In that area are the reservations of the Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni nations. At the time,I was working with handicapped children, a problem of epidemic proportions because of contamination due to uranium digging. The largest nuclear waste spill ever in the United States occurred in 1979, at Church Rock Arizona.  The devastation to these people continues today.

Since 1974, Peabody Coal, a British owned company, has been mining this area for coal. Tens of thousands of Indian people have been involuntarily removed from Big Mountain, their ancestral land, and relocated to Sanders, Arizona, only a few miles from the spill site at Church Rock

In 1985 Broken Rainbow, a documentary about the Hopi and Navajo and injustice at Big Mountain won an academy award. This publicity along with court cases stopped the mining and relocation, I thought.

A little over three years ago I was at an event that was trying to save the Ballona Wetlands near Marina del Rey from disappearing forever into a Dream Works movie studio. I was told that not only was our government relocating the Navajo again, but that in reality they had never stopped. They had only slowed down in an attempt to withdraw attention from the issue, and it worked.  

Since then, I have again gone back to the reservation, this time trying to help the Grandmothers.  Planting corn, sheering sheep, giving them support and letting them know they are not alone in their struggles. To show that others do care about them. Most of the men have died from the uranium poisoning and from working in the coal mines.  They (the coal mine bosses) never told us we needed to be careful, said one of the Grandmothers.

Over 350 million of our tax dollars have been used in this relocation project to date.  A decision made by the United States government to support corporate profits and greed over sanctity of human life.

In 1982 Roger Lewis, one of the three Federally appointed relocation commissioners resigned saying: “I feel that in relocating these elderly people, we are as bad as the people who ran the concentration camps in World War Two.  As Martin Luther King said: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

We want to stop them from mining any more on this sacred land. We need to stop them from relocating the traditional Indians who continue to live and to carry the ancient wisdom today as their ancestors have for thousands of years.