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The forgotten homeland

By CYNDY COLE
Sun Staff Reporter
Sunday, August 06, 2006

West of the divide between Hopi and Navajo lands, thousands of Navajos have lived for four decades involuntarily cut off from power, running water and newly built homes.

They sleep two and three families to a house, on average, in hogans, shacks and travel trailers. More than two-thirds of these homes lack running water and plumbing. Seventy-four percent have been deemed unfit for human habitation, according to congressional testimony. This is the land where a 40-year-old administrative order from the Bureau of Indian Affairs prohibits even minor home repairs, all new construction and other modernization because of a land dispute that's said to be near resolution now.

The Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. have each said they're close to a solution that would allow members of each tribe unfettered access to sacred sites and eagle gathering, a main point of contention. Meanwhile, the Hopi government has been granting Navajos more exceptions, allowing them to build here and there.

If the conflict were resolved, building and repairs would be allowed across the land.

But even if the breakthrough comes this year, it would take stupendous amounts of money, work and political support to lift the people living here out of poverty and given them access to amenities most other U.S. citizens take for granted.

NO POWER, LITTLE TO EAT

Lindy Kelly shares a house with her mother, father and her two children in the same place she grew up, about 10 miles west-northwest of Tuba City off a very rough dirt track.

There's no power or running water and there's not always enough to eat.

A fresh sheepskin hangs to dry on a pole near her house.

A brown and dappled colt munches hay in a pen made of shipping pallets.

Kelly's reddened eyes and flour-covered hands show no end to the daily chores of chasing cattle on foot, feeding children, taking care of one ailing parent and hauling water.

"There's not a single day that I just sit down," she says.

She'll be up at 2 a.m. the next day loading cattle into a truck for auction out of state so she can buy her kids, ages 5 and 7, some school clothes.

Except for one moment when her parents got their house in 1992, the prohibition on development named after Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner Robert Bennett has been the law of the land since before Kelly and her children were born, called the Bennett Freeze.

"I was trying to get a house for me and the kids, but..." Kelly just stops speaking.

But the waiting list for tribe-provided housing in Tuba City was years long.

And she can't get the clearance she'd need to build here on her family's traditional grazing land, due to the freeze.

No school bus could make it out here where horses roam wild across sand dunes and slickrock.

The road is so rough that the riders heads knock against car windows.

So Kelly spends four hours a day during the school year driving the children to and from school in Tuba City and returning home to her other duties, just as her mom did for her.

Looking to their future and a lifting of the freeze, she'd like a new house, running water and maybe a computer for the kids' schoolwork if they get electricity.

But all her money goes to gasoline, food and the children, she says.

'THEY WON'T LET US REPAIR'

Albina Kanaswood, 94, moved into Tuba City about 13 years ago when her husband needed doctors nearby and running water to wash diabetes-related wounds.

It can easily be 110 degrees out here in the summer and Kanaswood has health problems of her own.

Looking at the small wood hogan she lived in for more than 30 years, the tar paper protecting the wood has been mostly ripped away in the wind. A piece of particle board lies against the padlocked door.

"All tore up," she mutters. "They won't let us repair."

Kanaswood can point to her mother and grandmother's unmarked burial sites under the orange sand and knee-high brush and name the sandstone rock formations all along the drive to her former house.

She was taken from here and sent to boarding school, but she found her way home eventually.

This is where the eagles used to land and take away her prayers in the night.

Asked if she'd like to come home, Kanaswood opens her mouth wide and wrinkles her face incredulously.

"Of course," her daughter, Priscilla, says.

"My parents and us, we couldn't stay out there because we couldn't improve our hogans or our corrals or anything," Priscilla says. "We don't know whether we can ever go home again."

Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.

Even end of Bennett Freeze controversial

The Bennett Freeze once covered 9 percent of the Navajo Nation and affected 8,000 residents. It's since been repealed across half that area.

A patchwork of lands around Coppermine, Cameron, Tolani Lake, Tonalea and the Gap are still affected.

There's still a $33 million backlog of water and wastewater projects on the back burner and no telephone service for 90 percent of households.

Road maintenance is far enough behind that even if the Navajo Nation dedicated its entire construction budget just to this area it would take two or three years to catch up.

The prohibition on construction extends to schools, businesses, chapter houses and health centers.

People living here are also among the poorest on the Navajo Nation and the United States, relying largely on subsistence ranching that's been limited by drought.

Unemployment hovers around 75 percent and the average annual income is only about a quarter of what Native Americans typically make nationwide, according to U.S. Census data.

The Bennett Freeze was partly the result of an 1882 presidential order that established a reservation for Hopis and "such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle thereon," ignoring who lived where.

By 1966, when the boundaries of each tribe's land was still in dispute, Bennett's order was intended to cause such hardships on both sides that the tribes would find a way to settle disagreements quickly.

The current solution proposes no land change hands, that access to religious sites be granted on both sides and that no one is removed from their homes, said Roman Bitsuie, executive director of the Navajo-Hopi Land Commission Office.

"I think it's in the best interest of everybody to settle this issue and lift the freeze," he said

Still, the proposed deal is somewhat secret, generating one lawsuit so far.

There have been meetings in chapter houses to verbally explain the proposal but the Navajo Nation isn't releasing all of the related documents. Some identify sacred sites.

--Cyndy Cole

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