McCain and the Cross of Coal: GOP Front-Runner Tied to Theft of Navajo Lands

McCain

( – promoted by navajo)

According to an article over at the American Computer Science Organization:

A public research website: http://www.cain2008.org has brought together diverse historical elements of factual proof that Senator John McCain’s was the key “point man” introducing, enacting and enforcing law that removed Dineh-Navajo Families from their reservation on the Black Mesa in Arizona. The McCain revised law relocated them to Church’s Hill, Nevada (a Nuclear Waste Superfund Site, called “the New Lands” in PL 93-531). The Dineh-Navajo, a deeply spiritual and peaceful people, engaged in only peaceful resistance to being moved off lands they’d owned since 1500 A.D. Nonetheless, the Public Press and UN depicted brutalization, rights deprivation and forcible relocation.

The cain2008 website quotes from the UN report directly:

“The Black Mesa region in Arizona, USA is home to the indigenous communities of the Dineh (Navajo) and Hopi peoples. This region also contains major deposits of coal which are being extracted by North America’s largest strip mining operation. The coal mines have had a major impact on families in the region. Local water sources have been poisoned, resulting in the death of livestock. Homes near the mines suffer from blasting damage. The coal dust is pervasive, as well as smoke from frequent fires in the stockpiles. Not coincidentally, the people in the area have an unusually high incidence of kidney and respiratory disease.”

“The Dineh (otherwise known as Navajo) were stripped of all land title and forced to relocate. Their land was turned over to the coal companies without making any provisions to protect the burial or sacred sites that would be destroyed by the mines. People whose lives were based in their deep spiritual and life-giving relationship with the land were relocated into cities, often without compensation, forbidden to return to the land that their families had occupied for generations. People became homeless with significant increases in alcoholism, suicide, family break up, emotional abuse and death.”

— Marsha Monestersky for the UN Commission on Human Rights and Women Enacting Change at the UN

Will we hear more about the plight of the Sovereign Dineh Nation (SDN) in the mainstream media, or from the Democratic candidates? I won’t hold my breath, as Native American issues don’t even seem to register on their radar. That was made more than clear when Democratic President Bill Clinton left American Indian Movement [AIM] leader Leonard Peltier to rot in prison on frame-up murder charges, after already serving 25 years. Oh, and this was despite pleas for executive clemency for Peltier from Coretta Scott King, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Humans Rights, among others.

The Minnesota History Society briefly describes AIM’s history:

AIM’s leaders spoke out against high unemployment, slum housing, and racist treatment, fought for treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal land, and advocated on behalf of urban Indians whose situation bred illness and poverty. They opened the K-12 Heart of the Earth Survival School in 1971, and in 1972, mounted the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, D.C., where they took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), in protest of its policies, and with demands for their reform.

The revolutionary fervor of AIM’s leaders drew the attention of the FBI and the CIA, who then set out to crush the movement.

Leonard Peltier was a victim of the FBI program, Cointelpro. But it’s not just secretive policies of the FBI and CIA. Mainstream politicians have participated in the rape and destruction of Native Americans since this nation’s inception. Politicans like McCain work in tandem with the repressive apparatus of the state to line the pockets of the coal, mining and energy companies at the expense of the lives of poor Native Americans, mindlessly destroying their cultures in the process.

John McCain’s lurid participation in the latest scandal is part of a terrible history, part of a history that must be cleaned up if this country is to survive in any effective sense, and not continue its dizzying descent into moral and economic chaos and violent repression.

Hat tip to Winter Rabbit for alerting me to this story. See her excellent article on it at Daily Kos.

(This article originally posted at Invictus.)

10 Comments

  1. Carter Camp’s personal account:

    I spent a month in DC trying to get LP’s pardon finalized after the White House led us to believe he had a very good chance at being pardoned. On thankgiving I stood in front of the white house all day long fasting for him and the other ndn political prisoners. The last day was hell when we had to phone my brother Leonard and tell him we had failed and Clinton had lied to us all along. To make it worse our main contacts were in Hillary’s office so I know for sure she was part and parcel of lying to his supporters and the final decision to deny his pardon. I’ll never vote for her or support her or forgive her.

  2. I need to find a way to show where the CIA has tried to and has influenced Native American scholarship, but I’ve been writing other things.

    Really good seeing you over here,

    WR

    (BTW, the she is a he. Considering I think women are the better sex; I take it as a profound compliment)

  3. Welcome and please post more.

    You touched on the single issue that irritates me about the Clintons.

    I won’t hold my breath, as Native American issues don’t even seem to register on their radar. That was made more than clear when Democratic President Bill Clinton left American Indian Movement [AIM] leader Leonard Peltier to rot in prison on frame-up murder charges, after already serving 25 years. Oh, and this was despite pleas for executive clemency for Peltier from Coretta Scott King, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Humans Rights, among others.

    One of our members, Carter Camp was personally involved in helping Leonard Peltier get released.  I’ll try to link to his comment… So profoundly sad.

  4. Well, I still appreciate all the work you do. As Colbert might say, I don’t even think in terms of gender or sex. Everyone is one sex to me: mfale.

    🙂

  5. It’s a powerful memory of betrayal, one of an innumerable amount of such betrayals of Native Americans over the centuries.

    I’d love to see Obama win and on his first day in office pardon LP, explaining that a terrible error (really a crime) had been made in his Democratic predecessor’s last day in office eight years before.

    It’s not going to happen that way, but what a great fantasy.

  6. especially since we all start out as female in the womb. I’m adopting that concept.

    Apparenty,

    Maybe it’s to get or not.

    Feelings mutual Valtin, I remember being introduced to your work when I first read it at NION. Was that over a year ago now? A long time anyway. I’ll be glad when it opens up again.

  7. My wife showed me the Colbert movie a couple years ago, talk about a man doing amazing research and persisting against incredible odds and being an innovator. That’s all I can really say about it, not my field at all. But very, very incredible man. I kept thinking Stephen.  

  8. I’m talking to someone “doing amazing research and persisting against incredible odds and being an innovator.”

    Peace my friend.

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