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Can you talk briefly about the San Francisco Peaks and what they are, for people who have
never heard of them? Doko'oo'sliid, or the holy San Francisco Peaks,
are holy to more than 13 indigenous nations. They are central for our cultural survival.
Where are they? They're located just right outside of Flagstaff,
and they're the highest point in northern Arizona. You can see the Grand Canyon from
them. You can see just such a beautiful landscape. And they're vital not only for our cultural
practices, but they're an ecological island that are home to endemic species such as the
San Francisco Peaks ragwort, which is only found on the San Francisco Peaks and nowhere
else in the world. And what's happening with them?
Well, right now, we're—for the past 30 years—really, for the past 20 years, it's been a heated
battle to protect this mountain from resource extraction and development, and not just talking
about coal, uranium, oil, natural gases, but recreation as a resource extraction on these
sacred lands. The San Francisco Peaks are managed by the United States Forest Service
as public land, and currently they lease part of those lands to a ski resort known as Arizona
Snowbowl, that is— Snowbowl?
Snowbowl. And they've permitted to expand their development into rare alpine forests,
clear cutting more than 30,000 trees, many of them old-growth. And the most controversial
part is that they've entered into a contract with the city of Flagstaff. The politicians
of Flagstaff have sold 180 million gallons of treated sewage per year for snow making.
And this, right— Of sewage?
Of treated sewage for snow making. So this is grey water?
Well, it's considered treated sewage, or reclaimed water. And so, in this case, there are harmful
contaminants that are not tested or treated for by the EPA that are allowed to be in this
waste water, and it's being sprayed on this sacred church of ours. Right now, even though
we've had more than 10 years of legal battles that have gone all the way to the Supreme
Court, the situation is that we don't have guaranteed protections for religious freedom
as indigenous people. And Snowbowl has become—in 2011, they became the first ski area in the
world to make snow out of 100 percent treated sewage effluent.
Taylor, is there any legal means to challenge this?
Well, it's not an issue that Grand Canyon Trust has worked on. I know that the Hopi
Tribe has ongoing legal challenges in state court and federal court.
So, are the Navajo—Klee, are the Navajo and Hopi working together on this?
We had a coalition of 14 indigenous nations actually working together on this with six
environmental groups, that had led the charge to defend this sacred mountain on cultural
and environmental grounds. But those challenges failed in the Supreme Court. And so it reaffirmed
that we, as indigenous people, don't have guaranteed protection for our religious freedom.
And that's the situation we're in now. I've been arrested multiple times trying to stop
the excavators up on this mountain, and that seems to be the only redress that we really
have. I wanted to turn to one last clip from this
film, The Return of Navajo Boy, the film that's produced by Jeff Spitz and Bennie Klain. Here,
we learn about water scarcity and contamination on Diné land.
The community water pump is about five miles from my mom's house. We all get our drinking
water from the same place. There's about 200 people who live in this area. It takes about
10 minutes to fill one barrel. My niece Sherri learns to be patient filling the barrels.
The government came here a few years ago to check the safety of our drinking water, but
they never came back with the results. That's a clip from the film that we have been
playing through this segment, The Return of Navajo Boy. Klee Benally, the scarcity of
water? So, the framing of this section, I understand,
is the winners and losers of these struggles. But there are no winners when we destroy Mother
Earth. When we destroy the water that we need to drink, then we destroy the air that we
need to breathe and the ground that we need to feed ourselves from. And so, right now,
the EPA has closed 22 wells that have been determined to have too high of levels of toxic
contaminants in them on the Navajo Nation. But many of our people don't have running
water; they don't have electricity. Yet our lands have been exploited. We have coal-fired—three
coal-fired power plants that pollute our air. We have these abandoned uranium mines and
new mines that are threatening the region. We have fracking, hydraulic fracking, that's
threatening our land, as well. But this isn't just an issue for here. Wherever there's an
environmental crisis, there's a cultural crisis, because we are people of the Earth. This is
a social crisis that everybody has some impact of, because when we look at the larger challenges
of global warming, global warming, from an indigenous perspective, is just a symptom
of how we are out of balance with Mother Earth. So this is a problem that's all over.
Talk about how climate change affects indigenous people.
Well, we see the threats of displacement of indigenous people from the waters that are
rising and depopulating villages that were on islands. We see the threat of the caribou
migrations and those impacts. And we see this key resorts that feel like they need to make
snow because they don't have enough natural snow, and so they desecrate sacred mountains
such as this. I mean, the—it's not—we are all indigenous to this land, to somewhere,
on our mother, the Earth. And so, these impacts impact us all.
And, Taylor, finally, the effect of climate change on the Colorado River area and the
Grand Canyon? Researchers have projected declines in flow
of up to 30 percent in the coming century, owing to climate change and other factors.
And so, in a time when we're—the Colorado Plateau and the Colorado River Basin and its
water users stand to lose the most, it's a time for this region also to look very carefully
at the energy choices that we're making. I want to thank you both for being with us.
Taylor McKinnon is with the Grand Canyon Trust.