Paul Bloom's Sundance Report -- July 21, 1999 (Revised July 30)

"Never in this country will you go to church and see policemen outside taking your license numbers and your pictures." Joe Chasing Horse, Sundance Chief.

Sunday, July 18, saw the end of a four year cycle of Sundances at Camp Anna Mae on Big Mountain, Arizona, one of two Sundance ceremonies brought by the Lakota people to the Dineh (Navajo) threatened with imminent removal from their lands by the U.S. government.

Named for murdered American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Aquash, Camp Anna Mae designates an area of high desert land inhabited for centuries by people who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a line drawn in 1974 by an ignorant Congress heavily lobbied by Peabody Coal Co.

Besides its religious significance, this year's Sundance inadvertently became a massive demonstration of peaceful civil disobedience by all in attendance, residents, dancers, and supporters, who defied threats of fines and prosecution by the U.S.-created Hopi Tribal Council in order to attend.

As many as six cars of Hopi Rangers, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, and sheriffs of Navajo County maintained an around the clock vigil at the entrance of the camp. FBI and ATF agents reportedly visited the site as well. At the beginning of the 25 mile dirt road from Highway 264 another crew of Hopi Rangers stopped, questioned, I.D.-checked, and threatened people with fines and jail if they went to the Sundance. Some local residents were flatly turned away. No one knows how many stayed home to avoid the roadblocks, or how many were arrested on warrant checks or for other reasons. Notices designating Camp Anna Mae as a closed area were posted along the road.

In addition, "technicians" or "monitors" from the Hopi Land Team strutted aggressively around the Sundance area, ostensibly to ensure safe fires and sanitary conditions, harassing people in the kitchen and at the camps in arrogant displays of authority. These are the same thugs who accompany Hopi Rangers and heavily armed BIA police on recurrent raids to confiscate livestock of the resisters, those traditional Dineh who have refused to sign a restrictive lease authorized in 1996 by a U.S. Congress trying to settle a series of lawsuits by the Hopi Tribe.

Synchronized with these efforts was a campaign of misinformation, including false news reports planted on local radio of shots fired on the land, and radio spots on at least one commercial Flagstaff station warning people not to attend the Sundance because of threats of violence.

With the Sundance purification rites set to begin on 14 July, Hopi Tribal Council Chairman Wayne Taylor, Jr. issued an executive order dated 2 July declaring a drought emergency and extreme fire danger, and forbidding open fires within residential areas, and overnight camping on "undeveloped (sic) areas outside of Village areas."

On 9 July the chairman issued another executive order declaring a Hantavirus alert, proscribing camping in "underdeveloped (sic) areas" and asserting that no entrance would be permitted into "restricted (closed) areas."

In a letter the same day to sponsor and host of the Sundance and longtime resister Ruth Benally, Chairman Taylor, Jr. asserted that "the entire Hopi Reservation is closed to all access, except as authorized by the Hopi Tribe. All individuals entering and remaining on Hopi land without authorization of the Hopi Tribe will be subject to exclusion, assessment of penalties, and prosecution under the laws of the Tribe."

The Sundance is a religious ceremony of sacrifice and purification in which dancers abstain from food and water for four days, dancing from sunrise to sunset while drum-mers sing ancient prayers and families and friends watch (and dance) from the arbor. It's an experience of indescribable power and emotion. This was the twelfth year of the Sundance at the Joe and Alice Benally Memorial Sundance Grounds at Camp Anna Mae, the end of the third four year cycle.

Nevertheless the July 14 Navajo Hopi Observer, an independent paper, published a front page article by the Hopi Tribe Land Team which, among other slanders, depicted the Sundance ceremony as a "well-orchestrated effort to bait the Hopi Tribe into a hostile media situation."

More than 500 people from dozens of Indian nations and tribes plus non-Indian supporters from all over the world, including Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and Mexico, voted with their feet to refute the Hopi Tribal Council's desperate efforts to squash the Sundance. Their presence was a triumphant rebuke to an orchestrated campaign of lies and intimidation.

The original Hopi Tribal Council had been imposed by manipulation and deceit on the Hopi (the name means "peaceful") under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. By 1943 it had dissolved for lack of support. It was revived in the early 1950's by John Boyden, Peabody company lawyer and bishop of the Mormon Church. Over the protests of traditional Hopi, with the help of wealthy Mormon Hopi cattle ranchers, he convened a more durable tribal government.

The Indian Placement Service represented one of the Mormon Church's most successful and controversial programs. From 1949 to 1976 over 20,000 Indian children were taken into white families to live during the school year, going back to their reservation homes during the summer, and often returning to the same "foster" families each year. From its inception, the Hopi Tribal Council has been dominated by Mormons and alumni of this program.

The Mormon Church, extremely secretive about its assets, holds enormous investments in public utilities, including Arizona Public Service, and is reported to have been a majority shareholder in Peabody Coal Co.

Traditional Hopi still voice their opposition to the powerful Tribal Council, which has been maneuvering to assert its possession of the Hopi Partitioned Lands since the 1986 deadline originally mandated by Public Law 93-531 under the false premise of resolving a land dispute. They take strong exception to the assault on their Navajo neighbors with whom they have shared land, traded, intermarried, and disputed for centuries, as neighboring peoples have done since the dawn of human society.

On the second day of the Sundance, at the same time as egregious violations of basic respect and religious freedom were being perpetrated by the Hopi Land Team and various police agencies, five members of the Hopi Tribal Council travelled to the Sundance arbor to share the sacred pipe with several of the dancers in full view of everyone in the arbor.

Was this politics? Curiosity? Courtesy? Or does it augur a change of heart? Are lines being drawn between those in the Hopi tribal government who perceive the humanitarian disaster entailed by the policy of relocation, and those idealogues who are devoting themselves to waging low intensity warfare in a campaign of ethnic cleansing?

The engine of law doesn't pause to consider these and other questions. As they did at Waco, at meetings in Washington D.C. and closer to the land, law enforcement agencies are preparing plans for removal of the remaining resisters, now scheduled for February 2000.

Black Mesa Indigenous Support P.O. Box 23501, Flagstaff, Arizona 86002  Message Voice Mail: 928.773.8086 Email: blackmesais@yahoo.com