Diné activist Louise Benally knows firsthand how corporate takeover can destroy traditional ways of life.
Benally talked Friday at the SUB about how everything changed for her family when, in 1974, Peabody Coal Company opened a mine at Black Mesa, Ariz. Soon afterward, she said, roads opened and people started working for Peabody.
“The land partitioning took place and things changed forever,” she said. “The livestock were
reduced down to 75 percent. Homes were no longer allowed to be built or reconstructed, or patched up, so things changed.”
Benally was brought up in a traditional Diné lifestyle, and her parents weren’t formally educated. She remembers her family raised livestock, rode horses to camps and grew corn, squash and beans.
But Diné means of survival became illegal.
The federal government outlawed transporting windmills and lumber, growing and gathering wild foods and hunting animals in large quantities, Benally said.
“More and more of the land was being expanded for the mining companies,” she said.
Presently, Diné people and other indigenous groups believe global climate changes threaten their traditional lifestyle, Benally said.
Benally said the situation in Black Mesa is a microcosm of what’s happening globally. She said some groups want to live in a sustainable manner, but corporations want to extract the natural resources on these groups’ land.
“There is so much poison being pulled out of the ground and into the air, and our community suffers from a lot of health problems from these pollutants that are released into the atmosphere,” Benally said.
She said reversing the damage on the Black Mesa will be difficult.
“How do we address these problems?” she said. “We really don’t know, but just to continue to have that relationship with the natural world, and that’s all we can do. But the future is unpredictable at the scale we are going at right now.”
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At UNM, students and professors are effecting positive change by developing technology and educating people in traditional ways, Benally said.
Sustainability studies professor Bruce Milne will run a USDA-sponsored field school this summer. In it, students will learn about New Mexico’s modern and traditional agriculture.
They’ll visit Canyon de Chelly, a site about 40 miles away from Black Mesa.
“The more diversity that we have in the number of species and the kinds of genotypes that are out there the better,” Milne said.
“And cultural diversity and the knowledge that different people have is essential for enabling us to respond to the challenges that come along.”
