Calls to Action
Statement on Recent Aggressive Confiscation of Dineh Resisters’ Sheep Herds by NaBahe Katenay Keedihiihii
UPDATE: Due to public concern the Navajo-Hopi Land Commission Office (NHLCO) issued a statement on Oct 24, 2014: “To avoid creating a situation that will harm both tribes and the HPL residents, (NHLCO) requests that the Hopi Tribe cease and desist from further impoundment activities and allow NHLCO an opportunity to confer with the residents to request they remove their livestock in excess of permitted from the HPL.”
Signs on Back Mesa were posted in response to the recent assault reading “Closed” “To all Evil Forces of Gaah’ Hop & Peabody-Bahana Terrorists”
Oct 24, 2014 (Big Mountain Sovereign Dineh Nation) – In the last few days, traditional Dineh (Navajos) elders who have maintained a 40 year resistance to federal relocation policies came under attack by the U.S. Justice of Department supported, Hopi tribal law agencies. Law enforcement personnel composing of federally-deputized Bureau of Indian Affairs and Hopi tribal police, who also assisted armed Hopi tribal rangers, confiscated an approximate total of 200 sheep and goats. Rangers and police personnel arrived directly in front of the sheep corral gates and pushed the complete herd into several stock trailers. The Dineh owners and herders were not allowed to interfere or question and so far, one Dineh man has been arrested.
40 years of resistance and conflict has taken a horrible psychological toll on traditional Dineh cultural lifestyle especially by having sheep and other livestock. Sheep are an intimate part of Dineh livelihood as well as religion, and it is not mythological like that popular western theory about Spaniards’ “introduction” of sheep. Wild mountain sheep and goats have been utilized by prehistoric and historic indigenous inhabitants long before European invasion. Sheep are like the buffalos or domesticated reindeer that a culturally-intact society relies on and thus, for the traditional Dineh, it is a part of their being.
These recent events of forcible confiscation of sheep and goat herds is an attack because in is more than a range management effort dictated by the relocation program, but it is psychological retaliation against the Dineh’s long-standing defiance and intended to rip out a large piece of their hearts. Most of the owners of the sheep herds in the resistance communities are elderly, non-English speaking and have been traumatized from years of witnessing cultural deterioration due to policies of U.S. government and it coal mining conglomerates.
This story of Dineh plight can no longer be shrugged off as a controversial, “Indian vs. Indian” scenario. As obvious as American citizens have witnessed the processes of U.S. energy policies of mass fossil fuel extraction and their unsafe transport, as well as, the destructive encroachment upon aboriginal peoples’ lands, Peabody Energy have been pushing the federal government to facilitate their “long-over-due” expansion. As far as indigenous Hopi interest for these pristine territories that the U.S. Congress in 1974 designated as Hopi reservation, there had been no proven facts that justified any kind of historical Dineh invasion. The 1974 law of land partition, if looked into deeply, will only show that coal and aquifer extraction potentials were behind the push to create this inhumane corporate policy.
Now it is the time to see how that romanticized notion of the name, Hopi, to mean People of Peace can only be seen, from this day on, that Hopi law enforcement are perpetrators of colonial aggression in order to further promote fossil fuel extraction and global climate change.
Citizens of the world need to demand that the U.S. and its colonial Indian tribal agencies to withdraw its aggressive campaigns from the Big Mountain region and release the Dineh livelihood, their very essences of being, the confiscated sheep and goats herds.
NaBahe Katenay Keedihiihii
Interpreter for the Big Mountain Traditional Dineh Resistance, since 1977.
TAKE ACTION NOW!
Hopi Chairman Herman G. Honanie
Email: hehonanie@hopi.nsn.us
Phone: (928) 734-3102
Navajo-Hopi Land Commission Office: (928) 871-6441
Office of Range Management(928) 734-3702
BIA Superintendent Wendell Honanie
Email: Wendell.Honanie@bia.gov
Phone: 928-738-2228
Hopi Tribal Council
Email: hopicouncil@hopi.nsn.us
Phone: 928.734.3134
Hopi Tribal Council via Neva Poneoma, legislative secretary
Phone: 928-734-3133
Email: ptalayumptewa@hopi.nsn.us
Director, Natural Resources Clayton Honyumptewa
Email: chonyumptewa@hopi.nsn.us
This is a call for an Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage Against Colonialism on Sunday, October 9, 2022, everywhere.
We heard that mass actions are a bit out of fashion this season & lone wolfs or affinity groups are all the rage.
Counter the spectacle of the “good, respectable Indian” and their mundane celebrations of assimilation. Your ancestors invite you to embrace the veracious criminality of anti-colonial struggle and be smart (don’t get caught).
A banner drop? An attack on colonial symbols, monuments, etc. Spray paint? A broken window here, a burning xxxxxxx there? Be fierce and fabulously unpredictable and strike in the darkest part of the night (points if you use glitter). Even the smallest Indigenous dreams of liberation are greater than the settler nightmares we live everyday.
We won’t be making any lists or asking for emails this year due to a heightened sense for the need of greater security culture. Though we will post any securely and anonymously sent reports and pics in the aftermath.
In the spirit of Jane’s Revenge, abort colonialism. Colonizer (c)laws off our bodies!
– The insurrectionary anti-colonial invisible council of IPDR.
https://indigenouspeoplesdayofrage.org/
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Christine Prat
October 28, 2014 at 8:03 AM
Traduction française:
http://www.chrisp.lautre.net/wpblog/?p=2529
NaBahe Keediniihii
October 28, 2014 at 1:38 PM
This morning, Oct. 28th – 0620 hrs., Gaah’ Hopi Police & BIA Police, with guns drawn, the Begay resident in Red Willow Springs was surrounded. Main dirt road entrances were guarded by heavily armed police as well. Two teens who were niece and nephew of Etta Begay went out near the sheep corral to take pictures but cops put guns to their heads, and were handcuffed and released at the end of confiscation of the sheep and goats. Etta and her brothers were forced back into their house and police surrounded that house. Nearly 100 sheep and goats were taken but it has been assumed that the police did not have enough room for the 40 more sheep and they were left behind. The situation between non-Native supporters (only ones who acknowledged this resistance against corporate America’s genocide), Dineh elders and the BIA ordered invasion is getting more intense and may get volatile.
James Zarindast
October 29, 2014 at 12:46 PM
Currently a gigantic meyhane cloud seen from space is hovering over entire four corners . It’s corroborated by NASA and Los Alamo’s Laboratories
Mickey Clayton
October 29, 2014 at 1:51 PM
NaBahe, is there any way we can help donate to cover Etta’s impound fine and get her sheep back?
CJ
October 29, 2014 at 3:16 PM
You sang Hopis’ are being bullies now. Stop acting like the White man. It’s not Dineh people’s fault you were ripped off.