By Paula
D. Barteau
Shiprock
September
24 2015
Malcom explains the circumstances of the
Peabody Coal Mine to our group
So much
happened today.
We're in
Dinetah, on Larry Emerson's farm. He agreed to let us stay here. I think he
had, maybe has reservations, but I am thankful he did.
Sometimes
you need to be pushed outside of yourself. The thing about ignorance is you're
always inside of it and sometimes you forget that, you forget that you are the
product of a specific culture that separates you from others who aren't.
Larry
spoke to us today at dinner, about how life works in cycles. Evil comes out of
forgetting that, that your future will become someone else's past when you're gone. When
you forget that you come from the world before you.
Before
coming here we read Dahr Jamail's Toxic Legacy: Uranium Mining in New Mexico
and I have had a quote from Larry King, a Dine miner, stuck in my head all day:
"We
knew when a safety inspection was coming because all the tunnels not being used
were barricaded, workers were told to use respirators and other safety gear and
do things that weren't done on a daily basis...Then after the inspection, a
couple of days later it was back to normal, no safety and no respirators."
The people
who live here have been dehumanized. The institutions of racism here have
physical forms: Cell phone towers sticking out of the birthplace of Changing
Woman, fracking towers puncturing earth where men and women are buried and
still visited by their relatives, hundreds of fracking towers and their
accompanying containers of flammable gas clustered on the outskirts of a town
that has no hospital, no infrastructure for disaster relief. One such tower,
located near an elementary school, caught fire once. The school was evacuated
by passersby, not by fireman or health officials.
Water is sacred here, and the water has been
poisoned. Many local farmers are currently prevented from working by the Animus
river spill, sheep have died within hours of drinking the water near the
Peabody Coal Mine, research into the long term effects of the uranium in the
municipal drinking water are only recently receiving funding. People have died
of cancer in houses they built out of Uranium tailings they didn't realize were
dangerous due to the mining companies' extraordinary indifference to the lives
of their employees.
The mouth of the Peabody coal mine
The
resilience here is as astounding. I feel overwhelmed and unsure how to
contribute to the betterment of the situations here, but I promise I'll do my
best and to continue to ask how we can live lives that are not dependent on
destruction.
The life here cannot be paved over
