Water, Culture, and Power: Local Struggles In A Global Context

15.1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Barbara Rose Johnston and John M. Donahue

Water

Water is essential to life. The earth is a world of water, yet it is also a world where freshwater is relatively scarce. Only some 2.5 percent of the total volume of water on earth is freshwater, and large portions of the global supply are inaccessible.

The water cycle, driven by the sun, lifts purified water from oceans and land and releases it as rain and snow—some 10 percent of this over land and the remainder over seas. A bit more than two-thirds of the global freshwater supply is frozen in glaciers and polar ice caps. The remaining freshwater (0.77 percent of all water) is held in aquifers, soil pores, lakes, swamps, rivers, plant life, and the atmosphere. Thanks to seasonal and geographic variabilities, that which is accessible for human use is an even smaller figure. For example, the Amazon River alone accounts for some 15 percent of global runoff, and an estimated 95 percent of its flow is inaccessible (Czaya 1981).

Of all the water on earth, only one one-hundredth of 1 percent is available for human use as fresh, drinkable water, provided by stable runoff from rivers and lakes and a small amount stored in dams (Postel et al. 1996). Even so, this supply would support many times our present population if it all could be exploited (Meyers 1993, 102-103). However, both the water and the world’s peoples are unevenly distributed (Middleton et al. 1994, 141–143).

According to estimates by the United Nations Environment Programme, at least 1.7 billion people living on earth do not have an adequate supply of drinking water, and an estimated 40 percent of the world’s population faces chronic shortages. Many of these people live in arid regions, water-stressed countries where rain is limited and they must rely on rivers and groundwater for their freshwater needs. Nine of the fourteen countries of the Middle East, for example, face water scarcity (Postel 1992, 287). Population growth in water-scarce regions exacerbates the problem. By the year 2000, some 300 million people living in fifteen countries in Africa—one-third of the continent’s population—will struggle with water scarcity (Postel 1993, 106). Many of those facing water shortages live in degraded watersheds where deforestation, erosion, increased runoff, and microclimatic change contribute to water scarcity. And across the world, in all zones and settings, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the forces of global climate change as weather becomes increasingly chaotic and unpredictable and crops freeze, rot, or wither on the vine (Ohlsson 1995).

Water scarcity, however, is more than a matter of disturbed terrain, increased population, and climate change. Water scarcity can also be a by-product of water management projects: the building of dams, canals, and complicated delivery systems may provide water for some at the cost of others, with short-term gains that wreak long-term ecological havoc (Gleick 1993; McCully 1996; Postel 1992; Reisner 1986). Moreover, water scarcity can be a product of the social systems. Many of those facing water shortages live in the world’s cities, where water is often supplied to the rich by municipal systems while the urban poor, living on the fringes of cities, are forced to purchase water from vendors at rates as much as forty times higher (Meyers 1993, 103). Many people have access only to water that is unfit for consumption—contaminated by sewage, agricultural runoff, and industrial waste (Hu and Kim 1993).

Finally, the artificial nature of geopolitical borders influences water quality and water scarcity. Many of the important water basins of the world straddle political borders. Water containment and diversion schemes in one country affect supply and quality in other countries. The Nile River basin, for example, embraces parts of nine countries; conflict results as sovereign nations claim competing rights to use, store, divert, and pollute (Homer-Dixon 1996; Lowi 1996; Ohlsson 1995). Water allocations based on political and economic interests often exceed actual water availability, leaving downstream (or less powerful) users with a trickle of salty, contaminated water (Reisner 1986).

In short, water scarcity is more than a matter of decreased supply or increased demand. Water scarcity is influenced by a variety of factors, including topography, climate, economic activities, population growth, cultural beliefs, perceptions and traditions, and power relationships.

Culture and Power

The Chinese word for crisis is written with two characters, one that suggests danger and another that suggests opportunity. In many ways, the story of water at the end of the millennium is a story of the tension between danger and opportunity. The dangers of flood and drought can be transformed into economic opportunities as rivers are dammed, waters are diverted into distant fields, and power is generated to feed factories and towns. Yet such transformations imply other changes as well. Nature is dominated and turned into a commodity, complex bioregions are destroyed (Abramovitz 1995), and human social and cultural systems are dramatically, sometimes drastically, altered. Thus, the story of water is all too often a story of conflict and struggle between the forces of self-interest and opportunities associated with progress and the community-based values and needs of traditional ways of life.

In every community, people value water for different reasons and use water in different ways. The quest to capture, store, and distribute a reliable supply of water (or energy) implies the capture of a commons resource and the building of structures and institutions to enclose, commodify, and control it. This process of politicizing and commodi-fying nature requires centralized institutions of power and a reliance on technology to conquer natural forces. Systems for controlling resource access and use typically reflect the ways in which society is organized and thus recreate and reproduce the inequities in society (The Ecologist 1993).

In this book, we present a series of case studies that examine these complex cultural and power dimensions of water resources and water resource management. Contributors to this volume examine the origins, the anatomy, and at times the resolution of water conflicts in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Honduras, the Virgin Islands, Japan, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. Case studies span the continuum of water management contexts: dam construction, hydroelectric power generation, irrigation, transportation, water quality, and cogeneration (desalination). Attention is focused on the various actors in water debates, including historical actors and events but also the varied stakeholders: indigenous peoples, politicians, government agencies, environmentalists, agriculture and other industry-specific users, and citizen groups. The chapters present highly contested and contentious cases such as hydroelectric development at James Bay in Quebec, water management in the Colorado River basin, and the role of water access and control in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Cases also explore the cultural and power dynamics of water management in international (e.g., South Texas), national (e.g., Israel), regional (e.g., James Bay), and local (e.g., Virgin Islands) settings.

The book is organized into three parts dealing broadly with the issues of culture, power, and water. Part I (Rights and Resources: Water, Development, and Cultural Survival) explores some of the varied cultural meanings of water and water resources by examining the impact of water resource development on indigenous peoples. These chapters describe how water is the lifeblood of reproductive systems that maintain and support biological and cultural existence and how watersheds are the situational backdrop for cultural meaning, experience, history, and future. Thus, contested rights to use, constrain, and control water often involve contested rights to land and to the loci of power in resource decision making, both factors that sustain cultural identity.

Part II (Project Culture and Hydropolitics: The Making and Unmaking of Water Development Projects) focuses more explicitly on the political process of funding and building water resource projects. These chapters explore the varied reasons for initiating water development projects, describe the political and economic factors that shape these hugely expensive activities, and provide some sense of the promise that sustains the dream of water resource development over the long years between genesis and completion. Because these cases examine the intersection of culture and power, they also illustrate how different cultural notions, needs, and agendas intersect at a conflict axis, challenging the construction and viability of proposed projects and occasionally bringing a halt to the development process. Water resource crises and conflicts present opportunities to contest existing power relations; indeed, the power to declare a crisis in itself is contingent on possession of power (cf. Lees 1995).

Water is power, and the politics of water are such that dead projects can continually be brought back to life, carrying with them the baggage of outmoded dreams. The initial funding of projects creates momentum in itself, and despite changing times and needs, efforts to fix nature or protect human investment may continue to be funded for reasons of political capital rather than the actual viability of the project. Efforts to change or transform the focus of projects continually confront the entrenched project culture, which may find its institutional power threatened.

The contradictions between dreams and reality, between hydrodevelopment and reproductive strategies, and between those who stand to gain and those who stand to lose result in inevitable conflict—conflict that presents adverse consequences in both the biophysical and cultural realms. Thus, part III (The Culture and Power Dimensions of Water Scarcity) examines the tensions between culture and power as they structure perceptions and experiences of water scarcity and, indeed, as they have transformed the very nature of water.

There is growing awareness that water scarcity plays an increasingly significant role in local, national, and international conflicts. Thomas Homer-Dixon and members of his Environmental Change and Security Project define three types of scarcity: demand-induced scarcity, caused by population growth or increased per capita activity; supply-induced scarcity, marked by a drop in renewable resource supply because the resource is degraded or depleted faster than it is replenished; and structural scarcity, which arises from inequitable distribution of resources (Homer-Dixon et al. 1994, 391–400).

It is our contention that an adequate understanding of resource scarcity must also include an understanding of the process by which scarcity (or the perception of scarcity) is created—what motivates people to act in the way they do, to define resources and resource crises, and to devise responses. Thus, although places and cases vary, all chapters address the values and meanings associated with water in a given context, the power to attribute a certain cultural meaning to water, and different how changes in power result in different definitions of meaning and different patterns of water resource use, access, and control. Cultural notions, histories, economies, environmental conditions, and power relations all play a role in establishing differential resource relations, and this differential is a significant factor in ensuing conflicts and crises.

PART I

Rights and Resources

Water, Development, and Cultural Survival

CHAPTER 2

The Use and Abuse of Aquifers

Can the Hopi Indians Survive

Multinational Mining?

Peter Whiteley and Vernon Masayesva

Author Summary

Three actors play significant roles in water use in northeastern Arizona: the Hopi, the Navajo, and the Peabody Western Coal Company. The Hopi cultural and religious understanding of springs (paavahu) is contrasted with Peabody’s use of water to transport its coal to Nevada by slurry. The company’s wells are depleting the springs, and the springs are drying up. Hopi religious concerns with springs and paanaqso’a (deathly thirst) are metaphorical of larger issues of global development and natural resource management.

A very long time ago there was nothing but water. In the east Hurúing Wuhti, the deity of all hard substances, lived in the ocean. . . . The Sun also existed at that time. . . . By and by these two deities caused some dry land to appear in the midst of the water, the waters receding eastward and westward.

(Origin Myth recorded by H. R. Voth [1905b])

This is. . . one of the most arid countries in the world, and we need that water. That is why we do Kachina dances in the summer, just to get a drop of rain. And to us, this water is worth more than gold, or the money. Maybe we cannot stop the mining of the coal, but we sure would like to stop the use of water.

(Dennis Tewa, Munqapi village)¹

Hopi Society and Environmental Adaptation

The Hopi Indians of northeastern Arizona are an epitome of human endurance: they are farmers without water. According to their genesis narrative, the Hopi emerged from a layer under the earth into this, the fourth, world by climbing up inside a reed. On their arrival, they met a deity, Maasaw, who presented them with a philosophy of life based on three elements: maize seeds, a planting stick, and a gourd full of water. Qa’ö, maize, was the soul of the Hopi people, representing their very identity. Sooya, the planting stick, represented the simple technology they should depend on: there was an explicit warning against over-dependency on technology, which had taken on a life of its own in the third world below, producing destruction through materialism, greed, and egotism. Wikoro, the gourd filled with water, represented the environment—the land and all its life-forms-as well as the sign of the Creator’s blessing, if the Hopis would uphold Maasaw’s covenant and live right. Maasaw told them that life in this place would be arduous and daunting, but through resolute perseverance and industry, they would live long and be spiritually rich.²

The twelve Hopi villages lie on a generally southeast-northwest axis stretching roughly one hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) as the crow flies (see figure 2.1).³ The villages cluster in groups around the tips of three fingerlike promontories, known as the Hopi mesas, that form the southwesternmost extensions of Black Mesa, an upthrust plate of the Colorado Plateau (see figure 2.2 on page 20). Black Mesa is bisected by four principal southwest-trending washes, Moenkopi, Dinnebito, Oraibi, and Polacca; all but Moenkopi are ephemeral and flow only after significant precipitation. Smaller washes, Jeddito and Wepo, near First Mesa, are also locally important. The Wepo and Oraibi Washes separate the Hopi mesas from one another, cutting arroyo channels in valleys some 90 to 120 meters (300 to 400 feet) below the mesa tops, on which the villages perch. The washes and their tributary fans are main areas of Hopi floodwater farming. Only the Moenkopi Wash (far removed from the central area of Hopi villages) supports irrigation, in farmlands below the villages of Upper and Lower Munqapi, which remain the most productive areas for Hopi crops (the name Munqapi, anglicized to Moenkopi, means continuously flowing water place—an index of its social importance). The Moenkopi Wash is fed by tributary stream flows and springs but also is fed directly by an aquifer in a layer of sandstone called Navajo that sits below the surface of Black Mesa within the hydrological province known as the Black Mesa Basin.⁴

FIGURE 2.1.NAVAJO AND HOPI RESERVATIONS RELATIVE TO THE PEABODY WESTERN COAL COMPANY MINE

The 1882 Executive Order Hopi Reservation encompassed District Six, originally a grazing district, which included most of the Hopi village sites; the Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL); and the Navajo Partitioned Lands (NPL), which were created as a result of the Navajo-Hopi Indian Land Settlement Act of 1974. The Black Mesa mine straddles the north-central border of the HPL and the NPL. The villages of Upper and Lower Munqapi fall within the Western Navajo Reservation Bennett Freeze Area, which currently is also in process of partition between the Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation. Courtesy of the University of Arizona Press (modified from Whiteley 1988b).

The Hopi’s principal supply of drinking water is traditionally found in springs—indeed, Hopi history, which focuses on centripetal migrations by independent clans from all points of the compass, specifically remarks on the abundance and reliability of the springs that stud the walls of First, Second, and Third Mesas.⁵ The springs have determined Hopi settlement patterns and uses of natural resources. As geologist Herbert Gregory, an early visitor to the Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations, pointed out:

One of the surprises. . . is the large number of springs widely distributed over the reservation. Tucked away in alcoves in the high mesa walls or issuing from crevices in the canyon sides or bubbling up through the sands in the long wash floors, these tiny supplies of water appear to be distributed in haphazard fashion. . . . The ancient cliff dweller was well aware of the desirability of these small permanent supplies as centers for settlement, and many of the present-day Indian trails owe their position to the location of springs rather than to topography or to length of route.

(Gregory 1916, 132)

Insofar as the archaeological record confirms traditional history, the period between 1300 and 1500 C.E. saw a concentric contraction of more widespread villages—from Mesa Verde, Navajo Mountain, Tsegi Canyon, the Little Colorado River, and the Hopi Buttes—into such centers as are still populated by the Hopi today.⁶

Hopi presence in the region and engagement with its particular environmental exigencies is thus ancient. The Hopi are a Puebloan people, direct descendants of the Anasazi (an archaeologist’s term from the Navajo word meaning ancestors of the enemy; the Hopi, not surprisingly, prefer Hisatsinom, meaning simply ancestors), who between 800 and 1300 C.E. built some of the most impressive architectural structures in prehistoric North America. Chaco Canyon to the east figures in some Hopi migration legends, as do Mesa Verde to the northeast, Betatakin and Keet Seel to the north, Homol’ovi to the south, Wupatki to the southwest, and numerous other ruins throughout the greater Southwest.⁷ The common refrain of southwestern archaeologists, What happened to the Anasazi?, is unequivocally answered by the Hopi and other modern Pueblos: Nothing; we are still here. In Hopi country itself, there is evidence of continuous occupation by sedentary agriculturalists for a good 1,500 years, and the Third Mesa town of Orayvi—the oldest continuously inhabited village in North America—has been dated to at least 1150 C.E. In sum, the Hopi have learned to live by farming in this semiarid environment over the course of a long presence.

The persistent occupation of the Hopi mesas for more than a millennium is both remarkable and paradoxical. Unlike the other Pueblos, the Hopi, with no streams or rivers to support their subsistence economy’s dependence on maize, beans, and squash, must seek their water elsewhere. The ways in which the Hopi get and use water are a major part of identity, religious beliefs, ritual practices, and daily engagements and concerns. Much of the complex Hopi religious system is devoted, in one way or another, to securing necessary blessings of water—in the form of rainfall, snow, spring replenishment, and so forth—to sustain living beings, whether humans, animals, or plants.

A calendar of elaborate ritual performances is divided into the kachina season—roughly from December to July—and, from August to December, a season of more esoteric practices by higher-order religious sodalities—the Snake, Flute, Wuwtsim (Manhood), and Maraw (Womanhood) societies and the great Soyalangw society festival at the winter solstice. All these concentrate in some measure on ensuring beneficial environmental conditions, on keeping the world in balance. The Hopi regard ritual, if performed properly—the cardinal values being pure intentions and good hearts in harmony with one another, sentiments that translate into the philosophical concept of namitnangwu— as instrumentally efficacious ipso facto, not as mere symbolic embroidery on a techno-rationalist means of production.

The phrase Hopi environmentalism is practically a redundancy.⁸ So much of Hopi culture and thought, both religious and secular, revolves around an attention to balance and harmony in the forces of nature that environmental ethics are in many ways critical to the very meaning of the word Hopi.⁹ Hopi society is organized into clans, the majority of which are named after, and have specific associations with, natural species and elements—Bear, Sun, Spider, Parrot, Badger, Corn, Butterfly, Greasewood, Tobacco, Cloud—indicating the utter centrality of environmental forms and ecological relationships in Hopi thought. Myriad usages of natural species and agents in Hopi religious ritual express the depth and detail of this ecological awareness and concern. A kachina, for example, in appearance, song, and performance, typically embodies and encapsulates key vital principles of the natural world. Even a casual observation of a Hemis kachina at Niman (the Home Dance, in July), to just take one case, discloses a being festooned with spruce branches, wild wheat, clouds, butterflies, tadpoles, seashells, and so on. The bringing together of these natural symbols is in many instances designed to both evoke and celebrate the life-giving force of water in the world.

Springs, Water, and Rain in Hopi Secular and Religious Philosophy

Paahu, natural water or spring, is absolutely central in Hopi social and environmental thought. Indeed, the identity of the term points to the significance springs hold: they are the prototypical water sources. Supplemented by wells dug by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Agency over the past century, springs supply drinking water and water for livestock. They also feed a series of irrigated terraced gardens on the slopes below the mesa tops, which form another basic site of crop production; the gardens include chilis, beans, a little corn, onions, radishes, and fruit trees (see photo 2.1). The areas around the larger springs are also the only significant wetlands in much of the region. For this reason, they, too, are objects of religious veneration.

PHOTO 2.1. HOPI GARDENS

These terraced gardens below the Third Mesa village of Hotvela are irrigated with water brought by surface pipes and carried by hand from the Hotvela Spring, on the slope below the mesa’s edge. Courtesy of the Arizona State Museum, Tuscon.

Even with the introduction of piped water (for the most part, only within the past thirty years), springs remain critical in Hopi philosophy and practice. Springs and their immediate pond life environs serve as the ideal model of life and growth. Such places attract denser presences of life-forms than are found elsewhere in the semiarid landscape. Doves, dragonflies, ducks, cranes, frogs, sand-grass, cattails, reeds, cottonwoods, willows, and numerous other species concentrate at these locations—simultaneously the index and the manifestation of abundant, water-charged life. Such species serve as key symbols of the life-giving force of water in Hopi secular and religious philosophy.

It is hard to imagine anything more sacred—as substance or as symbol—than water in Hopi religious thought and practice. To be sure, some elements may appear more prominent: corn, the staff of life, which is ubiquitous in Hopi religious imagery; rattlesnakes in the spectacular Snake Dance; or performances by masked kachina spirits. But intrinsic to these, and underlying much other symbolism in the panoply of Hopi ritual, is the concern with water. Springs, water, and rain are focal themes in ritual costumes, kiva iconography, mythological narratives, personal names, and many, many songs that call the cloud chiefs from the varicolored directions to bear their fructifying essence back into the cycle of human, animal, and vegetal life. That essence—as clouds, rain, and other water forms—manifests the spirits of the dead. When people die, in part they become clouds; songs call to the clouds as ascendant relatives. Arriving clouds are returning ancestors, their rain both communion with and blessing of the living. The waters of the earth (where kachina spirits live) are, then, transubstantiated human life.

In general, springs and groundwater serve as homes for the deity Paalölöqangw, Plumed Water-Snake, who is a powerful patron of the water sources of the earth and the heavens. Paalölöqangw is appealed to in the Snake and Flute ceremonies, and is religiously portrayed during winter night dances. Springs and their immediate surroundings are places of particular religious worship in some instances, as in the Flute ceremony or during Powamuy (the Bean Dance) and Niman (the Home Dance). The Flute ceremony is specifically devoted to the consecration and regeneration of major springs; during this ceremony, in an archetypal gesture, the Lenmongwi, head of the Flute society, dives to the bottom of a particularly sacred spring to plant prayer sticks for Paalölöqangw.

Resources from spring areas such as water, clay, reeds, and spruce branches are gathered for use in village ceremonies, in which they are deemed to draw in the life-giving power of the springs themselves. Springs as distant as 160 kilometers (100 miles) are visited on a regular basis in order to bring back their sacred water for ceremonies, especially by clan descendants from former settlements adjacent to the springs. Early ethnographers Jesse Walter Fewkes and Walter Hough both remarked on Hopi veneration of springs:

In a general way every spring is supposed to be sacred and therefore a place for the deposit of prayer sticks and other offerings. . . . Every spring is a place of worship and hence a shrine.

(Fewkes 1906, 370-371)

No spring in the region is without evidence of many offerings to the deities of water. . . . Sacred Springs may. . . be regarded as altars, and the offerings as sacrifices, whose essence may be carried by the water.

(Hough 1906, 165)

Since time immemorial, the Hopi have offered blessings of cornmeal and prayers at springs, during specific visits for the purpose or simply while passing through the landscape (say, during herding, hunting, or treks to distant cornfields). When blessing a spring, typically a man also scoops up a handful of water and splashes it back toward his village or fields as a way to encourage the water to transfer some of its power to where humans most need it. Springs attract the rain and snow to themselves and thus serve as powerful foci of value in Hopi thought. Indeed, this is why they are sacred places: if much of Hopi religious thought celebrates life, then springs are self-evident indexes of the dynamic process that produces and sustains life. At the winter solstice ceremonies, feathered prayer sticks are placed over major springs around every Hopi village as both protection and supplication.

Among sources of water, there is a quasi-magnetic relationship: the Pacific Ocean, the Colorado River, rain, underground aquifers, springs, and living plants are mutually attractive—contagious in the anthropological sense: The land is a living organ, it breathes. . . the Hopis say that it is the underground water that sucks in, that breathes the rain (Vernon Masayesva).¹⁰ Paatuwaqatsi, literally the ocean, is simultaneously a central philosophical principle denoting the universally sustaining water of life. To attract the world’s powers of moisture, spring names are used frequently in ritual narrative and song: for example, Talakwavi, Dawn Coming-Up Spring; Tsorspa, Bluebird Spring; Kwaava, Eagle Spring; Paatuwi, Spring on the Rock Shelf; Höwiipa, Dove Spring; Hoonawpa, Bear Spring; Konva, Chipmunk Spring; Kookyangwva, Spider Spring; Tsinngava, Water Droplets Splashing Spring; Söhöpva, Cottonwood Spring. Springwater properly placed in one’s field, mud from spring bottoms used as body plaster in kachina costumes, and images of tadpoles or dragonflies decorating kachina spirits—all sympathetically entice the rain.

Springs themselves, like maize in fields, were originally planted in the earth by deities or gifted individuals. There was even a special instrument, a paa’u’uypi (spring planter), known to the elect and used for this purpose. (A spring near Munqapi, for example, is said to have been planted in this way by a man named Kwaavaho—for whom the spring is named—in the late nineteenth century.) Pilgrimages to reconsecrate and draw in regenerative power from especially significant springs at distant points are common in the Hopi religious calendar. Villages may be named for springs, as in the mother village, Songoopavi, Sand-Grass Spring Place. Some clans have exceptional responsibilities to springs, as does Patkingyam, the Water clan, and some springs are sacred to specific clans or religious societies at the different villages. Clan migration routes from former villages are often retraced—both literally in pilgrimages and figuratively in narratives and songs—at certain times of the year. In many instances, clan associations with springs at their ruins or along the route are mentioned as locations of important historical events. Thus, the Water clan has a series of historic points along its migration route from the south that are frequently marked by springs, such as Isva, Coyote Springs, north of Winslow. Similarly, Kiisiwu, Shady Springs, for the Badger and Butterfly clan; Sa’lako, Shalako (a kachina spirit) Spring, for the Bow clan; and Lengyanovi Spring, for the Flute clan, are all memorialized in clan tradition and visited in pilgrimage. In this sense, then, the living springs embody Hopi history: they are cultural landmarks, inscribed with significance, and commemorative reminders of the continuing legitimacy of clan rights and interests in specific areas.

Springs and the life-forms associated with them thus appear in many Hopi stories and sacred traditions, in literary forms such as personal names, and in artistic forms such as basketry, pottery, weaving, and painting. In these intellectual and aesthetic contexts, the substance and forms of springs and wetland life are both described objectively and celebrated with pleasurable appreciation and spiritual gratitude. Personal names, a prime form of Hopi poetic images, often reference springs and water: Paahongva, Water Standing Up (after the tiny columns of water that leap up from raindrops splashing on a pond or puddle); Paanömtiwa, Water Covering Up (perhaps covering a cornfield after a rain); Paatala, Water Light, referring to reflected light on water’s surface, particularly in the dark.¹¹ Many of the species that are totemic emblems of Hopi clans are associated with springs—paawiki, the duck; atoko, the crane; paakwa, the frog; paaqavi, reeds; and so on. The celebration of water, its origins or results, forms a major proportion—perhaps half—of all Hopi names. References to flowers—an explicit mark of the Creator’s rain blessings—celebrate water as well, such as Siitala, flower light, the reflected sunlight from flowers newly blossomed after a rain, and Sikyakuku, literally yellow foot, which refers to walking along through blossoming flowers while the pollen clings to one’s moccasined feet. There are also references to rain, such as Yooyoki raining, and Yoyvwölö, rainwater (there is a priest in one of the ritual orders referred to as the Yoymongwi, rain chief) as well as lightning, such as Talwiipi, a single lightning flash, or Talwipta, lightning in the ongoing process of flashing. Even species that are not so directly associated with water sources are frequently subjects of interest in relation to their behavior toward water. One name, Sharp Hearer, given by a Spider clan member, refers to the fact that when rain begins to fall, certain spiders secreted inside houses hear the rain and emerge from their cover, running out to drink from the freshly emerging puddles (Voth 1905a). Even here, then, when the species in question has no explicit conceptual link with water, the Hopi denote its significance by its habitual practices in relation to water. The concern with natural water depicted in this name details a precise knowledge of the behavior of the species as well as an aesthetic and creatural delight in the pleasure and happiness that the presence of water affords all beings of the world.

In short, springs are key in Hopi social life, cultural values, and conceptualization of the landscape, all of which form the ground of deeper religious thought and action. The Hopi smoke for rain, dance for it, sing for it, and offer many other forms of prayer for it. In the cycle of life, rainwater and snowmelt nourish the plants, which feed animals and human beings. Thus, prayers for rain are not abstract; they call the clouds to replenish the waters of the earth so that all life-forms will benefit and be happy. Here, then, is an environment populated not by Western science’s instinct-driven organisms without spirit or consciousness but by intentional, spiritual entities that are part and parcel of the same moral system that encompasses human beings. The Hopi have, so to speak, both a moral ecology and an ecological morality. As one Hopi man put it, We pray for rain so that all the animals, birds, insects, and other life-forms will have enough to drink too. The prolific complexity of Hopi ritual attends to springs specifically and as sources of blessing and vehicles of prayer in general.

Of Coal Mines and Slurries

The springs, however, are drying up, and with them the essential force of Hopi religious life and culture itself. Flows have been progressively declining over the past three decades. Numerous springs and seeps have ceased to produce enough water to sustain crops planted below them. The Moenkopi Wash no longer continuously flows, and the only major Hopi farming area that depends on irrigation water is in serious jeopardy. In recent years, the Moenkopi Wash has been down to a trickle by late May; not long ago, Munqapi children plunged into swimming holes long into the summer. Even the trickle that does come is supplied by only two upstream tributaries; much of the water from the mainstream itself is channeled into impoundment ponds by the Peabody Western Coal Company.

Peabody, which operates twenty-seven mines in the United States, is the largest private producer of coal in the world. Until recently, the company was part of the British multinational Hanson Industries, which demerged in February 1997. Peabody then became part of a newly formed Hanson spinoff, The Energy Group PLC, but top management remains virtually identical. In 1996, Peabody’s total operating profit (including all its mining interests worldwide) was $240 million, and its profit on coal sales was in excess of $2 billion; Hanson’s total sales, including its chemical and tobacco interests, exceeded $19 billion, and its total after-tax profit was $2.3 billion (Hanson Annual Report 1996). This is no small enterprise.

Peabody’s Black Mesa-Kayenta Mine is the only mine in the United States that transports its coal by slurry (see figure 2.2). The strip-mined coal is crushed, mixed with drinking-quality water, and flushed by pipeline to the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada. The cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix—electric oases in the desert—buy some of the power, but most of it goes to the electric toothbrushes, garage door openers, outsize television sets, and other necessities of life in southern California. Most of the slurry water comes directly from the Navajo or N-aquifer, 300 to 900 meters (1,000 to 3,000 feet) within the geologic formation of Black Mesa (see figure 2.3).

The pumping, Peabody has claimed, has no effect on the Hopi springs. Those springs, it maintains, are fed not by the N-aquifer but by the overlying Dakota or D-aquifer and by snowmelt. The Hopi do not believe Peabody’s assertion. But an escalating series of letters from Hopi individuals and officials, both traditional leaders and Tribal Council chairs; petitions signed by several hundred Hopi; protests in public hearings; dissenting interpretations by independent geologists ;¹² and repeated refusals by the Tribal Council to sanction the Department of the Interior’s renewal of the mining lease have all fallen on deaf ears. Flat rebuttals to Hopi protests continue to be retailed by Peabody and Hanson representatives, and a personal invitation to engage in direct dialogue issued to Lord Hanson, chairman of Hanson PLC, by Tribal Chairman Ferrell Secakuku in June 1994 went ignored. On 30 April 1994, W. Howard Carson, president of Peabody Western Coal Company, voiced the company’s party line in a letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times: Changes in the flows from their springs may be the result of drought conditions in the region, and perhaps from the increased pumpage from Hopi community wells located near these springs. . . . Peabody Western’s pumping from wells that are 2,500-3,000 feet deep does not affect these springs.

Yet Peabody’s characterizations of hydrological effects are eminently untrustworthy. Comments and hearings on the U.S. Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation Enforcement’s draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) (U.S. Department of the Interior 1990)¹³ produced a welter of objections, both to the sociocultural and environmental effects of the mine and to the shoddy research that produced general ratings of minor or minimal environmental impacts. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency’s official response noted:

We have classified the DEIS as Category EO-2: Environmental Objections—Insufficient Information.¹⁴ . . . We believe the project may result in significant adverse environmental impacts to water resources and air quality that should be avoided. We have also found that the lack of sufficient information on water, air, and biotic resource conditions severely impedes evaluation of impacts, alternatives, and appropriate mitigation measures. We are particularly concerned that the DEIS lacks an alternatives analysis which would enable the Federal agencies and the public to consider less environmentally damaging actions than the preferred alternative [i.e., the slurry].

(U.S. Department of the Interior 1990, 263)

FIGURE 2.2. BLACK MESA AND THE PEABODY

COAL COMPANY’S LEASE AREAS

The geological formation of Black Mesa, with the Hopi mesas and principal washes. The Peabody Western Coal company’s two lease areas are marked by hatched lines. Black Mesa tilts downward from north to south. The mining lease areas lie on top of its northern, higher end. The Hopi villages are at the lowest, southern extremity, where the aquifers are significantly closer to the surface. Courtesy of the Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University.

FIGURE 2.3. GROUNDWATER FLOW IN THE N-AQUIFER

The N- or Navajo Aquifer is composed of three layers: from top to bottom, Navajo Sandstone, the Kayenta Formation, and Wingate Sandstone. The N-Aquifer is separated from the overlying D- or Dakota aquifer by the Carmel Formation (indicated by the Confining Beds in the diagram). The D-aquifer also is composed of three layers: from top to bottom, Dakota Sandstone, the Morrison Formation, and Entrada Sandstone. For more on the geologic and hydrological stratigraphy of the aquifers, see Cooley et al. 1969. Courtesy of the Hopi Tribe, Water Resouces Office.

The EPA’s more detailed comments on the mine’s hydrological compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act noted:

Conclusions based on N-aquifer modelling. While EPA accepts the approach taken in modelling hydrologic baseline conditions and impacts, the conclusiveness of this effort is undermined by lack of data. This limitation, compounded by use of material damage criteria based on thresholds much less sensitive than significance under NEPA, leads us to reject the evaluation of hydrologic impacts. EPA believes that the available data do not support statements in the DEIS that the cumulative effects of current and foreseeable mining and related operations (principally the coal transport slurry) are expected to result in only minor hydrological