I took this picture a few evenings ago. This mountain looks different every day. Whether you think the mountain is “sacred” or not, or whether you have your own version of what “sacred” is, everyone in and around Flagstaff has a relationship with this mountain, whether they awknowledge it or not. Every single person cannot help but look at this moutain at some point through out their day. It rains up there when it is sunny in town. When the Aspens change, the mountain is checkered bright yellow. There is usually snow somewhere up there. It is the highest point on the Colorado Plateau and the entire state of Arizona. It is a mountain that not only demands your attention, but your respect as well.

Dook’o'oosłííd is the Diné (Navajo) word for the San Fransisco Peaks. It is just one name, one intimate relationship with that mountain that is specific to a separate culture, a separate cosmology wrapped around this majestic mountain range.

The Hopi’s call it “Nuva’tuk-iya-ovi.” The Kachinas live there.
The Apache’s call it “Dził Tso—Dilzhe’e.”
The Havasupai call it “Hvehasahpatch” or “Huassapatch”
The Hualapai, “Wik’hanbaja—Hwal`bay.” The Yavapai, “Wimonagaw’a.” And there are many many more tribes that have built their identity on this mountain. (Wikipedia, as lame as it can be sometimes, actually has a pretty good list).

Skiers call it “Snowbowl.” The Forest Service and the City of Flagstaff call it “Ching Ching!”

On Sunday afternoon, the Save The Peaks Coalition rallied in front of City Hall in reaction to the Supreme Courts refusal to hear the case. The turn out was great, and there was a lot of support from vehicles passing by. (If you’re unfamiliar with this, the bottom half of this article provides a background, but you should really just go here)

I can only remember one car sitting at the light adjacent to where we were, a group of guys shouting, “Snow making! Snow making! Snow making!” Some really negative and racist comments were directed specifically toward the indigenous population. Klee handled it really well, holding up a sign with an arrow pointing to the automobile. The sign said, “this is what racism looks like.”

Beyond the more obvious racism inherent in bumper stickers like, “Reclaim the Peaks,” (a reference to the sewer water they want to pump up the mountain to make snow, as well as the irony of “reclaiming” land that was flat-out stolen and labeled federal land), this issue has really illuminated deep racial divisions of Flagstaff.

Klee introducing Howard Shanker (who lost the election in November to Ann Kirkpatrick for this districts seat in Congress. Shanker was very supportive of the Save the Peaks coalition)

Attorney Howard Shanker speaking about the legalities of the case

Fourteen regional tribes and scores of local environmental groups have been fighting this issue for decades. Desecrating the Peaks is in direct violation of the Religious Freedom Act. I can’t even begin to explain the emotional impact that all this has on people whose religious and spiritual identity is directly connected to the Peaks. I go to these rallies and I talk with people in town. They have tears in their eyes; they shake when they speak personally about their connection with that mountain. And it’s not always indigenous people, either. I’ve cried over this mountain. My dad has said that his heart lies in the San Francisco Peaks. But I won’t pretend to have the same sort of connection that regional Native peoples do. Everyone who is in love with that mountain, not because of it’s potential for profit and recreation, is hated and vilified by those that just come here to ski.

If the decision went the other way around and the mountain was protected (not shut out to the community, but just left alone and respected for what it is rather than what it could be), do you think any skiers would sob and mourn the loss? Hell no. Most of the skiers don’t even live here. Those that own Snowbowl don’t even live in Arizona. And it wouldn’t be a loss to skiers any way. There are a million places to ski in this country. Leave this mountain alone.

Flagstaff is a 30% second home community; most of its out-of-town residents live in Phoenix; most of the people that ski the mountain are from Phoenix. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out whom the city is catering towards by selling wastewater to Snowbowl. The city caters to visitors over the people that actually live here…and certainly over those that have lived here longer than Flagstaff itself has existed.

Here is more proof. Where did they most recently repave the roads? Downtown. Where do the roads really need to be repaved? Our neighborhoods. They didn’t even bother to repave the southside of San Francisco. Now that street needs it. But they know the tourists and Phoenicians don’t cross the tracks, so why bother?

Klee holds up a bottle of reclaimed water, asking someone to bring it to the next city council meeting and challenge one of them to drink it since they apparently believe it is safe

…and, of course, speaking your mind in Flagstaff would not be complete without a watchful eye looming in the distance.

I have so much more to say about all this. It will have to wait until another time.

The public lands bill that was defeated early last month was reworked and signed yesterday.

This afternoon President Barack Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009, one of the most sweeping pieces of conservation and public land management legislation in decades.

The measure protects two million acres of wilderness in nine states and a thousand miles of rivers, a 50 percent increase in the wild and scenic river system. It establishes new national trails, national parks and a new national monument and provides legal status for the National Landscape Conservation System, which will protect some of the country’s most spectacular landscapes.

This is fantastic news, but Obama’s “environmentalism” makes me a little uncomfortable. He said:

“As Americans, we possess few blessings greater than the vast and varied landscapes that stretch the breadth of our continent,” said President Obama.

Which is cool, but read on.

“Our lands have always provided great bounty – food and shelter for the first Americans, for settlers and pioneers; the raw materials that grew our industry; the energy that powers our economy.”

Ugh. Obama is great at using vaguely agreeable terminology. To me, it seems to confirm that age old theory that wilderness is protected, not for the sake of wilderness, but to secure future development of natural resources. It’s like buying a big meal, taking a bit, and saying, “wrap it up for me, I’ll finish’er off when I’m a little more hungry.”

There is nothing wrong with using a resource – by definition, a resource exists so you can use it. That’s problematic of course, because that is our word for the trees, animals, rocks, and others who do not see themselves as resources. Still, even if we are to think of a resource as something that exists for our use, like all resources, they must be preserved so that others can also use them. They must be used wisely and sparingly if we expect future generations to be able to live here too.

Then Obama quoted President Teddy Roosevelt, who nearly 100 years ago said, “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”

Right on. That’s a great quote, but the truth is, resources have been wasted. They continue to be wasted, and we steal them from other countries now too. The quote is a 100 years old. We are the future generation he is speaking of and we are pissed. We are pissed that previous generations made rivers and streams unsuitable for drinking. We are pissed about the radiation, the cancers, and the chemicals. We are pissed about the clearcuts and the death of the oceans. We’re still building coal plants and pulling uranium out of the ground. We’ve banned some toxins and created some new ones. And they still want to talk about “generations that come after us?” They’ll be horrified, you can bet on that. If we really care about future generations, we need to create a world that will support their lives. And this one won’t.

I ended up scoring a ticket to see Sherman Alexie speak last night. It was much different than I thought it would be. I’m familiar with his work so I was expecting his sense of humor, but I wasn’t expecting the whole thing to be stand-up comedy.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the show (I’m settling on calling it a show – because it wasn’t a “reading” and it certainly wasn’t a “lecture”). I laughed throughout the whole thing along with the sold out audience. Afterall, there aren’t many famous native people so he had 500 years of stereotypes to draw from. It wasn’t until the Q and A at the end that I was a little turned off. Then I dropped into the bathroom on the way out, contemplating the long line to get my copy of Reservation Blues signed, where I spoke with a Navajo guy who was really offended by Alexie. We both shared a few examples of things Alexie said or did that were problematic to us. I left with a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing, not really thrilled about waiting in line to get my book signed (plus, on the way to the theater before the show I was on my bike and a rock was thrown up into my eye and it was incredibly uncomfortable through the whole show).

I don’t know why this guy, an older Navajo man, chose to talk to me, a skinny white guy who just happened to be peeing at the same time as him. I got the impression that he was very frustrated and just wanted to get his thoughts off his chest. I just happened to be there. I’m glad I was.

What makes Alexie such an engaging speaker is his ability to be very comedic about deeply personal and political issues, but at the same time, he can get completely serious in an instant. Yet his seriousness didn’t last much longer than that instant, and I found myself wanting more. Maybe 20 or 30 percent of the audience was native. I was just expecting a little more substance, a bit more direction. The man in the bathroom told me that if he could ask Alexie one question it would be, “how much do you know about your heritage?” He concluded his own statement saying, “he’d probably just turn it into a joke.”

I have no doubt Alexie knows a lot about where he came from, but to him, it seems to be all in the past. Though I laughed throughout the whole show, this guy’s perspective really got me thinking. He said, while it’s easy for him to joke around about poverty, alcoholism, government food, and under funded Native Health Services from his childhood, he escaped and got rich and the problems on the res are still very real to us.

I was bothered during the Q and A because he made fun of anyone who asked anything and turned each question into an opportunity to be funny. The way in which some people asked questions did invite jokes, though – like the guy who yelled out the rhetorical question, “Do you support the protection of sacred sites?” Of course he does. But his answer was troubling and showed that he is a bit out of touch with the politics of this area.

He said that to him, if there is a fire in his house, there is nothing sacred to him in the house but his family. He said with all the talk of sacred sites, it’s hard to know “where it’s okay to step.” Here is what really got me: he looked at someone in the audience and said, “if I had the choice to put nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain or save your life, I will choose you. It’s called Humanism. Look it up.”

That’s when I put my coat on and made my way to the door. I brought that up to the Navajo man in the bathroom. “In many places on the res, there is uranium contamination in the water people drink. Doesn’t he know this is killing people right now?” I told him I was aware of that issue and that if they put waste in Yucca Mountain, the consequences could be irreversibly deadly to generations of people. It’s all well and good to be a “humanist,” and bring up fictional scenarios that will never happen: one life against dumping nuclear waste. But the truth is, because of uranium contamination, people, those he tries to identify with, are dealing with slow cancerous deaths because of the desecration of native land. It’s is an issue that is deeper and more emotional to the people that live on the res than he seems to realize.

Alexie has a unique perspective, having grown up on the res, made it out, and now lives successfully in Seattle. He has a beautiful way with words and his growing body of work is really important. His talk did not provide a lot of direction for those less fortunate though. Not everyone can escape the res on writing scholarships after all. At times, it seemed like he was rubbing his success in everyone’s face. The underlying message to be successful did not point to fighting for human rights or working to improve conditions on the res, but simply to escape. I just wished he would have said something radical, something that could inspire people toward political action of any kind.

On the other hand, as one of the only famous voices for Native people, maybe – myself included – we just expect too much from him. The whole thing gave me a lot to think about and that is never a bad thing.

From I Blame the Patriarchy:

Fulton is sponsoring one of those wackaloon anti-abortion bills requiring that women seeking abortions undergo an ultrasound procedure and be forced to view the resulting fetal image.

To rationalize this outrageous invasion, Fulton opines that subjecting a woman to an ultrasound will convey unto her “information about the reality inside her womb.” Fulton says that this “information” will “reduce the number of abortions.”

My comment on the issue:

“You know, I’m totally fine with this as long as the bill also requires manufacturers to display a photo of sweathshop workers alongside clothing, pictures of men holding guns to the heads of slaves in the congo as they dig for colton alongside cell phone ads; then images of children in Ghana who suffer from cancers and unexplainable rashes from breaking down the metals from our e-waste alongside sales of laptops. While we’re at it, lets put pictures of factory farms on packages of chicken and eggs. Lets show pictures of mutilated cows in fast food restaurants.

I’m all for showing people the reality of their actions, but requiring women to look at the fetus in their belly is really stupid. It is growing inside them, women know it is there. While the things we should feel guilty about remain hidden.”\

UPDATE: I got a email asking about colton. Here is an article, “How the Mobile Phone in your Pocket is Helping to Pay for the Civil War in Congo.” Related articles here.