Hopi has many predictions in our culture — one of them being that the coming of non-Indigenous nations would make the Earth shake and life become ruptured. Many settlers are familiar with this concept from the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi (the Hopi word for “life out of balance”), which contrasts increasing industrialization with the sandstone of our lands. The record-breaking heat dome and lack of snowpack and moisture in the West this spring are signs of what our elders and ancestors have been warning us about for generations.
Pisisvayu, otherwise known as the Colorado River, sits blocked by pah’uutsi (Glen Canyon Dam) like stagnant blood, baking into Lake Powell, smothering our sacred sites and leaking into development projects in St. George, terminating long before her historical journey to paatuwaqatsi, or the Sea of Cortez. This is but one of three dams in Arizona that were built to hold water on the land via Pisisvayu. But we remember a different time, when water was treated like family. The Hopi people have a covenant with the Creator to steward water as well as the land.
The Hopi hauled water to our mesas and made long journeys up steep hills, carrying this lifeforce with us for our ceremonies and into our homes for generations prior to colonization. We are dry farmers; for the past 60 years, I have grown food to feed my family in the small reservation square in northern Arizona that the federal government carved out of Hopitutskwa, our traditional lands. In addition to dry farming, in which we rely exclusively on rain cycles and snowpack for our crops, I have been ranching for decades, and I use wood to heat my home, so I am no stranger to the challenges of living off the land. Rounding up cattle on horseback rather than using an all-terrain vehicle mitigates severe damage to the land and to the vegetation. Sometimes I cannot get on a horse due to injuries I sustained while serving our country in the military, so I round up cattle on foot. This is part of the stewardship that Creator bestowed upon us.
We have, as a people, born witness to enormous changes to the animals, people, landscape and food systems over many generations. We have watched as water has left the land for luxury — golf courses and pools down the Central Arizona Project. We do not have these things on Hopi; is it a need or a want?
I see legislation and management at every level that reflect a certain kind of ignorance and a refusal to listen to those of us who are more experienced. We cannot keep water on the land as long as our federal agencies — the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the federal bodies that govern them, the U.S. Congress and the executive branch — continue to put foreign interests above our own, and manage our lands and waters as if they were crops to be sold to the highest bidder. Giving Oak Flat, a sacred site for the Apache people in central Arizona, to Rio Tinto under the false premise of a prosperous land exchange is the final frontier of colonialism. Rio Tinto is not even an American company, and mining is an extremely water-intensive endeavor. Where will the water come from for the mining to take place? Will Rio Tinto clean up the pollutants that are carried downstream into Phoenix and Tucson?
All across Hopitutskwa, notably in New Mexico, these aforementioned agencies and decision-makers, who are beholden to special interests such as the oil and gas industry, are responsible for rampant fracking, exacerbating the climate crises and removing yet more water from the land through its wasteful process. This is happening globally and far beyond Hopitutskwa. We must ask ourselves again: Is this a need, or a want? When we pass away, we as Hopi know that our body’s moisture joins with the Earth, and we become Oomawsinom — the Cloud People. The emissions, pollutants and the disrespect for the water are blocking the completion of our spiritual journey.
In Arizona, many anti-wolf and anti-wildlife bills were introduced both at the state and federal level at the behest of the cattleman’s industry, to enrich shareholders who do not even live here. One such bill, HB 2160, went so far as to include special interest groups to manage wolves, should they come under the state’s jurisdiction. They did not include tribal voices in the bill, and we have managed to live with wolves and many other so-called “predators” without this level of panic. I believe it is a distraction, a type of constructed hysteria to keep us from holding our state and federal agencies and decision-makers accountable for the abysmal fate of so many wild creatures, including wolves, which, as evidenced by myriad reams of scientific data, are keystone species who help keep water on the land. When humans and animals were first made, the Creator did not just make people to manage the land, he also made a balance in the ecosystem with waterfowl, reptiles, amphibians, raptors — they are messengers to bring water back to the land.
The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are both allegiant to a “multiple use mandate” that treats our aboriginal lands as a balance sheet, with outdated metrics on success, like heads of cattle, and leaderboard of trees logged, and so on. These agencies have a mandate to consult tribes, but this often winds up being no more than a 30-minute phone call with tribal government officials, lacking any face-to-face interactions or deep relational work with our cultural practitioners. Consultation does not equal consent. We cannot drink oil or money. These so-called public lands are drying out from overgrazing, from thinning, from the recreational demands of ATV use — and the few laws we have enacted to guide us are being torn apart by the Trump administration, which is also beholden to the fossil fuel industry. We are losing precious time defending the basics, when we should proactively be pushing these agencies to work for the people, for the land, for the animals, and changing the outcomes of success to focus on keeping water on the land through abundant biodiversity, increasing habitat connectivity, and co-existence.
Consultation does not equal consent. We cannot drink oil or money.
Mismanagement of the land in the name of profit is the foundation of this global disaster and the ending of life. It is the reason that our ancestral sites were drowned in the creation of Lake Powell. Settlers believed they could literally hold water on the land in an unnatural concrete bowl, bending the wild river to their will. But as the waters of Lake Powell recede due to climate change and our ancestral sites return, we, as Hopi, have always known that there is no possible way to hold the water on the land in this way. Water is held on the land in the bodies of the animals, in the branches of the trees, in the moisture of the soil of the old-growth forests. Water is held on the land when deer and elk are kept in check by our wolf relatives to allow the vegetation to flourish. Water is held on the land when it is not drilled or blasted from the belly of the Earth to frack and mine and drill. Water is held on the land in our human bodies, connected to the whole, every drop precious. Paahuquatsi — water is life. Kwak’kwy: Thank you.
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