It isn’t easy being Indian,
and it’s even harder being Navajo. A special investigator
into the mismanagement of Indian money from oil and gas royalties
found that companies paid Anglo landowners 20 times what they paid
Navajos when building pipelines across the reservation (HCN,
5/12/03: Missing Interior money: Piles or pennies?). Bureau of
Indian Affairs real estate appraisers not only undervalued Indian
lands, they also erased documentation pertinent to the
investigation.
The Department of
Homeland Security and Phelps Dodge: a match made in New
Mexico. A New Mexico university and the federal
government plan to buy the town of Playas from the mining company
to train emergency workers responding to terrorist attacks (HCN,
3/3/03: Heard Around The West). Built by Phelps Dodge in 1972, the
town has hit hard times since the copper smelter closed in 2000.
The town’s 60 residents still don’t know if
they’ll be run out of town.
Whether it was an innocent example of state and federal
cooperation, or an illicit backroom deal,
environmentalists want to know what happened between Utah Gov. Mike
Leavitt and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Gale Norton
(HCN, 4/28/03: Wilderness takes a massive hit). Last spring,
Leavitt and Norton reached an agreement that prohibits the Bureau
of Land Management from designating any new wilderness. Alleging
that public input had been ignored, environmentalists filed a
Freedom of Information Act request last April. But that request was
ignored, and Earthjustice is now suing Interior for withholding
documents.
Apparently, industry groups
still haven’t figured out that environmentalists have
lawyers, too. In August, Tucson enviros staged a protest
outside the office of the Southern Arizona Homebuilders
Association, opposing the association’s lawsuit to remove a
rare owl from the endangered species list. Three days later, Tucson
police arrested Kierán Suckling, executive director of the
Center for Biological Diversity, on charges of disorderly conduct,
assault and trespassing (HCN, 3/30/98: A bare-knuckled trio goes
after the Forest Service). The Center, whose motto is
“Nature’s Legal Eagles,” is suing the
homebuilders’ association for filing a false police
report.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Follow-up.
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