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Giving thanks for protectors of sacred
places |
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November 23, 2006 |
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by:
Suzan Shown Harjo/ Indian Country
Today |
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As people gather in our great lands to give
thanks for the bounty of this time, I am
grateful that two threatened sacred places
are protected - Medicine Lake and Topock
Maze in California - even if one of them is
not fully out of danger.
Topock Maze is a complex landscape of earth
drawings and sacred areas on a bluff above
the Colorado River in the Mojave Desert. It
has been revered for millennia by the Mojave
and other tribes as a pathway to the
afterlife.
Medicine Lake is a ceremonial place of
spiritual and physical healing for the Pit
River, Wintu, Modoc, Shasta, Klamath and
other nations. The lake is in the caldera of
a volcano on Pit River Nation territory near
Mount Shasta in the northern part of the
state.
These sacred places have been threatened and
desecrated by energy companies. Pacific Gas
and Electric Co. violated Topock Maze with a
water treatment plant and the Fort Mojave
Tribe sued. On Nov. 9, they announced a
settlement, with PG&E apologizing and
returning 125 acres of the sacred land to
the tribe.
Medicine Lake is the subject of a Nov. 6
protective ruling by the 9th Circuit Court
of Appeals, but federal agencies could
appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The appellate judges reversed a 2004
district court ruling and disapproved lease
extensions issued in 1998 by the Bureau of
Land Management and the Forest Service to a
private energy company, Calpine, for a
proposed geothermal power plant in the
Medicine Lake Highlands.
Caretakers of Medicine Lake ask supporters
to join them in petitioning Interior
Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and Agriculture
Secretary Mike Johanns to let the appellate
decision stand.
''Another appeal would further drain
taxpayer dollars,'' said Mark LeBeau, a Pit
River citizen of the Illmawi Band. ''The
[agencies] need to abide by the current
letter of the law in this case.''
LeBeau vowed to ''increase pressure on
Calpine to demand that they respect our
culture, sacred sites and environment and
drop their plans to build power plants in
our sacred areas.''
Attorney Deborah Ann Sivas, counsel of
record for protection of Medicine Lake,
outlined the next steps in the case: ''The
Ninth Circuit will send the case back down
to the district court, and the district
judge will enter summary judgment in our
favor. That means the lease issues and the
project approval will be back before the
federal agencies for further
consideration.''
Sivas thinks it is ''an open question''
whether Calpine wants to pursue the leases
further or is in a financial position to do
so. ''Calpine might try to argue that the
agencies should merely suspend the lease, do
the proper review and affirm the old lease
decision, but we will vigorously resist that
approach.''
The appeals court ruled that the federal
agencies failed to comply with consultation
requirements of federal laws. Sivas, who
directs the Environmental Law Clinic at
Stanford Law School, said the leases ''are
null and void'' because they were illegally
extended. ''Thus, if BLM wants to issue them
again, the process has to start from
scratch, with a full environmental review
process and full tribal consultation on the
question of whether the leases should be
issued in the first instance.''
''The victory is a good feeling,'' said
Radley Davis, who also belongs to the
Illmawi Band of the Pitt River Nation.
''This decision represents a victory for all
the traditional people and sacred places
that have no voice. It represents the
acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty [and]
the strength of grass-roots people.''
Davis speaks of the struggle to protect
Medicine Lake as multigenerational: ''Our
elders and leaders who have fought all their
lives to protect Saht Tit Lah [Medicine
Lake] and for such victories are looking
down on us with great pride. We thank them
for giving us direction, wisdom and strength
in carrying out the work they left for us
continue.''
Davis cautioned that the fight is not over:
''We must stay alert and expect that Calpine
and the U.S. government to respond with
great force.''
Fort Mojave Tribal Chairman Nora McDowell
also spoke of generational duty, in
announcing the Topock Maze settlement with
PG&E: ''We have responsibility not only to
the past and present, but to the future. It
wasn't easy getting a corporation to
understand, to recognize and to accept
this.''
''The settlement is more than any of the
parties could have received through
litigation,'' said tribal attorney Courtney
Ann Coyle. She and her husband, Steven P.
McDonald of Luce, Forward, Hamilton and
Scripps, represented Fort Mojave.
''A court decision makes winners and
losers,'' said Coyle. Instead, the tribe
receives a part of its sacred land and ''can
secure a more direct seat at the planning
and management tables and steward the area.
As for PG&E, they have begun the process of
learning how to work in a sacred area in
cooperation with the tribe, something that
would have been unlikely to occur if
litigation proceeded. Because the
remediation may take several decades, it is
imperative that the parties learn to work
together.''
While calling it ''a big step in the right
direction,'' Coyle said that ''no settlement
could fully remediate the desecration that
has been done to this area from the
construction and operations. We need to
actively work to reduce or discontinue these
uses, restore these areas and provide them
an appropriate level of management.''
When asked if the settlement were
replicable, Coyle responded: ''We hope that
these settlements will be used by other
tribes in their efforts to protect the
sacred. That precedent has been set that
tribes have the right to ask for better
corporate responsibility and sustainability
practices, that it is not too much to demand
sensitivity training for the corporations
and agencies working with tribes and that an
apology to tribes is not an admission of
weakness, but rather, sometimes a necessary
step in the healing and trust building
processes that allow all the parties to move
forward.''
Coyle gave credit for the settlement ''to
the leadership on all sides of this case.''
At the state level, the toxics control
director with a background in anthropology
''quickly understood that the litigation was
best settled and put his personal mark on
those efforts. The PG&E chief executive got
directly involved in the litigation and came
to the reservation and heard for himself
from the affected tribal elders how the
company's activities were affecting their
connection to the afterlife.''
''The Mojave chairperson's personal
involvement and leadership style was
invaluable and highly persuasive with the
other leaders. She was ably supported by
Linda Otero, the Mojave's AhaMakav cultural
society director. It was a coming together
of these leaders that enabled the
settlements to occur.''
Coyle said that ''consultation at the
earliest point in project planning is surely
the best way to go.''
Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee
Muscogee, is president of the Morning Star
Institute in Washington, D.C., and a
columnist for Indian Country Today.
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