Navajo and Hopi Nations are fighting for the protection of Arizona burial grounds as one of the world’s largest coal companies seeks extension of its mining permit

In 1967 the Peabody coal company came to the Navajo and Hopi reservations in northern Arizona and Utah to excavate a strip mine – but the land it leased from the tribes was on an ancient tribal burial ground. So, as required by law, it hired archeologists and for the next 17 years a dig known as the Black Mesa archeological project – the largest in North American history – unearthed more than one million artefacts, including the remains of 200 Native Americans.



Now the bones and artefacts are at the centre of a debate between tribes people who say ancestral remains and archeological ruins have been desecrated, and a coal company and government officials who are planning a new dig.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vernon Masayesva, the former chairman of the Hopi tribe and founder and director of the Black Mesa Trust. Photograph: Sam A Minkler

Native American groups and the Sierra Club are suing the US government to protect ancient Indian burial sites as one of the world’s biggest coal companies, Peabody, seeks a lifetime mining permit for the land it leases from the tribes. Sierra has settled its suit, while the other two suits are still active.

“I am incensed that my ancestors were dug up, ground up and send off to universities to be studied,” said Vernon Masayesva, a plaintiff and former Hopi tribal chairman.

Peabody says it has taken good care of the artefacts and bones. The collection is curated “with the express wishes of both tribes” and “in compliance with federal law,” said Beth Sutton, a company spokesperson.

But a report by the Army Corps of Engineers, which surveyed the collection early last decade at the University of Illinois, where it is housed, found the curation to be “substandard in every respect”. Rodents and spiders “were a problem”, according to the report, which notes that facilities had been broken into and artefacts were missing.

What’s more, Alan Downer, a former historical preservation officer for the Navajo Nation, said the tribe had never authorised any remains to be loaned to a professor, Debra L Martin, who teaches at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He said he was “shocked to find out” about eight years ago, that she had had the bones since 1980.

Some members of the tribes blame their leaders for moving too slowly, accusing them of being too concerned with retaining lucrative leases of the tribal lands.

Peabody’s Kayenta coal mine fuels the Navajo Generating Station, which is owned by the US Department of the Interior and provides water and electricity to Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

The Black Mesa bones represent a fraction of the remains of 200,000 Native Americans owned by the US government, which sit in museums and universities as a legacy of industrial land use and archaeological projects.

“It’s ghoulish,” said D Bambi Kraus, president of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and an adviser to Bill Clinton, the former US president, on race.

Cataloguing the vast federal holdings of Indian remains is not a government priority, said Michael Trimble, an archaeologist with the Army Corps of Engineers, who authored the report on the Black Mesa collection.

The dispute is about more than bones and relics. For many Native Americans, the shabby treatment of ancestral remains amplifies a deeper sense of loss and dislocation that is tied up with the federal push of Indians on to reservations in the late 1800s.

On top of Black Mesa – so named because of a dark seam of coal that runs through it like a vein – Leland Grass, a traditional medicine man, surveyed the valley where sheep herders eke out a meagre living. More than 40% of homes here lack running water and the population is racked by poverty, joblessness and alcoholism – problems some attribute to the situation with the bones. “This desecration has brought a strong disharmony to the land,” said Grass, who, along with the rest of his medicine men’s association, called Nahooka Diné, is pushing for the bones to be returned.

The 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Nagpra) was supposed to accelerate such returns. “The law was supposed to right a moral wrong,” said Kraus. It requires any facility holding Native American remains to catalogue them and return them to the relevant tribes. But “compliance has been very poor,” according to a 2010 audit by the government accountability office.

Under the law, the Bureau of Indian Affairs should provide regulatory oversight. But Anna Pardo, who co-ordinates Nagpra for the bureau said: “We’re still not sure of the scope of our responsibility,” adding that the bureau requested a legal opinion from federal lawyers eight years after the law was enacted – in 1990 – and never received an answer.

The bones provide important clues to an agricultural people who first appeared among the Mesas more than 3,000 years ago.

“The bones are a byproduct of mining,” said Nicole Horseherder, an activist with the Navajo grassroots group Tó Nizhoni Ani. “They should have come up with a plan to rebury them… Instead, they created a situation they don’t know how to fix.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest View of the edge of Black Mesa just east of the Peabody mine with Monument valley in the distance. Photograph: Sam A Minkler

Peabody and a collective of museum curators, professors and tribal officials say they are trying to work through those issues.

Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, who manages cultural resources for the Hopi tribe, said: “There’s been a lot of goodwill from Peabody to fund a museum that would bring part of the collection from Illinois to the south-west.”

Mining officials acknowledge that there have been problems since the 1967 dig began and say the antiquities laws, newly enacted at the time, were confusing. “The federal agencies were winging it back then,” said Jon Czaplicki, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Reclamation.

Kelley Hays-Gilpin, an anthropologist at the University of Northern Arizona who participated in the dig said in a written statement that on one Peabody dig she saw human bones being ground up by mining machinery and ancient ruins excavated with a backhoe (the rear digging bucket on a JCB).

“The next dig deserves to be done professionally with full participation by members of clans who settled on Black Mesa,” said Masayevsa. The archaeological burial sites and rock art “represent pages from our history, Arizona’s history, US history and world history,” he said.

An excavation conducted painstakingly with hand tools will add time and money to the project. Still, officials with the Bureau of Reclamation have begun hearings on how to protect existing burial sites before the coal company expands its mine in an operating permit expected to come into effect in 2019. What to do with the remains is not a part of those discussions.