In late October in a remote area of Arizona called Black Mesa, federal SWAT teams dressed in military flak jackets and wielding assault rifles set up roadblocks and detained people as helicopters and drones circled overhead.

The response made it seem as though police were targeting dangerous criminals — terrorists, even. But they were actually detaining impoverished Navajo (Dine’) elders accused of owning too many sheep.

For the past month Hopi rangers and agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have been entering people’s land and holding them at gunpoint, with few warrants and little respect for due process. Community members say they live in fear because of this extreme intimidation in the Hopi Partitioned Lands in northern Arizona.

The Hopi tribe and the BIA say that over four dozen people have exceeded their permitted limit of 28 sheep per household, which will lead to overgrazing. Even if that were true — and many people doubt the claim — it would hardly justify the excessively intimidating approach to the problem. So far, three people have been arrested and more than 300 sheep impounded. Exorbitant fees are levied for people to recover their sheep, which the elderly Navajo residents depend on for their livelihood.

The residents of Black Mesa believe this most recent assault on their livelihood is being funded and instigated by the federal government through the Department of Interior and the BIA as part of an ongoing effort to maintain access to vast coal reserves on their ancestral homelands.

The 1974 Navajo and Hopi Settlement Act made almost a million acres of shared Navajo-Hopi land in northern Arizona exclusive Hopi territory, called Hopi Partitioned Lands. Black Mesa was crisscrossed and split by barbed wire fencing designating boundaries. The Department of Justice undertook a plan to relocate more than 14,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi.

Couched as an effort to resolve what was called the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, the act was actually the result of an ongoing effort to exploit mineral resources in the area. The Navajo and Hopi had peacefully coexisted in the area for decades until the discovery of coal led to policies that created corporate-backed tribal governments and divided the tribes over resource exploitation.

The relocation conveniently cleared the way for two of the largest coal strip mines in the country. In its 30 years of operation, Peabody Coal’s 103-square-mile Black Mesa mine left a toxic legacy along a 273-mile abandoned coal-slurry pipeline, the source of an estimated 325 million tons of climate pollution discharged into the atmosphere. It ceased operations in 2005.