#Hydropower Developer No-Show Leaves #Navajos with More Questions than Answers

Chapter officials table hydropower resolution, ask for more community info sessions as FERC seeks to end a policy blocking permits on Tribal land absent Tribal support

by #HerbYazzie, Coal-Lease Area Resident; #AdrianHerder, #TóNizhóníÁní; #TaylorMcKinnon, #CenterForBiologicalDiversity
via #CensoredNews, Nov. 21, 2025

Excerpts: #KayentaAZ— "On a cloudy, rainy Wednesday afternoon, the Kayenta Chapter held its monthly meeting where a resolution by #NatureAndPeopleFirst was first on the agenda. Impacted community members from the coal-lease area on Black Mesa (#DziłYíjiin) filled the chapter house to voice concern about the resolution. But before discussions could begin, Chapter officials tabled the resolution because the developers didn’t show up.

"Nature and People First (#NPF) are developers who are pushing #PumpedStorageHydropower (#PSH) on the #NavajoNation, particularly in the #BlackMesa region. Pumped storage pumps water uphill during low electricity prices and then releases it back downhill through generators when electricity prices are high, producing electricity and revenue. Pumped storage #hydropower, which requires huge amounts of water, is different than hydrogen, which other developers wanted piped across the Nation."

[...]

"#TóNizhóníÁní (#TNA) e-filed comments objecting to #FERC’s proposed policy reversal along with the #CenterForBiologicalDiversity, #AmericanRivers and more than a dozen #tribes across the US. 'For decades, #CoalMining on #BlackMesa has not only extracted coal but also billions of gallons of #groundwater to support the #mining operation,' wrote #AdrianHerder with Tó Nizhóní Ání. 'Energy projects that propose to use large amounts of water for #EnergyProduction should be vetted diligently.' Water access and reliability is crucial for our communities on Black Mesa and the southwest region of the United States.

"Tribal communities understand the resources and impacts by industry. Any project that proposes to use groundwater when it has been heavily impacted and in a state of recovery should not be considered for continued industry use."

https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2025/11/hydropower-developer-no-show-leaves.html

#WaterIsLife #Diné #Dineteh #Greenwashing #PeabodyCoal #ReaderSupportedNews

Dine' tell Navajo Council 'NO COAL!'

The Monster has returned, and it is even more grotesque than the one before. Dine' remember forced relocation, the loss of water and medicine plants, and the loss of loved ones. Navajos say 'No!; to Trump and Navajo President Nygren's push for coal.

By #BrendaNorrell, @bsnorrell.blogspot.com June 1, 2025

#ForestLake, #NavajoNation -- "Dine' told the #NavajoNationCouncil that the #CoalIndustry has cost them their aquifer water, and their health. Combined with #UraniumMining, they have lost their loved ones to widespread #cancer and #BlackLungDisease killing their people.

"Dine' remembered #ForcedRelocation and the stripping of the #forest by #PeabodyCoal, during a hearing on Friday. The Navajo Council was told to stand up for #FutureGenerations, or step aside.

" 'The Navajo Nation has provided coal to the big cities for decades, while the people of #BlackMesa have nothing to show for it," Dine' from Black Mesa told the Council.

" 'We are supposed to be the Protectors of the Earth.'

"#LouiseBenally [#KleeBenally's aunt] of Big Mountain told the hearing that you can't trust what #Trump is telling you because he'll change whatever he says in the next sentence. Louise said he has no concept of what being a human is.

" 'Keep your prayers and your language, those are the things that really matter for us #IndigenousPeople,' said Louise. She and her family spent their lives resisting forced relocation brought by Peabody Coal's mining on Black Mesa.

" 'Everyone was opposed to another #CoalMining, it's not good for anything, and it is causing #GreenhouseGases to continue to rise,' Louise told Censored News.

" 'Doctor Nygren doesn't know that. He needs a hogan level of education.'

" '#ClimateChange is so, important to every living thing, we need to be finding solutions not making things worse.' "

Read more:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2025/05/live-navajo-hearing-on-revitalizing.html

#EO14241 #Diné #Dineh #Dineteh #NavajoNation #WaterIsLife #DirtyCoal #TrumpSucks #AirIsLife #NoCoalMining
#BigCoal #USPol #NativeAmericanNews #CorporateColonialism #RememberKleeBenally
#BuuNygrenSoldOutHisPeople

Now Showing Online! #BigMountain Film Featured at Tokyo Global Film Festival

By NaBahii Keediniihii, via @bsnorrell.blogspot.com, May 28, 2:33 PM

"Greetings All.

I hope your late Spring is going well.

The ONLY film festival so far that
selected the Big Mountain Film is Tokyo Liff Off Global Film Festival.

Big Mountain feature documentary will end streaming on June 1st which is night time Saturday in the U.S., 5/31.

https://liftoff.network/tokyo-lift-off-film-festival-2025/

Sorry that you have to purchase a Ticket (cost is $12), in order to Vote. GO DOWN TO THE 'FEATURES' Category. Find the title: "BIG MOUNTAIN LEGACY, LAST STORIES OF DÍNEH." More Votes = More Exposure about Big Mountain Legacy!!

Let's hope that other Film Fests judge to select this Big Mountain Legacy film.

What more can I say, this documentary is not about myself. Understand that I am only the MessenJah.

Thank you, again.

Sincerely,

Kat Bahe"

Watch the film trailer
https://vimeo.com/848932137

Big Mountain Legacy Film: SYNOPSIS / Re-enactments / A Dream of a Man
Director: Bahe (Naabaahii) Katenay (Keediniihii), October 2023 (75 minute featured documentary)

Background:

"In the 1970s, Dineh (Navajo) families around Big Mountain were notified that their communities would be uprooted and that they may never see their ancestral homelands ever again. Now 50 years later, less than 20 home sites remain and the once strong #resistance leaders like #PaulineWhitesinger, #HaastinNiizBegay, #JohnKatenay, and #RobertaBlackgoat (#KleeBenally's grandmother) have all passed on.

How should the future remember the legacies of such wise teachers? What gave their community the will to defy U.S.

Congressional Legislations that were nothing but anti-Indian which was forcing them to give up hundreds of years of cultural existence?

The Congress of the United States passed Public Law 93-531 in 1974 and it was signed by the President. It is an Executive Order, a declaration to exterminate, a declaration of war. The justification for this law was to “resolve” a supposed “land-dispute” among the Hopis and Dineh, and the lands were divided.

The 2023 Video Documentary:
The original impetus for resisting the federal mandate was the sacredness of the lands, ancestral ties and natural features which were dwelling places of Deities. The elder interviewees knew the future will not be the same way as they had lived and the same childhood experience. The video put aside much of the effective resistance against the most powerful, #capitalistic country in the world, instead the video presents stories about their ancestors’ teachings. A Dineh ritual existence which was basically daily living, ceremonies and nutrition. An indigenous atmosphere long before the Europeans’ arrival with its brutal conquest. The video narrowly touches on a 400-year history of cultural survival and maintaining identity. And how that history overlaps with so-called modern America.

One grandmother’s story become an intense chapter, and it is about her direct clan ancestry facing near annihilation as one little girl survives which resulted in re-establishing a Clan at Big Mountain.

"This story comes from a massacre site with two mass graves. Then stories about decades of intense state of fear and which lead into the US’s late 1800s war policy of random killing, starvation and captivity. The modern times the 1920s and 30s when these story tellers were born, a different state of fear had re-emerged, and then again at their elderhood in the late 1900s. All the stories in this documentary program are messages for the future because, as these elders have predicted, the lands maybe empty of indigenous culture which once thrived for centuries."

Continue reading at: Sheep Dog Nation Media
https://sheepdognationmediarockswisdom.blogspot.com/

Source:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2025/05/now-showing-online-big-mountain-film.html

#BigMountainResistance #Activism
#Dineh #Dineteh #Hopi #JohnMcCain #PeabodyCoal #BigCoal #PeabodyEnergy #Resistance #WaterIsLife #CorporateColonialism #HumanRights #LandDefenders #CulturalGenocide #EnvironmentalRacism #DirectAction #DefendTheSacred #IndigenousAction

via @bsnorrell.blogspot.com

#NavajoNation Targeted Again for Sacrifice Zone: '#Energy Companies Preying on the People'

#Diné ask: Why is the Navajo Nation allowing energy companies to prey on communities and individuals?

By Brenda Norrell, Censored News, May 23, 2024

"Dine' on the Navajo Nation are now targeted with a push to revitalize dirty coal energy, and a hydropower project that would pump precious water from their aquifer. Dine' question why the Navajo Nation government is allowing energy companies to prey on the communities and individuals.

"#LouiseBenally of #BigMountain [#KleeBenally's aunt] said the bottom line is greed. 'They want to eat up everything but, don't know that even their lives depend on it too. Poisoning the natural cycle will come back and destroy them too.'

"The new stampede of parasitic energy companies to the Navajo Nation comes at the same time that #radioactive #uranium trucks, covered only with tarps, are traveling across the Navajo Nation, from the #GrandCanyon uranium mine to the mill in the #WhiteMesaUte community in Utah.

"At the same time, more than 500 #UraniumMines, and scattered radioactive debris, remain on the Navajo Nation, and was never cleaned up by the U.S. government. Dirty coal mines and power plants left the legacy of death and #ForcedRelocation.

Navajo Council Plans Meeting on Revitalizing Coal Industry

"Citing #Trump's push for new #CoalMining, the #NavajoNationCouncil plans to hold a public hearing on
revitalizing the coal industry.

"The Navajo Nation Council announced the public hearing, stating that on April 8 President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order entitled, 'Reinvigorating America’s #BeautifulCleanCoal Industry
and Amending Executive Order 14241' aimed at reversing past federal policies, to boost the coal industry and to strengthen the country’s national energy security, according to the White House.

"The public hearing is scheduled in Forest Lake Chapter on Friday, May 30. Louise Benally and her family spent their lives battling #PeabodyCoal and resisting forced relocation at Big Mountain on #BlackMesa. She said what Trump is doing is another chapter in the assault on the land and people.

" 'Pl 93-531 is a law created by #BarryGoldwater to target our rights to water and land base to be taken away. He developed that law so, with what Trump is trying to do is no different.'

" 'They want to eat up everything but, don't know that even their lives depend on it too. Poisoning the natural cycle will come back and destroy them too.'

" 'The American political system is not our government as traditional people which is where all our modern day problems come from in the form of an endless greed to keep eating up the earth and the natural resources.'

"Louise questioned Navajo Nation President #BuuNygren's support of Trump and coal mining in Washington, and Nygren's agreement for uranium trucks to cross the Navajo Nation. 'The Navajo Nation government is at a crossroads. Buu has been taken by Trump, and the people he is supposed to be responsible for are in question.'

" 'He has been taken into the bag of greed -- uranium and coal yet, there is no water. We want accountability.' "

Read more:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2025/05/navajo-nation-targeted-again-for.html

#Diné #Dineh #BuuNygrenSoldOutHisPeople
#WaterIsLife #LandIsLife #EnergyFuels
#Dineteh #NukingTheNavajo
#Havasupai #UraniumMines
#EnvironmentalRacism #WhiteMesaMill #NukingTheNavajo #NukingTheUte #Ute #Paiute #Hopi #BidiiRoots #DineCARE #Havasupai #PinyonPlainUraniumMine #AirIsLife #UraniumMine #UraniumTransport #RadioactiveDust #RememberKleeBenally #BigCoal #DishonoringTheMemoryOfKleeBenally
#HaulNo #NoMiningWithoutConsent

HT @bsnorrell.blogspot.com

Deadly Coal Mining is a Photo-Op for Navajo President and the Media is Part of the Game

By #BrendaNorrell, Censored News, April 12, 2025

"The media covered up the true history of #coal mining on #BlackMesa. Now, #Navajo President #BuuNygren is pushing and celebrating #CoalMining, and was in D.C. for photo ops doing it.

"Peabody Coal didn't just dig up coal -- they dug up Dine' from their burial places, and Dine' were put in museums. Dine' graves were dug up for 16 years, and cultural items were looted by a team from Prescott College, and millions of items were taken to Southern Illinois University. The Navajo government granted #Peabody Coal its lease and knew about the robbing of graves of Dine' at the time.

"It is a dark chapter in history, and the Navajo President now glosses over this cruel and toxic history with his PR spin and photos in self-promotion in DC."

Read more:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2025/04/deadly-coal-mining-is-photo-op-for.html

#CensoredNews #ReaderSupportedNews #Diné #FourCornersPowerPlant #RobertaBlackgoat #DinéResistance #NavajoResistance #FourCorners #BlackMesa #BigMountainResistance #Resistance #FarmingtonNM #BloomfieldNM #Cancer #ToxicDumping #NavajoEnergyTransitionCompany #BuuNygrenSoldOutHisPeople #PeabodyCoal

[Thread] So grateful to the @internetarchive ! They have a web capture of my #HopiProphecy article that I wrote in 1999 (but without the graphics). In the article, the blame is firmly aimed at #PeabodyCoal, #UraniumMining, #BigOilAndGas and #TwoHeartedPeople (selfish people) for destruction of #MotherEarth and the bringing about of #PurificationDay. I will be posting excerpts from the article (with the missing graphics), along with commentary, in this thread.

The archived version can be found at the link below:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050130085845/http://www.whatmagazine.org/bigmountain/bigmtn5.html

A coal power plant demolition serves as a poignant historical moment for the Navajo

By Adam Burke
October 5, 2024

“At one point #SanJuanGeneratingStation and the #FourCornersPowerPlant, according to Los Alamos National Lab, were the largest source of point-source #pollution in the United States,' [Mike Eisenfeld of #SanJuanCitizensAlliance] said.

"But on this day, the San Juan Generating Station sat dark and inert — it shut down two years ago. As we flew over the Four Corners Power Plant, puffs of white smoke told us it was still producing energy.

'"This is the last #CoalPlant up here,” Eisenfeld said of Four Corners. 'All the others have been retired. Gone.'

"When Eisenfeld first moved to the area nearly 20 years ago, #CoalMining and coal power were on the rise in northwest New Mexico. Today, several large-scale #SolarProjects are in the works."

[...]

"[Elouise] Brown became an anti-coal activist in December 2006, after she learned that former Navajo Nation President #JoeShirley was backing a new coal-fired power plant in the region. The so-called Desert Rock project would have put a third coal plant within a few miles of the other two.

[...]

"'In our #Navajo way of life, you don’t mess with #MotherEarth. You don’t mess with the resources inside,' she said.

Read more:
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/05/nx-s1-5076973/coal-power-plant-demolition-navajo-new-mexico

#Dineh #Diné #Dinetah #PeabodyCoal #Solar #RenewablesNow #CoalPower #Pollution #WaterIsLife