Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 11:46:13 -0700
From: Diane <dmw98@jps.net>
To: redorman@theofficenet.com
Subject: Paul Bloom's Sundance Report

I'm using a friend's email to send this in Word document and text document
format. Perhaps you'll post it on your web site. Thanks, Paul

"Never in this country will you go to church and see policemen outside
taking your license numbers and your pictures." Joe Chasing Horse, Sundance
leader

Sunday, July 18, saw the end of a four year cycle of Sundances at Camp
Ana Mae on Big Mountain, Arizona, one of two Sundance ceremonies brought
by the Lakota people to the Dineh (Navajo) threatened with imminent removal
from their lands by the U.S. govern- ment.

Named for murdered American Indian Movement activist Ana Mae Aquash, Camp
Ana Mae designates an area of high desert land inhabited for centuries
by people who sud-denly found themselves on the wrong side of a line drawn
in 1974 by an ignorant Congress heavily lobbied by Peabody Coal Co.

Besides its religious significance, this year's Sundance inadvertently
became a massive demonstration of peaceful civil disobedience by all in
attendance, residents, dancers, and supporters, who defied threats of fines
and prosecution by the U.S.-created Hopi Tribal council in order to attend.

As many as six cars of Hopi Rangers, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, and
sheriffs of Navajo County maintained an around the clock vigil at the entrance
of the camp. FBI and ATF agents reportedly visited the site as well. At
the beginning of the 25 mile dirt road from Highway 264 another crew of
Hopi Rangers stopped, questioned, I.D.-checked, and threatened people with
fines and jail if they went to the Sundance. Some local residents were
flatly turned away from the road. No one knows how many stayed home to
avoid the roadblocks, or how many were arrested on warrant checks or for
other reasons. Notices designating Camp Ana Mae as a closed area were posted
along the road.

In addition, "technicians" or "monitors" from the Hopi Land Team strutted
aggressively around the Sundance area, ostensibly to ensure safe fires
and sanitary conditions, harassing people in the kitchen and at the camps
in arrogant displays of authority. These are the same thugs who accompany
Hopi Rangers and heavily armed BIA police on recurrent raids to confiscate
livestock of resisters.

Synchronized with these efforts was a campaign of misinformation, including
false news reports planted on local radio of shots fired on the land, and
radio spots on at least one commercial Flagstaff station warning people
not to attend the Sundance because of threats of violence.

With the Sundance purification rites set to begin on 14 July, Hopi Tribal
Council Chairman Wayne Taylor, Jr. issued an executive order dated 2 July
declaring a drought emergency and extreme fire danger, and forbidding open
fires within residential areas, and overnight camping on "undeveloped (sic)
areas outside of Village areas."

On 9 July the chairman issued another executive order declaring a Hantavirus
alert, proscribing camping in "underdeveloped (sic) areas" and asserting
that no entrance would be permitted into "restricted (closed) areas."

In a letter the same day to Ruth Benally, sponsor and host of the Sundance
and longtime resister, Chairman Taylor, Jr. asserted that "the entire Hopi
Reservation is closed to all access, except as authorized by the Hopi Tribe.
All individuals entering and remaining on Hopi land without authorization
of the Hopi Tribe will be subject to exclusion, assessment of penalties,
and prosecution under the laws of the Tribe."

The Sundance is a religious ceremony of sacrifice and purification in which
dancers abstain from food and water for four days, dancing from sunrise
to sunset while drum-mers sing ancient prayers and families and friends
watch (and dance) from the arbor. It's an experience of indescribable
power and emotion. This was the twelfth year of the Sundance at the Joe
and Alice Benally Memorial Sundance Grounds at Camp Ana Mae, the end of
the third four year cycle.

On 14 July the Navajo Hopi Observer, an independent paper, published a
front page article by the Hopi Tribe Land Team depicting the Sundance ceremony
as a "well-orchestrated effort to bait the Hopi Tribe into a hostile media
situation."

Nevertheless, more than 500 people from dozens of Indian nations and tribes
plus non-Indian supporters from all over the world, including Japan, Belgium,
Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and Mexico, voted with their feet to refute
the Hopi Tribal Council's desperate efforts to squash the Sundance ceremony.
This was a triumphant rebuke to an orchestrated campaign of lies and intimidation.

The original Hopi Tribal Council had been imposed by manipulation and deceit
on the Hopi (the name means "peaceful") under the 1934 Indian Reorganization
Act. By 1943 it had dissolved for lack of support. It was revived in the
early 1950's by John Boyden, Peabody company lawyer and bishop of the Mormon
Church. Over the protests of traditional Hopi, with the help of wealthy
Mormon Hopi cattle ranchers, he convened a more durable tribal government.

The Indian Placement Service represents one of the Mormon Church's most
successful and controversial programs. From 1949 to 1976 over 20,000 Indian
children were taken into white families to live during the school year,
going back to their reservation homes during the summer, and often returning
to the same "foster" families each year. From its inception, the Hopi Tribal
Council has been dominated by Mormons and alumni of this program.

The Mormon Church, extremely secretive about its assets, holds enormous
investments in public utilities, including Arizona Public Service, and
is reported to have been a majority shareholder in Peabody Coal Co.

Traditional Hopi still voice their opposition to the powerful Tribal Council,
which has been maneuvering to assert its possession of the Hopi Partitioned
Lands since the 1986 deadline originally mandated by Public Law 93-531
under the false premise of resolving a land dispute. They take strong exception
to the assault on their Navajo neighbors with whom they have shared land,
traded, intermarried, and disputed for centuries, as neighboring peoples
have done since the dawn of human society.

On the second day of the Sundance, at the same time as egregious violations
of basic respect and religious freedom were being perpetrated by the Hopi
Land Team and various police agencies, five members of the Hopi Tribal
Council travelled to the Sundance arbor to share the sacred pipe with several
of the dancers in full view of everyone in the arbor.

Does this augur a change of heart? Are lines being drawn between those
in the Hopi tribal government who perceive the humanitarian disaster entailed
by the policy of relocation, and those idealogues who are devoting themselves
to waging low intensity warfare in a campaign of ethnic cleansing?

The engine of law doesn't pause to consider these and other questions.
As they did at Waco, at meetings in Washington D.C. and closer to the land,
law enforcement agencies are preparing plans for removal of the remaining
resisters, now scheduled for February 2000.