The Sacred and the Stonewashed - San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff, Arizona - Brief Article

Sierra, Nov, 2000 by Marilyn Berlin Snell

Rescuing a holy mountain from high-fashion jeans

Next to the front door of Sammy M. James's Flagstaff mobile home hangs a poster of the nearby San Francisco Peaks. The Spanish name for the Peaks has been crossed out with black ink and replaced with the Navajo Doko'oo'sliid, "the place where snow never melts." The tallest point in Arizona, this place marks the westernmost boundary of the traditional Navajo homeland--an immense stretch of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado where the ceremonies of Navajo medicine men have the power to heal. It is of no importance to the Navajo that the Peaks fall outside the treatied confines of their reservation, or that most of the Peaks' area is now public land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The Peaks are sacred--and not just to the People (or Dineh, as the Navajo call themselves), or to the Hopi, whose spirits live part of the year in this heaven on Earth, but to 11 other Southwest tribes as well.

James is a member of the Navajo Black Sheep Clan. His friend Bucky Preston is Hopi and belongs to the Bamboo, Eagle, and Sun Clans. Fierce land disputes between their tribes far predate the 19th-century creation of the Navajo and Hopi reservations, and continue to this day. Though James and Preston come from tribes that don't much like each other, they united in their love of the Peaks and have been working with other Native American activists and the Sierra Club's Save the Peaks Campaign to protect shared and holy ground.

Their collaboration began two years ago when Tufflite Incorporated petitioned the Forest Service for an additional 30 acres to tack onto its 90-acre pumice-mining operation along the eastern flank of the Peaks. Under the 1872 Mining Law, companies like Tufflite can stake claims on federal land to mine "locatable minerals," judged to be of an "uncommon variety with unique properties and special, distinct value." The main use of pumice is for stone-washing denim.

Native American activists and environmental groups had been fighting separate battles against the White Vulcan Mine since the 1980s, when the global craze for the lived-in look made pumice a hot commodity for the fashion industry. During that decade the mine expanded from 5 to 90 acres. In the process, miners dug up and exposed archaeological sites, disturbed threatened species such as the Mexican spotted owl and, according to the Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, Zuni, and White Mountain Apache, desecrated an altar. The request for an additional 30 acres was the last straw, and coalition-building began.

Next to James's poster is a handmade bag with two pouches, one side containing white corn pollen for morning prayers--sung outside in the driveway between double-wides--the other filled with yellow corn pollen for evening prayers. On the wall next to the corn pollen bag hangs a picture of Jesus.

"Both ways work," James responds when asked about the corn pollen/Christ combination. "Growing up I was converted to Catholicism, but right now I'm what I call a young traditionalist." The 47-year-old returned to his roots in 1986, when he, his wife, Ella, and children, Eric and Shannon, left Phoenix. "I got my curiosity back about my culture when I moved closer to the Navajo Nation and the elders," he says. "I'd spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was young, every summer living in their hogan and tending sheep. They talked to me about the culture but I wasn't paying attention. When I moved to Flagstaff, I was losing the language and I didn't know how to sing or pray. I was lost."

James opens his "instrument box," which contains eagle feathers with Navajo beadwork stitched by Ella. He removes a pouch containing various plants and herbs, all sacred, all gathered from the Peaks. "Only the medicine men know what these plants are and how they're used. They're very scarce." He lets me smell the mixture. I close my eyes, inhale, and am filled with rain--or at least the memory of rain, from my Arizona childhood. Most summers growing up I was dragged all over "Indian country," as my parents called it, in the family Travelall with my sisters and our slobbering dog. It happened when I was a kid and it happens still: When I'm in this country, with its peculiar geology, scents, loud weather, and slanting afternoon light, I become acutely aware of not only my presence, of my body and its physical relationship to the ground, but my presence-within-a-greater-presence: an immanence.

"Everything has a special purpose," James says as he brushes a hand over the contents of his box. When asked if he studied with a medicine man to learn how to use the instrument box, he pauses. "We don't study. We attend ceremonies, listen, and learn." This is only the first of many cultural clarifications. Another comes when I ask if he considers himself an environmentalist. "I just heard that word two years ago for the first time. It's a foreign word and I'm not foreign." He laughs and then adds, "I'm not an environmentalist. I'm with nature." The distinction between being with nature and being an environmentalist is not merely a semantic one. When it comes to the Peaks, for example, James does not see the campaign as a political or even an environmental fight, but as a work of reverence to save something so woven into the fabric of his life that he doesn't separate the land from the prayer from the plants from the ultimate health and welfare of his people.