Column: Navajo activist returns to fight power plant

Opinion

Thursday, May 14, 2009

"If you drive through here on the road that connects Gallup and Shiprock, you'll see stretches of tawny dirt and a whole lot of empty.

It's the place a Houston-based power company decided would be perfect for a huge, twin-tower 1,500-megawatt coal-fired power plant. The company called it Desert Rock, a name that embodies desolation.

But if you're from here, you don't see empty. You see the place where your grandparents made their sheep camp and where you ran around as a boy and where all your relatives still live. You don't call it Desert Rock. You call it by a name that translates from Navajo as "water for the rams."

"It's not this desolate, uninhabited area. We've been out here for years," Dailan Long says.

"It was invasion of a territory that had meaning for our people but was meaningless for other people," Long says of the choice of Burnham for the project, which would take millions of tons of locally mined coal and yield $50 million in royalty payments and taxes to the Navajo Nation government, which is a partner. "

Get the Story:
Navajo Returns Home To Fight Power Plant (The Albuquerque Journal 5/14)