Alicia Littletree with Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney at Oakland courthouse rally, Nov. 1996.

Margaret Lou-Vike, Solomon Islands activist, The Nature Conservancy

Filling Gunbarrels with Flowers -> Protesters who helped stop the Vietnam War – in Washington, D.C., 1967

Pauline Whitesinger, defender of traditional Dineh (Navajo) lands and culture at Big Mountain against the Peabody Coal Company

The Mountains Were Painted.
— Pauline Whitesinger

I used to go up there, to the mine area, when the pinions would come in. I went to gather them.

Navajos lived there. At that time there was no mine, no word of it. It was a beautiful place. Those people were living beautifully too.
There were incredible mountains. They stood along each other like a picture. Some seemed to wear hats.

Probably the very way that they were set when the mother earth was designed and decorated. Now when I go there that area merely resembles the surroundings right here at my present home. Those mountains are gone.

There’s just these holes there. Way way down, who knows how far down, to the bottom of the earth perhaps. Its not a pretty picture. And rises up some god awful thing that looks like smoke. In pillars. Its disturbing.

This is the thing here, those picturesque mountains are gone. In Window rock the same situation exists, there were a group of remarkable rocks, again with hats. Those rocks have been scratched out. They were replaced with a dull grey hill.

When you observe this process, the erasure of the careful designs on the land, the artwork of the Holy People, it disturbs you.
The moral is that the mother earth has been manipulated at our expense.

There’s springs there. And they come up with some heat to them. It never snows there. No snow, and then there are green grasses that rise up. Special places.

There’s some spots like that over here, by “Coalmine”, well, it was like that, now it is all being dug out.
So my grandmother would say, this that we are sitting on, it is a woman mountain laying up here. She said the coal is the liver of this woman.
Over towards Window Rock there is a man laying there. Further on he holds his head up.
The northern mountain is her head. She is a woman lying across.
That’s why you don’t burn coal. If you have to do something with it, there’s a certain sacrificial offering that you do. You offer hard goods, jewels, and you just take so much up out. That’s how it was done, as far as the coal.

So that’s whats causing the womens’ hearts to hurt, the men even. That’s it. That’s what’s doing it to us I think. This liver. This is the price we pay for people to have work.

In Tuba city, they sell it in sacks this big. Ten bucks. I just look at it. I think to my self, people didn’t used to carry this stuff around for free, without having made a proper offering for it. There they go, hauling it along. Over this way it’s the same story, over toward window rock, they stash it in with loads of firewood and sell it for cash.

So the male mountain lays this way. Over here, there is a woman. They have grandchildren. The place called ‘white rocks stretch down’ is the girl grandchild. This way too a place called ‘white rock’ is a boy grandchild. He sleeps there with his grandpa, they say. That’s the way the old women used to talk about it.

That’s why you do the offerings, white corn and yellow corn, in the light of dawn, in prayer.
In the evening too, offerings.
That’s how its been done.

Just two or three days ago, I started to incorporate these concerns into my prayers and daily corn pollen offering:
“This is a matter of great importance.”
“Whatever happens, let these illustrious mountains not be overturned.”

They are causing a hard time on this mother of ours, this mountain woman. That’s what I think. She is lying there sacred. What else?
Bodies, surgeries. People are off to the hospital to be cut up and here the mountain separates from itself.
Over this way, a stretch across of land separated where it once was joined.
And now it has grown back together.

I never have been there, just my mother saw it. She was coming up this way and it unveiled itself to her.
My grandchildren have been to this place and they tell me it has recently grown back together. It has obviously grown back together and even appears to have a scar of sorts where the incision was made.

That must be why it happened in the first place, so that what has happened now could be.

(Translated by Owen Johnson)

Here is a January 2013 Statement from Big Mountain Elder Matriarch Resister, Pauline Whitesinger. If you are a Dineh reader and would like the Dineh version, please email us and we will gladly send it to you:
from http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=bb9ecfdb5d711f67f04ee3551&id=b692b744e3&e=7d53a4aff4
and http://supportblackmesa.org/