50 Years Ago: Navajo officials find out about secret clause in Peabody contract

It’s an issue that would dominate headlines in area newspapers for the next 30 years – opposition to coal-mining activities underway by the Peabody Coal Company in their mining of coal in the Kayenta and Black Mesa areas of the reservation.

Word was just coming out in June 1965 that Peabody would be using a lot of the Navajo Tribe’s water to transport its coal from the Black Mesa mine by a slurry pipeline to the Clark County-David Dam area near Las Vegas, Nev. And how much water were they talking about – some 30,000 acre feet.

This is something that neither officials for the federal government nor Peabody happened to mentioned to the Navajo people. It also seems something they forgot to mention to officials of the Navajo Tribe.

Maurice McCabe, the tribe’s director of administration, would learn of this for the first time in June 1965 and when he did, he immediately asked tribal attorneys to give him a copy of the lease between the tribe and Peabody Coal to see if this was a violation of their agreement.

After spending several weeks reading the document and seeking legal opinions from tribal attorneys, he would release a statement condemning the coal company and this would be the first time the Navajo Times would print anything that was negative abput Peabody or coal mining on the reservation. But it wouldn’t be the last.

“This is in direct violation of an agreement signed by the coal company and the Navajo Tribe in 1963,” said McCabe, who added that back in 1963 Peabody Col “agreed to build a railroad which would be used to transport the coal out of the Black Mesa area.”

“At no time was a slurry process mentioned,” he said.

However, in statements released by U.S, Secretary of the Interior, Steward Udall, he pointed to agreements signed between Peabody Coal and the California Edison Company, which said that Navajo and Hopi col mined in the Black Mesa area of Arizona “will be transported by slurry pipeline or rail to the plant site in Nevada.”

McCabe was livid when he learned of Udall’s support of the Peabody slurry line.

“It would be my considered opinion,” McCabe would later say, “That any modification of the basic permit which substituted a slurry for the standard gauge railroad would be an outrage and a complete and utter disregard of the best interest of the Navajo Indian tribe.”

What really upset him was the fact that the Interior Department approved this without going to the Navajo Tribal Council. McCabe pointed out that the laws of Arizona and New Mexico specifically prohibited any assignment of Navajo water rights without getting the approval of the Navajo council.

Just how bad was this?

McCabe pointed out that the Navajo Tribe had only been allocated 50,000 acre-feet of water from the San Juan River and now tribal officials learned that 35,000 of this would be used for the slurry line.

Udall and officials for the coal company would point out that the Navajo Tribe was receiving millions of dollars annual because of this agreement and that should make up for any loss of water tot he tribe.

But even this would be knocked down when Peter MacDonald became the tribe’s chairman in 1971.

He went on a campaign that lasted several years to get Peabody to pay the tribe a fair amount for royalties for its coal mining operations. MacDonald would point out that the tribe was only receiving 20 cents a ton royalty from the company, about the cost of a can of Coke.

MacDonald and tribal attorneys would eventually get a new agreement from Peabody that would sharply increase the tribe’s share from that can of Coke to 12.5 percent of the value of the coal at the mine site.

But the Peabody agreement would spark a major protest from Navajo grassroots members that would go on for decades, going from one generation of Navajos to another.

In another story that is beginning to get a lot of play in the Times are plans being made for the 19th annual tribal fair which is set o be held that September in Window Rock.

The theme of the fair is “The Long Walk to Progress” and this has generated some criticism for the tribe trying to use a phrase associated with a period of tragedy in Navajo history with an attempt to show that the tribe is gong away from its traditional ways and becoming more a part of the Anglo world.

Officials speaking for Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai said people have misinterpreted the phase, adding that the tribe is still promoting traditional values.

This fight between traditional versus “progress” i just coming to the forefront as the tribal government continues efforts to convert the tribal economy from farming and ranching to one where most of the adult Navajos will have nine to five jobs.

Almost all of the members of the Navajo Tribal Council throughout the 60s received most of their income from ranching or sheep and the money from being on the council, which was just a couple of thousand dollars a year, was considered to be a sideline.

Even in the 1970s and 1980s, most of the council would continue to have a background in ranching and it wouldn’t be until the late 1990s, that a shift could be seen with elected officials .having more education and coming from the job-side.

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