'Roadblocks on the road to fairness and justice'
By Marley Shebala
Navajo Times
WINDOW ROCK, Sept. 1, 2011
Donald Dodge and Peterson Zah were pivotal players in the foundation for the suit, which accused Peabody of violating the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and said it had cost the tribe $600 million in lost revenues.
The Navajo Nation vs. Peabody Holding Co., et. al., stemmed from the company's back door dealings with federal trustees for the tribe, represented by then Interior Secretary Donald Hodel, as the tribe sought to increase the royalty rate on its coal in the mid-1980s.
According to federal, tribal and corporate documents in the case, Peabody went around tribal officials and secretly lobbied Hodel to block his own agency's plan to approve a 10-fold increase in the royalty rate on Black Mesa coal.
Donald Dodge, the BIA's Navajo Area director at the time, was poised to impose the increase on Peabody, which had been paying just 37 cents a ton on coal at its two mines on Black Mesa.
In an exclusive interview with the Navajo Times last week, Dodge recalled that he tried working with Peabody as early as 1979, after Congress increased the minimum royalty rate on federal coal to 12.5 percent and Interior decreed that the same would apply to Indian coal.
Dodge said he received no support from the administration of then Chairman Peter MacDonald Sr., and could not get Peabody to budge.
However, Dodge said that as soon as Peterson Zah became chairman in 1983, the two agreed that the Navajo people deserved more for their coal.
Dodge sought the opinion of experts in the BIA on what would be a fair rate, and also looked at research from the U.S. Bureau of Mines, which said non-Indian owners of coal reserves were getting as much as 25 percent in royalties.
Based on the research, Dodge recommended to the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs that the rate on the Black Mesa leases should be 20 percent. The recommendation had Zah's full support.
Peabody immediately appealed Dodge's 20 percent decision and launched a full-scale campaign to get the tribe to accept the federal minimum of 12.5 percent.
"We held our ground at that figure to try and have the federal government change that rate (of 12.5 percent)," Dodge recalled. "This is very important. That old rate is still there."
"We used a lot of resources, manpower and money in seeking the truth about the role of Peabody 's hired guns to strangle our efforts," Zah added. "In retrospect, it seems like there were roadblocks on the road to fairness and justice. It was frustrating - trying to correct a wrong in the dark, a wrong committed by one of the highest officers of the federal government and a corporation against an innocent peaceful group of Navajo people."
"It was disheartening to see how the secretary of the Interior, as our trustee, allowed himself to be persuaded by greed and corruption and work against the Navajo Nation," he said.
"But," Zah noted, "there is a lesson to be learned from all of this and that is that Indian leadership should always be beware of the federal government and their role in business dealings with huge corporations.
"The other lesson to be learned in this whole thing is if you really believe in certain things you have to live it," he said. "You can't just say what you believe and not live it and carry out those beliefs.
"It so happened that Dodge and I believed in the same thing and we made a commitment that we would see this thing through," he said.
"Another lesson," Zah said, "is you have to be honest and you have to have some degree of fair play and belief in fair play. If you hang onto that belief a reward usually happens and that is the settlement."
Asked what he thinks of the settlement approved by the current Navajo Nation leadership, Zah glanced at Dodge before saying, "We felt the settlement could have been more but we didn't know the facts when the tribe went into negotiations so we can't second guess and to some degree discredit what leaders did.
"We don't know if the negotiations included an admission of guilt from Peabody - 'Yeah, we were guilty and this is money for what we did.' We don't know because no one wants to talk," Zah said, alluding to the Shelly administration's refusal to release details of the settlement.
But Zah said what he and Dodge know is that the Navajo Nation and the BIA stood together against "a giant corporation and we never moved off what we were exercising, which is sovereignty of the Navajo Nation's right to renegotiate leases."
Dodge added, "We went through real stringent situations with the federal government. When you're in that situation, it's not real comfortable to deal with it."
But he said they both shared the same priority and that was working for the Navajo people.
The Navajo people were "very, very deserving" of a 20 percent coal royalty rate, which should be invested in the education of every single one of their children, Dodge said.
comments powered by Disqus