Haaland’s ‘freeze’: As Interior secretary bans oil and gas on lands around Chaco, naat’áanii frustration bubbles
Navajo Times | Donovan Quintero
WINDOW ROCK
The Navajo Nation celebrated Treaty Day on June 1st. The next day, its treaty was thrown out the window.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on June 2nd presented a public land order to withdraw a 10-mile radius surrounding Chaco Canyon from new mining and oil projects.
Navajo Times | Sharon Chischilly
Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico has vast stone edifices, some towering as high as four or five floors contain hundreds of rooms. The Interior Department will withdraw public lands around Chaco from new oil and gas leasing for 20 years.
In the public land order from the Bureau of Land Management, the withdrawn 10-mile radius of Chaco Canyon is 336,404.42 acres of public land and not subject to land already owned by tribal, private, or state bodies.
Haaland carried out the efforts to protect the land and its surrounding Pueblo communities, according to the BLM’s public land order.
The order went against everything tribal nations have fought for, and to do that the day after the Navajo Nation celebrates Treaty Day was wrong, according to President Buu Nygren and Speaker Crystalyne Curley.
“When I took the oath of Navajo Nation president, you protect the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation,” Nygren said. “You honor the Treaty of 1868, and for the secretary to issue this the day after Treaty Day, I thought it wasn’t cool.
“I was like, ‘What the heck? We just had Treaty Day yesterday (June 1),’” he said.
Read the full story in the June 8 edition of the Navajo Times.
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