Word: hydros
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...rights, some of this money belongs to the Federal Government, which supplies the water that produces the hydro power. To Phil Doe, a former Reclamation Bureau official, the arrangement symbolizes much of what has gone wrong with federal policy on water rights. "This is an absurdity on top of an absurdity," says Doe. "First they get water at a bargain, then they use it to generate power, which they sell at market rates. That money belongs to us, the taxpayers...
Challenging the stereotype of Indians as uncompromising conservationists, more than 200 individual Navajo landowners have quietly leased 1,440 acres to Hydro Resources Inc., an Albuquerque company that plans to mine uranium ore from a local aquifer (a layer of water-bearing rock). The company has promised a lucrative payoff: more than $40,000 for each property it leases, plus royalties as high as 25% on the sale of the uranium ore. For some Navajo landowners that could translate into more than $1 million a year--a nice paycheck anywhere, but especially in a region with double-digit unemployment...
...decorated with stripped-down car frames and visiting neighbors honk their horn rather than ring the doorbell. Less than 10% of the local Navajo stand to benefit directly from the mining leases, and many of the rest, conditioned by a history of false promises from outsiders, aren't buying Hydro Resources' assurances that their water will remain unpolluted by the mine...
...Hydro Resources contends that its extraction process poses no threat to the groundwater. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission concurs, and the company has been granted a license to mine. "If there's a resource there, why shouldn't our people be able to enjoy the proceeds of it?" argues Ruth Bridgeman, 79, who leased her property to Hydro Resources several years ago. Leonard Arviso, a Navajo who acts as the company's liaison to his tribe, talks not of land or money but of children who are forced to leave the community for lack of jobs. "We can respect Mother...
...issue has split not only the tribe but also individual families. For example, Capitan, the grass-roots opposition leader, is the nephew of Arviso, the employee of Hydro Resources. And there is a generational clash as well: some younger Navajo accuse the landowners, many of them tribal elders, of selling out. "The older people always say human life is more important than material things," says LaJuanna Daye, a health-care worker, "but here they have the chance to prove it, and all we see is greed...