<center>Letters to the Editor</center>

Land dispute about jurisdiction, not denial of rights

Editor:

Contrary to the recent opinion expressed by Leonard Benally in your paper on Wednesday, April 25, the Supreme Court’s recent decision rejecting the Manybeads appeal is not about denying Navajo resisters their religious freedom or the right to live on supposed ancestral homeland. Considering that they are trespassing on Hopi land, they are fortunate they were able to remain at Big Mountain for so long. It is about time that the Hopi are guaranteed the right to fully enjoy the use of our own land, instead of having to continually wrangle with trespassers who are reminded time and again that Big Mountain rightfully, legally and spiritually belongs to the Hopi. After all, to the Hopi who have lived in the Four Corners area for over 2,000 years, those 510 years that Leonard Benally mentions in an inaccurate and exaggerated fashion make him and his ancestors relative newcomers to the area.

Nobody at any point in the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute wanted to “humiliate, slander, criticize or deny the resisters their basic fundamental rights.” What all of the Hopi want, both traditional and “progressive,” is to finally regain uncontested jurisdiction over the tiny piece that we have left of our 18 million acre ancestral homeland. The U.S. government’s role is to assist us in doing so. We call on the federal government to help us protect our rights just as any other citizen is entitled to call on the courts and the government in the protection of their rights.

The Navajo-Hopi land dispute was not an issue about breaking the spirit of the Navajo living at Big Mountain or the spirit of the Hopi people in their struggle not to be dispossessed from their lands. It was about our right to use and enjoy our lands. It is our spirit that carried us through difficult times in a land struggle that pitted a small tribe against the largest tribe in the nation, who are relative newcomers on our lands and who over the years came to hold title to a large majority of our ancestral homeland. Spirit is what keeps us alive as individuals and as a nation. What I do hope I live to see break is the resisters’ refusal to accept that by not signing a lease with the Hopi Tribe, they chose to throw away their one chance of remaining on Hopi land.

Sincerely,

Eugene Kaye

Chief of Staff

Office of the Chairman

Hopi Tribe

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