The Masayesva Family

Water as Life

Black Mesa, Arizona · By Gary Paul Nabhan

Patuwaqatsi. When Hopi elders say “water is life” it is not a cliché but a fact of life.

Anyone who doubts that the Hopi truly honor water as something that tangibly sustains their lives should visit a farm tucked back in the headwaters of Oraibi Wash, between two fingers of the outspread hand formed by Black Mesa in northeast Arizona. There Victor Masayesva, Sr. still cultivates several rainfed acres as he has done for decades. His blue and white flour corns, sweet corn, beans, squash, watermelons, cassava melons, and fruit trees need constant tending.

Victor still walks out into his fields at dawn, tending to his crops, weeding out their competitors, and chasing away ravens, regardless of the droughts, plagues, political changes, and economic pressures that have forced many American farmers to go belly-up. In fact, the only change in his routine of the last half-century has been a rather recent one. After his fiftieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Victor decided to give up sheepherding in order to devote himself full-time to farming. In the midst of the worst drought in more than a millennium, the fields of neighboring Navajos, Anglos, and Hispanics are stunted and suffering, but Victor’s dozen acres of rainfed fields of blue corn are tasseling out and maturing full ears. His other crops look just as lush.

It is not merely his sustainable cultivation of crops that makes Victor’s example so inspiring, but the follow-up work that he and his wife do to prepare traditional Hopi foods. He has constructed a huge stone-lined pit in which his family seasonally roasts a half-ton or so of sweet corn. He has built a piki house in which he stores seeds and his wife kneels down weekly to make wafer-thin blue piki bread in the traditional manner. His crop seeds are saved from year to year, and backed up in long-term storage at the Native Seeds/SEARCH germplasm facility in Tucson. They are seeds specially adapted to the Colorado Plateau. His blue flour corn has seedlings with extra-deep roots to reach into soil moisture and extra-long hypocotyls that can emerge from planting as deep as twelve inches below the ground surface. His mottled lima beans have root knot nematode resistance. His tepary beans show extraordinary tolerance to drought, heat, salinity, and alkalinity. In short, they are exquisitely adapted to the prevailing conditions of the plateau and able to survive on as little irrigation as any crops in the world.

Water is a big political as well as cultural and agricultural issue for the Masayesva family. Every one of Victor’s children has forged a career that has somehow touched upon water and its role in native language, culture, subsistence, and survival. Two of Victor’s most successful Hopi crops are his sons Virgil, founder of the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals, and Vernon, founder of Black Mesa Trust. The latter is founded on the idea that, as its educational materials state, “Water is not a commodity to be bought, sold or wasted.… Water is sacred, especially in the Black Mesa region where water is key to our survival.”

Vernon Masayesva and other Hopi leaders make these pronouncements as practiced natural resource managers who know how to make the best of the meager moisture hidden in pockets within the stretch of the Painted Desert they call home. Increasingly, however, they repeat these ancient aphorisms cognizant that their land is now drier than it has been within the collective memory of their cultural community. Climatologists agree. At the beginning of the twenty-first century it appears that the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau is suffering from the most prolonged, severe drought in 1,400 years. Not only has rainfall been unusually spotty, but winter snows have melted quickly, wildfires have ravaged upland watersheds, and most freshwater springs have all but dried up.

These indicators of drought are not interpreted by the Hopi merely as physical changes in the landscape, but also as signs of an imbalance between humankind and the natural world. Most Hopi recognize that, even during the worst of other periods of limited rainfall, a trickle of water still dripped from their springs. Today they ebb because of the accelerated pumping of the Navajo Aquifer – the sole source of drinking water to the villages on the Hopi Reservation and to many ranches on the Navajo Reservation. It has also been drawn upon for the past thirty-five years by the Peabody Coal Company, which has pulled as much as 1.3 billion gallons out of the ground annually in order to slurry coal from its Black Mesa mines in a 273-mile pipeline to the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada.

Peabody officially claims that its groundwater pumping has little to do with springs drying up when compared to the impacts of domestic uses and the drought itself, but many scientists and Native American elders think otherwise. Scientists cite the aggravated effects on well and spring drawdown, as well as ground subsidence in the area of Peabody’s wells compared to other drought-stricken sites nearby. And Hopi elders see long-term consequences. As they explain in a statement regarding the groundwater pumping associated with Peabody’s mines, “Water under the ground has much to do with the rain clouds. Everything depends upon the proper balance being maintained…. Drawing huge amounts of water from beneath Black Mesa in connection with strip mining will destroy the harmony…. Should this happen, our lands will shake like a Hopi rattle: land will sink, land will dry up, plants will not grow, our corn will not yield and animals will die….”

Victor’s son Vernon has further explained the critical significance of springs in Hopi cosmology: “Springs are the breathing holes between the Fourth World that we currently live in, and the earlier worlds we emerged from. What happens to springs affects our future as a people.” Unfortunately, Vernon and Victor know all too well what is happening to these breathing holes. Over the last half-century, they have witnessed the drying up of more than three-quarters of all the springs within walking distance of their farm along Oraibi Wash. The water depth in wells has decreased by a hundred feet or more. The rate of their loss, Vernon contends, has accelerated since Peabody began pumping from the Navajo Aquifer around 1970. He refers to this trend with the Hopi term paatski, “the tearing up of water.”

Peabody’s pumping of groundwater from the Navajo Aquifer may soon be curtailed. If that happens, Vernon will look to his father’s example as a guide to what he and other men should concentrate on next. The Masayesvas imagine what they call “a learning plaza” for sustainable use of natural resources – an outdoor school in which traditional Hopi teach their youth and their neighbors their traditions of adaptation to this dry, wind-blown land. If they are ultimately successful, the Masayesvas will have produced the ultimate blessing: a crop of younger people who will know how to take care of the land with the same diligence and acuity of vision that their elders have shown.

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This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.