[log in to unmask] wrote:
> Dear Mike,
>
> There is currently a strike at the McKinley Mine in New Mexico that has been
> going on since the 14th of May: due to shift length and health care options
> that discriminate against Native Americans (as stated by UMWA), inasmuch that
> proposed changes in the health care options would be paid as $100 payment,
> leaving the 'risk' (or 'strain') to the Indian Health Services system. (280
> Navajo's work at the mine). For further info. see the Ind.pbl.: Coal Age,
> Sept.2000 edit., p.14.
>
> Sorry to change the theme slightly, but it shows that 'friction' still
> exists.
> Regards, Bernard
Both the Navajo and the Apache have had to work in mining in this century, for
lack of other employment, but it has never been popular work. Neither group mined
before European settlement of the southwestern USA. My wife, Ana Alonso,
published a book on Apache-Spanish conflict in the settlement of northern Mexico
(Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution and Gender on Mexico's Northern
Frontier, University of Arizona Press, 1995) in which she footnotes 19th century
documents that claim that the Apache had a special hatred for European mining
because it violated their beliefs about the sacred nature of the earth. Certainly
they were relentless in attacking early mining settlements like Clifton and Dos
Cabezas, greatly slowing the development of mining in the southwest until the
final defeat of the Apache in 1886.
Both the Navajo and the Apache avoided mine work as far as possible before WWII,
but dire poverty eventually forced them into mines. The Navajo were the principal
workforce for uranium mining around Grants, New Mexico, in the 1940's and 1950's.
It was not until the mid-1990's that the U.S. Government, their main employer,
acknowledged any responsibility for the resulting epidemic of lung cancer among
them, authorizing lump-sum compensation and payment of medical costs - a
settlement that came too late for many miners, though their dependents got the
money. More recently many Navajo have been employed by Peabody Coal, which began
strip mining the vast coal deposits on Black Mesa in the Navajo reservation.
While the royalty payments have been the major source of income to the tribe it
is not popular work. The Apache have been less involved - they are only a small
proportion of the workforce at the vast Morenci mine and the smaller mines at
Globe, both of which are adjacent to Apache reservations.
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