Navajo Activists Get the Cold Shoulder From Sithe

A delegation of indigenous peoples from all over the world rallied in solidarity with the Dooda Desert Rock Committee outside the offices of Sithe Global Power in New York City on April 25 to make sure Sithe understands the impacts of its proposed Desert Rock coal-fired power plant on the local Navajo people at the proposed site on the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico.

Elouise  Brown (above left), president of the Dooda Desert Rock Committee, and Enei Begaye, executive director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, attempted to deliver a letter to Sithe telling them that local people do not support the project. Sithe declined to meet with them. Brown and Begaye were in New York for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

News reporters accompanied the two into the building where Sithe Global's offices are located, but were ordered to "leave immediately." Receptionists called Sithe several times and left messages, but the company did not come down or call back, and the receptionists would not deliver the letter, directing Brown and Begaye to a messenger center at a different location.

"I don't understand how the proponents of the Desert Rock Energy Project from our Navajo Nation can do business with a corporation that will not speak to members of the Nation who would be directly impacted by the project," Brown says. "At least we delivered the letter and they have an idea there are many Navajo people opposed to this project and only a couple who want it."

The Navajo Nation's private energy development firm, Dine' Power Authority, has given Desert Rock the thumbs-up, but most tribal members oppose the project and have been fighting it from the get-go. When the Bureau of Indian Affairs recommended that Desert Rock be built, Navajo grassroots activists called it "a BIA-issued death certificate for the Navajo people."

Photographs courtesy of the Indigenous Environmental Network.