Caught in a tangled web of US-Indian history

Many here say they don't want to sign the leases, which require rental fees, and would grant Navajo recognition of Hopi control over their land. Some say the climate of harassment is getting worse, as Hopi and US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials confiscate their livestock, post eviction notices on their doors, and threaten to burn their homes.

Zonnie Whitehair, an elderly Dineh woman whose family has herded sheep on this land for generations, says she and her late husband were told if they didn't sign the lease, their livestock and other valuables would be taken.

The Hopi and BIA say not one Navajo family has been relocated against its will. They deny undue harassment, but add they are mandated to enforce the law.

"For any impoundment of livestock that we are bound to make, we give the Navajo formal notice of three weeks," says Fred Chavez of the Hopi BIA. "We are bound by law to do what we are doing."

But to Pauline Whitesinger, who sits at her breakfast table studying a notice tacked to her door, the wording sounds like a threat. The paper reads, in part: "You will be given a notice to vacate if you continue to fail or refuse to relocate."

"There is no word in my language for relocation," Ms. Whitesinger says. "To relocate from my ancestral land is to die."

For all the angst the relocations have caused, a tidy sum of money from the coal leases flows to both tribes. Peabody Coal Co., which runs the mine in the joint use area at Black Mesa, says royalties paid to the two tribes total about $40 million a year - money that pays for roads, schools, police, fire, and sanitation services.

Moreover, 92 percent of the mine's 350 workers are native Americans. The average salary is $55,000 a year, pretty decent wages in this part of the West.

"What is happening to the Dineh people is truly tragic," says Peabody spokeswoman Beth Simpson. "But Peabody Coal is in no way acting together with the Hopi tribe or US government to push the Dineh off the land. The area in question is the subject of Hopi efforts to reclaim control of its lands."

But not all Navajo have shared in the largess from the mines. Those who live near the mine - on both Navajo and Hopi partitioned lands - say they endure air pollution and health problems. In 1996, in a legal dispute between the Dineh and the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining, a federal judge found: "While the Navajo Nation benefits from the proceeds of mining, the unhappy fact is that its members who live near the mine suffer the effects of that same mining."

With their hopes riding high on the pending report from the UN, the Dineh say they will continue to press their case in the international arena. They are trying to schedule additional visits by other UN officials, whose special mandates range from human rights to the environment.

They are backing lawsuits against the mine and two local power plants for exceeding pollution standards. And they are asking people from Las Vegas to Los Angeles - whose electricity comes from the mine-fed power plants - to switch to other power sources.

In tribal officialdom, both sides say they hope to resolve the dispute. "We are still hoping the Hopi and Navajo can come to some harmonious solution over these lands," says Navajo Nation spokeswoman Gerri Harrison.

But to the Dineh who live on the hardscrabble land punctuated by rocky soil and breathtaking vistas, the only harmonious solution they can envision is to live here for generations to come.

"We were placed here by the Creator to be caretakers of the land," says Roberta Blackgoat, founder of the Sovereign Dineh Nation, a group who rejected the Navajo tribal council that signed the coal leases. "If we lose this land, we lose our souls, our reasons for being."

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