![]() ![]() The Department of Justice undertook a plan to relocate more than 14,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi. Black Mesa was crisscrossed and split by barbed wire fencing designating boundaries. In 1974, the Navajo and Hopi Settlement Act made almost a million acres of shared Navajo-Hopi land in northern Arizona exclusive Hopi territory, called Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL). In 1964, a conglomeration of companies known as Peabody Western Coal Company (now Peabody Energy), first signed a deal with the Navajo Nation and then the Hopi Tribe, granting the company mineral rights to strip mine the high desert plateau of Black Mesa seated within the 1882 boundaries of the Navajo and Hopi reservations. There are an estimated twenty to fifty billion tons of high grade, low sulfur coal underlying the Colorado Plateau in a stretch of Arizona desert known as Black Mesa.Since the 1970s, the Navajo (Diné) community of Black Mesa has faced a tremendous battle against particularly insidious types of colonialism that continue to endure into the present day. ![]()
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