Peabody Coal removed 341 Navajo and Hopi people from their burial grounds : Indybay

BLACK MESA, Arizona. The Peabody Coal removed 341 Navajo and Hopi people from their burial grounds for coal mining, a tool of genocide, oppression and relocation. Southern Illinois University still holds several million artifacts stolen from Black Mesa by Peabody Coal, some of which are 8,000 years old.

Long way home

Peabody Coal removed 341 Navajo and Hopi ancestors from burial sites.

Brenda Norrell
News with censorship
February 14, 2023

BLACK MESA, Arizona. The Peabody Coal removed 341 Navajo and Hopi people from their burial grounds for coal mining, a tool of genocide, oppression and relocation. Southern Illinois University still holds several million artifacts stolen from Black Mesa by Peabody Coal, some of which are 8,000 years old.

On this long tragic journey home, the ancestors were sent to five different museums – in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts and Nevada, and then finally to the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff – before being reburied in their homeland.

Louise Benalli, a Big Mountain diner, said, “The Peabody Coal Company has no respect for anything or anyone, only their greed matters.” Benally reacted in 2013, after discovering the deletion of ancestors.

Today, Nicole Horseherder, Dine, Big Mountain, Black Mesa and director of To Nizhoni Ani, said that ancestors and artifacts must be returned home.

“The operation of the Peabody Western Coal Company has no end. They seized over 60,000 acres of mining land, pitted families against each other, destroyed shallow aquifers and water sources, unbalanced deep aquifers, and dug up our ancestors. just send them to museums and institutions without our consent.

“It’s a shame that the Navajo people and the Hopi tribe allowed themselves to be held hostage for 50 years, but members of the Dyne community know that artifacts and ancestral remains must be returned to Black Mesa for reburial,” Horseherder told Censored News.

Beginning in 1968, Peabody removed 200 ancestors from their burial sites when she dug up land for coal mining on Black Mesa. According to the NAGPRA notice, more ancestors were removed from burial sites in the Cletla Valley near Kayenta to have coal delivered by rail to a power plant near Page.

It was Prescott College and Southern Illinois University that carried out the “Black Mesa Archaeological Project” – affectionate words that hide the horror of excavating graves, stealing ancestors and their last possessions.

Read the full article at Censored News.

Please check out our series on museums and universities that hold the remains of thousands of indigenous people, which follows the release of a new database on ProPublica.

Photo by Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

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