More on ‘Navajo vs. Ski Area’

The New York Times reports today about making snow for a ski area on a sacred mountain in the US Southwest. The Denver Post carried the story last week and I blogged about it briefly here.

The story does a good job of explaining the legal conflict which pits the operators of the Arizona Snowbowl against Navajo leaders — and recreation against religion.

What caught my eye were the analogies with which the Navajo and their lawyers explained the desecration of the mountain by making snow there with treated wastewater. According to the article:

A lawyer for one of the tribes likened it to “pouring dirty water on the Vatican.”

and

“The mountain is like a power plant,” Frank Mapatis, a spiritual leader in the Hualapai tribe, said in court. “You plant a feather there, and it is like plugging into a power plant.”

I have noticed that British Columbia native groups also find themselves speaking in terms that they believe their legal adversaries will understand in order to get their messages across — to equate the desecration a mountain with the vandalism of a church makes these disputes more accessible to larger and non-native audiences. It does, however, misrepresent the full extent of the conflict that ultimately extends across philosophical and epistemological boundaries.

This ski area story seems to acknowledge that, noting that in court the Navajo will be required to explain why the mountain is so sacred. The question of whether or not the courts will understand the evidence of the Navajos is another story, and one worth watching given the frequency with which non-native courts struggle with native cultural and religious perspectives.

Defending the economics of skiing is always less important and, besides, no one really uses much of the mountain anyway:

The federal government has said that even with the expanded ski runs, the resort would be using only about one percent of the peaks on the otherwise undeveloped mountain.

And, the story likens this legal fight to a conflict over worldview:

The case pits economic interests against traditional practices, and culture versus science [emphasis added], the kind of clashes that are becoming increasingly common in the West as population booms and development pressures butt against Indian desires to reassert ancient practices.

Given the discussions with Kerim at SavageMinds about science and traditional knowledge lately, I suspect this is more a fight between two cultures, two ways of viewing the world, and less about one group that claims science as its domain and another group with something called culture.

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