Wellspring: A Story of Life & Water on Black Mesa, Part 1

Nicole Horseherder, Diné, is from the Black Mesa region of the Navajo Nation. Nicole is one of the original founding members of Tó Nizhóní Ání and has been an active member since its establishment. Nicole is a graduate of the University of Arizona with a Bachelors in Family and Consumer Resources. Nicole received her Master of Arts in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. Canada. Nicole began her work with Tó Nizhóní Ání as an outreach coordinator and interpreting hydrology and legal documents for Diné communities fighting coal-mine impacts. Today Nicole is leading efforts towards transition away from fossil fuel development in the Navajo Nation. Outside of Tó Nizhóní Ání, Nicole enjoys her time with family, horses, ceremonies, and traveling.  Photo by Darcy Padilla

Tó Nizhóní Ání

Black Mesa Map

Resource: “History and Background of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute”
This history is from the Navajo-Hopi Land Commission Office, an office under the Navajo Nation executive branch, and thus represents a Navajo Nation government perspective.

*Science Moab seeks to provide a link to an official Hopi government position and/or resource on the 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act; please contact info@sciencemoab.org with recommendations on such material. 

Resource: “An Historical Overview of the Navajo Relocation”
Article from Cultural Survival, an Indigenous-led NGO and U.S. registered non-profit.

Black Mesa Trust

“Drawdown: An Update on Groundwater Mining on Black Mesa”
A 2006 update to the original NRDC report (2000) on the Navajo aquifer.

Largest Strip Mine In The Nation Threatens Tribes’ Water Source
NRDC press release announcing the 2006 updates to the 2000 report, “Drawdown: Groundwater Mining on Black Mesa.”

Science Moab: This is Science Moab, a show exploring the science happening around Southeast Utah and the Colorado Plateau. I’m Carrie Schwartz, and today we’re talking with Nicole Horseherder, co-founder and executive director of  Tó Nízhóní Ání, or Sacred Water Speaks, a Diné-led nonprofit organization based in Black Mesa, Arizona on the Navajo Nation.

Across many chapters, Nicole has worked at the confluence of water, science, advocacy, and community. This episode is part one of a two-episode series from our conversation with Nicole. In this episode, we hear about Nicole’s childhood, early career, and journey into the work that she now does.

This episode was made possible by the Colorado Plateau Foundation, a Native-led funder supporting Native-led organizations protecting water, sacred places, and endangered landscapes, preserving Native languages and uplifting sustainable community-based agriculture. Since 2012, the Colorado Plateau Foundation has awarded more than $5 million to over 200 native-led initiatives across the Colorado Plateau. Learn more at coloradoplateaufoundation.org.

Now, onto our conversation with guest Nicole Horseherder of Tó Nízhóní Ání.

 Science Moab: Nicole, it’s a pleasure to get to speak with you today. Thank you so much for taking the time. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Nicole Horseherder: Sure.

[Introduces herself in Diné]

My name is Nicole Horseherder and I am the executive director of Tó Nizhóní Ání. I live on Black Mesa, it’s the high plateau situated on the Navajo Nation in Northeast Arizona.

 Science Moab: Now before we dive into the particulars of your work, I’d love to just go back in time a little bit. Can you talk about what it was like growing up on Black Mesa and maybe you could also help paint a picture of Black Mesa for listeners. What does it look like, feel like, sound like?

Nicole: Yeah, that’s a hard question to answer right away. I had a really awesome childhood. When I became aware of my surroundings, I was in a safe space. I was in a community space, ’cause I grew up in a one room traditional house. I had the company of my grandmother, my aunts, my mother of course, and a lot of cousins.

We spent a lot of time outdoors. I hardly remember being inside except to eat, except to sleep. But we spent the rest of the time outside playing, even in the wintertime.

Most of my memories are from following my grandmother around wherever she went and whatever she did. We spent a lot of our summer days riding horses, herding sheep. A big task that she would often assign to us was like bringing the sheep back in. Another task she would assign to us is catching sheep. So we got really good at things like that. So, there was lot of physical element to our daily lives. I guess a lot of my childhood was spent doing daily activities related to everyday life and covering a huge space.

But, once relocation went into effect, and that was like in 1974 and ’75, ’76, we saw the fences start going up in my area and divided this land that I live on between Navajo and Hopi, and was referred to as Hopi Partition Lands and Navajo Partition Lands after the fence went up. Our grazing area became like half the size that it was before.

 Science Moab: A quick note here. The 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, enacted amid ongoing government and corporate efforts to access mineral resources in the Four Corners region, imposed an artificial boundary across nearly two million acres of jointly used Diné and Hopi ancestral lands. The law forced the relocation of more than sixteen thousand Diné and Hopi people, severed access to sacred sites, and introduced a building moratorium and livestock reduction program, posing a threat to the community’s very survival.

It’s a complex history that continues to affect the people who call that area home. We’re linking a couple of articles in the show notes in case you’d like to learn more.

Okay, back to Nicole.

Nicole: And even then, I didn’t realize that was a sad time and that many of my people were depressed during that time and grieving during that time over the loss of their homes and their land. But as traditional Diné people are, they maintain a lot of control over their emotions. I grew up in a family where emotions were constant, they were steady and there were a lot of occasions of laughter and joking, but those were the only emotions that I could really see that was different from what was constant. The constant emotion was always just calmness, peacefulness, talking to each other in calm ways. Always kind of like solution oriented talking, you know, like my grandmother would say, “well, today this is what I plan to do.” And then everybody seemed to know, like, if grandma’s gonna do this today, then I’ve gotta do this today.

But for us, it was just like a task here, a chore here, and I guess our happy spot was always wherever my grandmother was, whatever she was doing, we were always there to just either keep her company or play next to her while she was doing something. And then of course moments when we would just go off and play on our own, climb trees while the sheep were at the water hole or something like that. And that, that was it.

And then we got a chance to see a lot of the weather just because we spent so much time outdoors. Especially the monsoons. Monsoons were a very special time and very distinctly, I would remember that as the summer went on, the days would get hotter. And at a point late in July when it just seemed like it was so hot, the clouds would start gathering, around noontime, you would start seeing the clouds coming together.

And then it would rain and it would rain for like maybe an hour, and each day it would pick up power and it would rain a little longer. It would rain a little harder. So the days went on like that. Every day the same – clouds would gather, it would rain, and then it would dissipate.

And then the evening was just hot but humid. And then as the sun went down, it would cool down quickly. And the next morning, same thing again. The mornings after monsoon were some of the best times, the most beautiful time, the most beautiful smells, everything sage, the juniper, the pine trees, the wet dirt, just the air, the way it smelled. And even bird sounds were louder. Animal sounds were louder.

And then late in the monsoon , there would be some flooding, a little bit of flooding happening, like a lot of runoff from the hills would come down into the low areas.

And people had built little earthen ponds, some dams. And so the waters would collect and then the rest of the season there would be water in those ponds. And those were the places that we would often herd sheep to so that they could drink. And also during this time was harvest time and we just had huge corn fields.

And I just remember day after day of collecting, and we would have blankets laid out in various areas of the cornfield that my grandmother would want us to harvest from. And we would just go around and collect the ripened ears of corn and put ’em on the blanket. And once you had a pile going, then somebody would sit down, gather all four corners of the blanket, hoist it over their shoulder, and then they would carry the corn on their back all the way to, I guess back in the older days was like wagons.

But during our time, we had these old seventies Ford trucks. And we would always have the variety of corn, the white, the yellow, the blue, and monsoons and harvests were like a really busy time. So I was so fortunate to be home during this time because the rest of the time except for weekends was school and school was just such a culture shock for me. So many of the kids that I went to school with had already moved to the towns.

But during this time, there was a lot of industry coming into the reservation. Businesses were popping up, schools… it was a place where there was a lot of employment of our people. My mom is probably the only person in her family with a college education. And so my mother was working at the schools. And so part of my life was living in teacher housing and going to school from there. But oh, during those times I missed home so much and I just couldn’t wait for Fridays. Yeah, that’s pretty much how I grew up. That was my childhood.

 Science Moab: Thank you for sharing that. I love that you also kind of helped take us through the seasons, it’s really beautiful. In speaking about memories of your childhood. One of the things that stands out are a lot of memories tied to water. And you mentioned that you noticed changes in Black Mesa with fences going up and the designations of land changing.

When did you first notice that the water was changing? That the springs you knew as a child were drying up?

Nicole: So as a child, there didn’t seem to be a shortage of water. There was always a watering hole or a windmill or a well that we could go to. I didn’t see water hauling hardly at all. In fact, I don’t have any real memories except maybe when I was in high school. I do remember us hauling water, but that was mainly for drinking water.

And my grandmother was probably one of the last persons to actually move seasonally with her lifestyle of her sheep. So we had winter camps and summer camps and places, spring, fall, you know, like she moved all the time.

So when I came home on weekends during high school, I would always have to find her and I always knew where she was. We would spend the weekends there with her and do whatever chores needed to be done there.

But I did not notice the diminishing water sources. And it wasn’t until I left high school and went to college, and my undergraduate years I was in Tucson, so I was coming home on weekends a lot but not every weekend. So there started to be some space and some time between my, my relationship with home. I applied for graduate school and then I think the biggest impact for me was getting into grad school so far away from home and just not being able to come home at all. Maybe once a year for the next three years.

And at that point, what that did to me once I got done with school, was I came home and I had a totally different look, different observation of home. I notice things that I probably wouldn’t have noticed just coming home like every weekend.

 Science Moab: What were the changes that you noticed?

Nicole: I noticed things were drier. Like one summer, I came home in 1997 and I noticed it was so hot that summer, like to the point where I almost couldn’t stand the heat. I think it was probably in the nineties, the temperature. It was just heat that I was not familiar with. But I spent the summer at home and the monsoons were a little different that time. They seemed to come later and not give as much rain. Then I spent another year at school and then I came home and that’s when I really noticed changes.

And right at that time too, my grandmother was not going out with the sheep anymore, often would just kind of let ’em out and let ’em roam and then just either track ’em or take a little walk about in the direction that she knew they went. So not really with them all day long, like the way she used to be.

She was really getting up in age and so a lot of our chores would be to check on the sheep and bring them back in. And that’s when I noticed that it’s hotter, it’s drier. The watering holes have less water.

But I think the biggest change for me was seeing the monsoons change. And then all of a sudden it’s like, fast forward to this time when I’m a young adult, like, I’m not 30 yet and I’m feeling this heat. And it feels different to me and I’m looking and listening to myself late in July and I’m missing something. What is it that I’m missing? And I’m missing the monsoons, I’m missing the days where it gets hot, and then the clouds form, and then the rains come, and it cools off. And it’s like, “yeah, definitely something’s off.”

And then right around that time also we’re like hauling water for a lot of our needs. Not just our drinking water, but for the animals and thinking, “oh, this is different. We’re spending a lot of time doing this.”

Right around that time too, I’m back home and my family’s talking to me about finding a spot to build a home, and establishing myself and I’m thinking, okay that’s great. That’s good encouraging words and conversations, but as I’m thinking about this, I’m thinking, yeah, but if I move there, the spring is dry . And I’m thinking about the water sources that used to be these places, and I’m thinking, what happened? What’s going on and what’s happening to our lands? And also, right at that time a lot of young folks coming home from college were getting really political.

I mean, we’ve always lived in a political place from the days that relocation was happening, even prior to that, when my grandparents and my mom’s oldest siblings were experiencing livestock reduction. And the federal policies that were coming down during that time, they were active, they were political, they were advocating for themselves to the time when relocation happened.

And all these young folks that are coming back from college along with me are talking about water rights and how so much water is being negotiated for industry and how we’re up against the state of Arizona and huge companies that are actually doing business on the reservation. We’re having to convince them that we need water rights. And it’s, it’s, you know, something’s not right. You know, something that was never taught in schools, something that the school system never prepared us for. That we’re having to navigate that and do our own research. This is the other thing about college for me, is that it never prepared us for this. And the only thing that university prepares us for is to be able to research, to look for those answers.

So here I am back from university for a second time and trying to figure out where I’m gonna live and trying to find a job. And at this point I’m looking for anything, even though I have a linguistics degree at this time, and my real goal was to teach linguistics and language. at the tribal college. And that doesn’t happen. The tribal college is two hours away. And I decide that I’m gonna stay closer to my community.

 Science Moab: So Nicole ends up getting a job locally and starts doing a ton of different community programs.

Nicole: Coordinating federal and local government education programs, livestock programs, agriculture programs, childcare programs, community organizing, substance abuse. Trying to bring AA to the community because at that point in time the aftermath of relocation was still, there was still a lot of grief and, you know, none of this was gonna go away if we didn’t address it in some systematic way.

Like we weren’t even providing therapy or counseling to our people who were struggling with the loss of their homes and their land, and the ability to graze livestock, feed themselves, and so substance abuse was real in the community. That’s how people were coping. Grief was real, depression was real. People were hurting themselves, and there were no government programs specifically to address these things, but we knew that the result of a relocation we were seeing throughout the community. So I was bringing in these kinds of programs that would help people, address, some mental, physical, spiritual issues that they were having.

This is really hard work for a young college graduate. But after three years, off to the side, I was still part of this other movement.

Other young people were asking questions and demanding answers from the government about water rights. And so then I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m trying to find answers to these other questions that I have, because I’m still trying to establish myself here in my home community. And yeah, we don’t have water here, too. And what is that all about?” You know? So listening and being part of this movement that was taking shape gave me a place to ask these questions also.

 Science Moab: What were some of the water issues that you and other members of this movement were focused on?

Nicole: At that time we were getting ready to settle our New Mexico water rights. And these colleagues of mine were trying to make sure that we weren’t getting ripped off in the settlement agreement.

And they were really asking hard questions like, “why are we waiving our right to claim injury to water? And why are we waiving our rights to this and that?” And there was all this waiver language all over in the settlement agreements. I was learning a lot just by being part of the group and listening and going to these meetings. And so already I was getting myself involved in this activism that was happening on the side of my job. I was doing a good job as coordinator and a lot of people were participating and it was fun.

After three years though, I couldn’t do a full-time job anymore because I became a mother. So then I got out of my job, which I had to work so hard to get. And, I just became a full-time mom. There was nothing else I could do. My mom was still working at the time. I didn’t have family members who could help me. ‘ Spent a lot of time visiting my grandmother, sitting with my grandmother. She’s not a really talkative person. We would sit there with her and she would be weaving. So we spent a lot of time together in quietness.

Of course I was still connected and still involved with the activist group. They were still doing a lot of direct actions and sit-ins and talking to Navajo leadership and Navajo attorneys and trying to get a better outcome for the New Mexico settlement.

 Science Moab: But a forthcoming partnership with Black Mesa Trust and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the NRDC, was about to mark a major turning point

Nicole: My Uncle, Percy Deal, who was a Chapter official, said, hey, you know, Vernon Masayesva, the director of Black Mesa Trust. They had already been well established and had a small staff and they were really going after Peabody Coal Company for various different violations: pollution violations, violations of water use, and not doing their due diligence. Vernon had commissioned a study with Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, and that study came out that year. He wanted the principal investigators to come out and present their findings.

He wanted Navajo communities on Black Mesa to coordinate a meeting so that community people could come and listen to the findings. An interpreter would be needed. A lot of my community members at the time were still speaking primarily Navajo. So that’s what we did. We coordinated that meeting and it happened to happen right outside my grandmother’s house.

The guys from NRDC… David Beckman and Andrew Wexler, presented to the community. One is an attorney and one is a scientist. My Uncle Percy interpreted for the community. I was just the coordinator. I just made sure that the site was set up and food and water would be available and this is in 2001 and I have this baby in a cradle board, and I’m sitting there and my Uncle Percy said, “you know, this is really important information. It helps us answer the question of what’s happening to our springs and seeps, what’s happening to our water sources.”

By this time other people in the community are starting to ask this question. Vernon says to us, Black Mesa Trust… we’re asking these questions and we’re holding Peabody’s feet to the fire and making sure that they are in compliance, but the water use it’s excessive and we don’t know what’s gonna happen if we allow them to continue to use our water this way. And we have got to stop them . The study was clear and that is that the USGS had set thresholds for the health of the aquifer. By this time, a few of those thresholds had already been met.

But the company and the regulatory body that was enforcing compliance on the company OSMRE, neither of them took action. Instead, what happened was they moved the criteria. Having studied linguistics, which is a very technical field, I was excited by the NRDC study. It was the kind of stuff that I liked to read. It was interesting to me and I could understand the technical document. And listening to my elders interpret that technical information for the community is something I felt like I could do is something I felt like I wanted to do.

By this time I had already been immersed in my community and language again for about two years. And Vernon said, ” You, Navajos, you need to organize, and you need to help us fight this.”

And Percy said. ” I agree with you, I think we should do that. We should organize also, and I think the people that should do this is YOU.” And he pointed to me and, that’s how Tó Nizhóní Ání. TNA was established.

You know, we organized, we said, “okay, what do we do?” The easiest thing to do is to take this study and turn the information into a bunch of poster boards, ’cause at that time, there was no PowerPoint. So we went out and got poster boards and we started drawing pictures that were in the study, the picture of the layers of Black Mesa and the aquifers beneath. We were trying to convey the idea that the aquifer is pressurized and it’s the pressure that brings the water to the surface.

So we were getting all scientific with this, but in a way that local people could understand. They understood these concepts. So we were saying ” this is why the water is not coming to the surface anymore. It’s because not only is the water being depleted, but it’s being depressurized.”

And that’s gotta stop. That’s why we’re seeing the disappearance of seeps and springs all across, not just within the vicinity of the mine. OSMRE and Peabody only wanted to deal with and talk about what’s happening inside the lease area.

And of course, they didn’t want to see that the operation and the use of the water was impacting the water everywhere across Black Mesa. The Hopi villages that sit on the edge of Black Mesa were seeing the disappearance of their seeps and springs. The impacts were being felt far and wide. It made sense to establish a group on Navajo on Black Mesa that would organize and mobilize the Diné communities.

Vernon was doing that with Hopi. So that brings us to the establishment of Tó Nizhóní Ání and then we started going community to community and educating.

Science Moab: Thank you, Nicole, for sharing your story from childhood all the way to the formation of Tó Nízhóní Ání. Again, we’ve been speaking with Nicole Horseherder, co-founder and executive director of Tó Nízhóní Ání, or Sacred Water Speaks.

This is part one of a two-episode series with Nicole. In the second episode, we’ll pick up where we’re leaving off here and follow Nicole’s work since the formation of Tó Nízhóní Ání. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation as much as we have. ‘

To learn more or listen to other Science Moab episodes, visit sciencemoab.org or anywhere you get your podcasts. Our theme music is by Jeremy Spaulding, and this episode was produced by Carrie Schwartz, Mary Langworthy, and KZMU.

If you love Science Moab, support us by sponsoring the podcast, writing us into your research grant, or donating at sciencemoab.org. This program is unique to Moab, Utah, and your support makes it possible.