Wednesday, 1/03/07, on American Indian Airwaves
Part 1: DDR Movement: Desert Rock Barricades, Struggle of Dine people to protect Mother Earth, Four Corners New Mexico region. UN Observer Account Interview with Dailan Jay Long, spokesperson for DDR Elders, press spokesperson. More updates are available at Desert-Rock-Blog.com. Communities at Ground-Zero of the Proposed Desert Rock Power Plant.
Burnham and Sanostee, NM chapters are located east of the Chuska Mountains. Burnham chapter has no economic base and there is no source of employment, except for the Navajo coal-mine where very few local people are employed. Revenues from the coal mine go directly to the Navajo Nation government operating funds. A large portion of Burnham land is leased to Navajo mine and oil and gas development.
In the coal fields of the Fruitland Formation in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico, surface mining is laying the ground to waste and coal-burning power plants are polluting the air. The Four Corners and San Juan power plants in northwest NM are among the worst point sources of pollution in the entire United States. They have contaminated the air shed of the San Juan Basin and fouled the waters of the San Juan River which flows through the New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah portions of the Navajo Reservation. Now, a third coal-fired electrical generating station is proposed to be built in Burnham, a small Navajo community located along the cottonwood bosque of Chaco Wash which runs into the polluted San Juan River. Fueling the Four Corners and San Juan generating stations is the Navajo Mine which will also provide strip-mined coal to the third power plant--the Desert Rock Energy Project--if it is built. This is were the barricades are being created and resisters have there camp.
Part 2: SB 18: Resistance to the destruction of Sacred Sites; Chumash Nation Unites
Interview with Fred Collins, Northern Chumash Council; Ray Ward, Barbareno Chumash Council, and Joe Talaugon, San Ynez Chumash Elders Council.
The United Chumash Alliance is a new development in First Nation Chumash communities which focuses on protecting Mother Earth. Our guest explore the paradoxes of Senate Bill 18 which on March 1, 2005 Senate Bill 18 (hereinafter SB 18) was signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. SB 18 requires that local government consult with California Native American tribes to aid in the protection of traditional tribal �Sacred Cultural Places� through local land use planning. The intent of SB18 is to provide California Native American tribes an opportunity to participate in local land use decisions at an early planning stage, for the purpose of protecting, or mitigating impacts to, �Sacred Cultural Places�. The purpose of involving tribes at these early planning stages is to allow consideration of cultural places in the context of broad local land use policy, before individual site-specific, project-level land use decisions are made by a local government.
The principal objective of SB 18 is to preserve and protect �Sacred Cultural Places� of California Native Americans. SB 18 is unique in that it requires local governments to involve California Native American in early stages of land use planning, extends to both public and private lands, and includes both federally recognized and non-federally recognized tribes.
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