Transcript of Presentation Excerpt

My name is Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, and I recently retired from the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office as the Director for 30 years. And in terms of the focus here at this conference on managing public lands, I think the issue that I want to speak to represents one of the more difficult issues that the Hopi tribe has had to face in its most recent history. The Arizona Snowbowl is a ski resort within the jurisdiction of the Coconino National Forest which is under the Forest Service.

In 1968, the Hopi tribe filed its first lawsuit against the federal government when the Snowbowl owners went after an expansion of acreage from 70 acres to 770 acres to be used for expanded ski recreation. In 1968, the Hopi tribe argued that its First Amendment rights were being violated. And subsequently, it was heard in federal court, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which failed to hear it.

So the expansion was allowed, and currently the resort does operate within the 770 acres. When I assumed office back in 1988, I studied the history of relationship with the Coconino National Forest and particularly the Snowbowl situation. And I began to understand that lingering controversy.

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In about 1999, or 97 thereabouts, excuse me, the ownership changed with the Arizona Snowbowl. And in 1999 they gave me a call and wanted to sit down with me on this new change of ownership. So we did, and they expressed at that time very intimately that they wanted to restore a better relationship with the Hopi tribe because of the controversy.

Which I think we took well. I think it was at that time a very good effort by the new owners to do so. So we entered into an understanding of mutual respect and understanding noting that the Hopi tribe's position on what now was being defined as a traditional cultural property was still lingering.

And one of the areas that I quickly understood in my new job as Director for the Cultural Preservation Office was the fact that many agencies again did not truly understand landscapes as a TCP. And in the case of these majestic peaks that the Hopi calls Nuvata Keovi, snow-covered peaks, the San Francisco peaks, and its living connection to the Hopi people was clearly again lacking. And so that was from the federal manager's standpoint with the Coconino National Forest.

And then you take the ownership of the Snowbowl, which again faced a similar situation that they just didn't quite understand the controversy in itself and why the lawsuit in 1968. So in 2000, they came forward with a new proposal and they introduced a concept of what they call improvements to their current level of operation for the ski resort. So they said that it was going to be still within the 770 acres.

They were not proposing to go beyond that, but they were going to develop more ski runs and more snow play areas was sort of the message and we thought it was generally a straightforward proposal. But we thought about it and we didn't think much about it until the actual outline came forward to us in 2001. And this is where snowmaking came into play, meaning that the owners were now proposing to use reclaimed wastewater to make artificial snow through snowmaking.

And we didn't, of course, at that time understood the technology, but when we studied this outline of the proposal, it became clear that the Hopi tribe again took issue with that. And, you know, the San Francisco Peaks feature so prominently in our history and religion You know, one of the things that people don't really quite understand is really our principles of life where history is religion and religion is history. Hopi, like many other tribal religion, is environmentally based.

You know, I grew up like that. I grew up into a farming and sheep herding family. Back in the 1950s, I grew up into a culture that was still living off the land, where you respected the environment, where everything that you took from the environment, you reciprocated through prayer and offerings.

That's how I grew up. And as we grew up, we learned to also respect our horizon of landscapes that feature later into our clan traditions, into our religious teachings. And I learned over time how the San Francisco Peaks, over time, grew into a very, very profound landscape where, as kids, we were told that that's where the Kachina spirits lived and resided.

And as you get into your young adult life and get initiated into the Kachina belief way, you begin to understand that relationship. So, our Kachina religion is very, very fundamental to the Hopi people. Every Hopi child gets initiated into Kachina.

Every year, hundreds of kids up to about 10 years old, 12 years old, get initiated into this first order of religious teachings. I would say that those are rites of passage. And that's how you begin to grow and understand this landscape we call the San Francisco Peaks, where, as you grow and begin to be a practitioner, it enables you to understand the spirituality of the Hopi culture in terms of respecting your environment.

And that's so misunderstood by outsiders. So, when the proposal came in to use, in this case, recycled wastewater, it was clear that it was now, again, a recognition of the controversy of 1968. I remember one meeting we had with the proponents, the owners of the Snowbowl.

And our Council of Elders told them, no, do not make artificial snow. Let the Kachina spirits make snow. One lady told the owners, maybe you can pray with us so that there's going to be more snow on the peaks.

Why can't you pray with us? Because the bottom line for the proponents was that they wanted to have a longer ski season, meaning that using, again, these snowblowers, they would start early in November and then in March, meaning the bottom line was their net profit. The Hopi tribe said no. So, an environmental impact study was triggered off, and the Hopi tribe filed its protests and its opposition to it vigorously.

And we told the forest supervisor that, look, you have a proposal here. You know the Hopi tribe's longstanding opposition to the disturbance of the peaks, and that this effort now by the new owner will simply compound that. You don't have to accept the proposal.

You don't have to accept the proposal. That was to no avail. So, accepting the proposal meant that a NEPA [National Environmental Protection Act] was now triggered off.

So that went through a couple of years of environmental study. So, I quickly formed a coalition in the southwest with local tribes, and sure enough, we had six tribes coming in to also voice their opposition to the proposal. You know the Snowbowl operation and the proposal to use reclaimed water today stands as the only ski resort using recycled wastewater.

So, the Hopi tribe went through this NIPA proposal, the EIS. Six other tribes presented their opposition, but the record of decision in March of 2005 went against the tribes. In 1968, the Hopi tribe filed its lawsuit around the First Amendment.

This time around, our attorneys were dumbfounded as to what we could use to stop the operation. So, interestingly, when I googled religious act, I just typed that in, a law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act came up. And that law, a one-page law, a very rarely used law, said that a federal agency needs to have a compelling interest that would override other interests to approve a project.

In this case, the argument by the federal government was recreation. That was their compelling interest, they said. And that's what we used to file the lawsuit.

And it went through the process of litigation, all the way up through the Supreme Court, and it failed to hear the lawsuit. When I was on the stand, the U.S. attorneys sarcastically told me, Mr. Kwanwisiwma, what's the matter with you? The proposal is still to be within the 770 acres. You have 93,000 more acres to worship in.

What's the problem? The problem is that if you disturb one portion of the sacred landscape, you destroy the sanctity of the whole. Traditional cultural property. During the appellate court hearing, the three-panel judge sided with the Hopi tribe, and a judge who was of Jewish descent gave this example.

Look, government, look, Snowbowl, you just don't know what the Hopi people are trying to tell you. You take a church, a synagogue, that's an area of sanctity. You have a congregation that believes in it and worships within that sanctuary.

You have a font that's part of your religion. Suppose somebody comes in and puts wastewater into that font. It destroys the sanctity of that synagogue or church.

That's what the Hopis are trying to tell you. So you see, it was a very difficult situation for the Hopi tribe. So we failed in federal lawsuit.

And then in 2009, the Hopi tribe filed a lawsuit against the city of Flagstaff, what the lawyers call a nuisance claim, meaning that the use of recycled wastewater simply had no scientific history and that in terms of health risk and safety, that more studies had to be made. So the Hopi tribe underwent a three-year scientific study to do that, and we filed a lawsuit against the city of Flagstaff. And today, it's still going through litigation.

Our nuisance claim represents the public's interest at large, and the city of Flagstaff today faces a $15 million civil claim. So the trauma it causes in terms of a federal agency decision is, again, probably not going to be understood. Because when we pray in our kivas, our ceremonial chambers, and we pray in other deities' liturgy, we go to the west first and we visualize the landscape, the Grand Canyon.

Good. We look at the cloud priest. We see the vision of the cloud people.

Then your attention turns to the west. You envision the landscape of the San Francisco Peaks. Then your prayers just get all tangled up because you visualize that wastewater being used up there, that recycled wastewater.

That is totally unacceptable. So the long-term harm it caused us, again, will never probably be understood.