Paastiki: Tearing up the Waters
Hopi Elders speak out

One day you will sell rain water
Springs will dry up, then,
Your exodus will begin,
With "tin-cups" in hand,
Looking for water,
Where springs once ran healthy,
Now dead.

—Hopi Wuuchim prophecy song as sung by Valgean Joshevema, Sr.
He first heard this song when he married a girl from Old Oraibi in the 1920s.

Water under the ground has much to do with rain clouds.
Everything depends upon the proper balance being maintained.
The water under the ground acts like a magnet attracting rain from the
clouds, and the rain in the clouds also acts as a magnet raising
the water table under the ground to the roots of our crops and plants.
Drawing huge amounts of water from beneath Black Mesa will destroy
the harmony, throw everything we have strived to maintain out of kilter.
Should this happen, our lands will shake like the Hopi rattle; land will
sink, land will dry up. Rains will be barred by unseen forces because
we Hopis have failed to protect the land given us, as we were instructed.
Plants will not grow, our corn will not yield and animals will die. . . . all
will disintegrate to nothing.

— Hopi elders and religious leaders, 1972


"My uncles taught me that if we stray off the path of Hopi teachings we will be punished severely by the great flood. The old ones call it "Paastiki." I have often wondered what they meant. A flood in a desert? Impossible! Then one night it became clear. Perhaps they also meant tearing up or destroying the waters underneath us.
If we and Peabody continue to take out more than what is going in, we will wake up one day in a waterless world, in a water-world torn up and destroyed. We will then suffer the punishment that our elders hope we would avoid, but we seem to be sleeping, living in a dream world. As long as water runs out of the faucet when we turn it on, we really don't care and worry about anything else."

— Jason Tanakhongva
Hotevilla Village


Unlike Peabody Energy, Hopi people do not have millions of dollars to pay for public relations and hire scientists to deny the obvious. Hopi people have only eyes to see, prophecies to remember, brains to reason.
Peabody scientists study their charts, they crunch their data, then they tell us that pumping over one billion gallons of water annually from the N-aquifer is causing no damage whatsoever. They say that they will take "only one-tenth of one percent" of the stored water underneath Black Mesa. And that impacts to springs and Moencopi Wash "are too small to be measured." We've heard this kind of claim before—for example, the nuclear power industry said their electricity would be "too cheap to meter."
Hopi elders remember swimming in Moencopi Wash; today they see it is dry, and they reason that damage is being done. Flute societies will be conducting their ceremonies in sacred springs that were once healthy, but are now empty.
In the village of Polacca, there are preliminary indications that community wells are stating to run dry. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicted this would happen, but no one was listening or seemed to care. In 1988, USGS reported that the combined community and Peabody pumping would cause water levels in the N-aquifer to drop 80 feet by the year 2007. Ten years later, however, USGS reported that by 1966 the water level in Keams Canyon area dropped by 160.2 feet.
Over one billion gallons of potable water per year. Over one billion gallons of pristine water that Peabody mines from our enclosed aquifer cannot be taken from these dry lands without impact. One billion gallons of our ancient, sacred water -- water upon which we have survived for millennia, upon which we depend today evaporates each year into the desert skies. One billion gallons of living water, enough to provide for Hopi for 100 years, dies on a dry wind.
Observation and reason. An enclosed aquifer in a land that has received very little or no rain in the last seven years. One billion gallons pumped to slurry pulverized coal to a power plant in a Nevada desert. Moencopi Wash, once full and fresh, are now dry; sinkholes are starting to appear; and sacred springs are now struggling to stay alive. How much clearer, how much simpler could it be? Observation, reason, and common sense, the root of all science, ours and theirs.

—Vernon Masayesva, Executive Director, Black Mesa Trust


Our bodies are mostly water, and so life cannot continue without it.
But we cannot forget that water also has the potential to wash away civilization and cause destruction. It all depends on what's in our souls. The human soul has the potential to bring happiness to the world, but also to bring pain. This is the message water is telling us.

— Dr. Masaru Emoto, The Hidden Messages in Water, 2001


We are of water, and the water is of us.
When water is threatened,
All living things are threatened.

What we do to water,
We do to ourselves.

— Hopi Hisot Navoti Gathering
October 23, 2003, Second Mesa, Arizona

"When the water is gone from Black Mesa, so will be the traditional cultures that could have taught the world so much about living successfully with less."