Page 16 RAIN July 1981 The -Missionaries Return to Indian· Country by Winona LaDuke and Faye Brown The seeds of a land war were sown this spring. Indians in the Western states of Arizona, South Dakota, and California have moved into battle formations, and the Department of Interior Secretary James Gaius Watt is now expected to make a corresponding move. Federal and Indian lands are the frontier and the anticipated conque·st of James Watt is clearly in jeopardy. In an area of northeastern Arizona, the Hopi and Navajo reservations are in a state of siege. Federal relocation troops, under the supervisio~ of James Watt and the blessing of Congressional Act PL-93-531 have moved into the area. Their mission: to forcibly relocate 6,500 Navajo people by mid-1986. This is the largest mass removal of Indian people since the notorious Cherokee "Trail of Tears" in the 1830s. Presidents may have changed from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan, but the enthusiasm for Manifest Destiny still appears to exist. · It appears that Watt puts his religious interpretations even . above the budget policies of the Reagan Administration. According to a Salt Lake City legal firm, a public relations firm from·the same religious persuasion, and Hopi Tribal Chairman Abbot Sekaquaptewa, the Navajos are reproducing too quickly and encroaching upon the Hopi Reservation, which sits in the center of the Navajo land. The answer to this predicament, according to Sekaquaptewa and his legal council, is to put up a fence between the Navajos and the Hopi.
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