Diné activist receives prestigious Heinz Award for her work on water, mine reclamation
Nicole Horseherder, co-founder of the nonprofit Tó Nizhóní Aní, has been working to bring environmental justice surrounding the land, water, animals and people of her community of Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation.
Now she is being recognized as a recipient of the prestigious Heinz Award.
The Heinz Award is named after John Heinz, an heir of the Heinz ketchup company and former Pennsylvania senator who died in a plane crash in 1991. The Heinz Family Foundation has been giving out cash awards in various categories — including economy and environment — since 1993, and this year Horseherder is a recipient for the environment category. It comes with an unrestricted $250,000 cash award.
“I’m doing this work for no other reason than to uplift the communities that I work for,” Horseherder told The Arizona Republic. “Environmental justice is a big issue for us, and social justice, and economic justice go hand in hand with the environmental injustices that have happened on Black Mesa. For us on Black Mesa, it seems like it's one adverse policy after another since the time of Hweeldi (the Long Walk).”
Horseherder has been doing environmental advocacy work for her community and other communities that were adversely affected by the Black Mesa and Kayenta coal mines and Navajo Generating Station for over 20 years. She has been surrounded by this work her whole life and continues, she said, because future generations who must address past environmental harm.
“I grew up in the relocation era,” said Horseherder. “I grew up following my grandparents and my mom and aunties around to these meetings. Activism has been all around me all my life. Activism didn’t start with Tó Nizhóní Aní, that’s for sure. Our grandmothers were already marching to Washington D.C. back in the late 70s early 80s. I’m just an extension of that activism.
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Coal mining affected the region's water supply
After returning home from college, Horserder said she quickly got into community work and hasn’t stopped. The concern for her was the decades of mining by Peabody Western Coal Company, which had depressurized and drained the region’s aquifer, the only source of drinking water along with her family’s livestock springs.
A July environmental study found Peabody Western Coal Company, which operated the Black Mesa mine from 1965 until its 2005 closure, and the Kayenta mine from 1973 until 2019, produced an average of 14 million tons of coal per year and pumped billions of gallons of groundwater from the Navajo Aquifer, also known as the N-aquifer, one of the only potable sources of water in Black Mesa.
This depletion of water had gone unchecked by the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement office, part of the Department of Interior. The reclamation office has not addressed Peabody’s overuse of groundwater in the region and has failed to hold them accountable, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis report.
“This oversight demonstrates a flaw in OSMRE’s criteria for environmental reclamation and a failure on the part of the DOI to hold Peabody accountable and uphold its trust responsibilities to the Navajo and Hopi tribes in Black Mesa,” the report stated.
Research also revealed that Peabody Mine was depleting the Navajo Aquifer 3 to 4 million gallons of water per day for a slurry line to transport coal to Nevada.
The mines and water use led Horseherder to co-found Tó Nizhóní Aní and she now serves as its executive director. It was formed over 20 years ago to protect the aquifers, streams and land of Black Mesa, and to bring attention to other Navajo communities affected by decades of coal extraction.
“Encouraged by a local Indigenous leader to take up the cause, Ms. Horseherder, her husband Marshall Johnson and community member Valencia Edgewater established TNA as a nonprofit in 2001,” a news release from the Heinz Foundation said. “Four years later, with the coordinated efforts of partners such as the Black Mesa Water Trust, TNA successfully shut down the Black Mesa mine, ending Peabody’s industrial use of the aquifer.”
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Clean energy is a priority now
Horseherder said TNA is now focusing on transitioning to clean energy production and transmission. The group is working on the decommissioning and complete cleanup of the Navajo Generating Station site, which closed in 2019. It also works to repatriate artifacts and ancestral remains removed as a result of coal mining in the area, according to the news release.
“The work that is at the forefront of the work that we do right now is transition,” Horseherder told The Republic. “We are trying to inform and guide transition the best possible way we can, and that means taking the coal plants that have shut down, and the coal plants we know are shutting down, and replacing energy with renewable energy. Coal and fossil fuel has had a tremendous toll on our water.
“Water is what everyone is talking about right now in the southwest,” she continued. “We can’t afford to commit any more water to the fossil industry. How are we going to make the change? How are we going to move beyond coal? That is what is the main driving force at TNA right now.”
She said reclamation is part of the transition. Giving the land back to the people in a livable condition with the water that was there before mining, is life after coal. She asks that, if they are unable to reclaim Black Mesa lands and its water, then what is the purpose of mining?
“Isn't the mining and fossil fuel energy industry more costly to the Nation than beneficial? I think so,” said Horseherder. “If we can’t do reclamation right, and we can't make the agencies take responsibility, and we can't make the companies take responsibility for the damage they have done then we shouldn't be involved in leasing more Navajo lands and more Navajo resources.”
Arlyssa Becenti covers Indigenous affairs for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send ideas and tips to arlyssa.becenti@arizonarepublic.com.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Navajo activist receives prestigious Heinz Award for activism
