‘Their greed is gonna kill us’ Indian Country fights against more fracking

A few winters ago, Sam Sage started getting strange phone calls. Families living in rural areas south-west of Counselor, New Mexico, were telling him they saw sickly bull snakes and near-death rattlers above ground during the snowy, winter months of the south. Sage, the administrator at the Counselor Chapter House, a Navajo local government center, was incredulous.“In February? There’s no snakes in February,” he said. Sage had a theory for what was happening: underground vibrations from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, forced the snakes from their dens and on to the surface. Over the years, he’s noticed other changes. Vegetation died off and the climate became drier. People living in homes with dirt floors told him they had felt vibrations from the ground late at night, from 2 to 4am. The Navajo and Puebloan lands of north-western New Mexico where Counselor is located are no stranger to drilling. The first oil well in the area was reportedly drilled in 1911 with natural gas following soon after. Today, the US Bureau of Land Management is considering a plan, known as the Mancos-Gallup Amendment, which could lease land in the region for some 3,000 new wells – many of which would be for fracking oil and gas. The plan would expand drilling into some of northern New Mexico’s last available public lands, threatening the desecration of sacred Native artefacts near Chaco Canyon while bringing in a swath of new public health risks to a place that’s already reeling from one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the world. Fighting the amendment is something of a last stand for Native and environmental activists who have seen the oil and gas industry proliferate in recent decades. They say at least 90% of public lands in northern New Mexico are already leased for oil and gas drilling. Under the Trump administration, the amount of US lands up for lease to oil and gas companies has soared – 461m acres across the country, as of earlier this year. To New Mexico environmentalists and indigenous activists, the new plan is just another instance of the administration’s energy dominance agenda threatening some of the country’s most pristine lands. The new proposal would encroach further upon the Chaco culture national historical park – a network of historic archaeological sites that today hold Unesco world heritage status and are of spiritual importance to Navajo and Puebloan people in the region.“To a non-indigenous person, they [are] ruins. But to an indigenous Pueblo person, they’re still active sites that are used in spiritual ways,” said Julia Bernal, the environmental justice director at the Pueblo Action Alliance, an indigenous sustainability organization formed in the wake of Standing Rock. “The fight has constantly been, ‘These are sacred sites.’ But the non-indigenous power is like, ‘Well prove to us these are sacred sites.’ How can we prove that when it’s our beliefs?”Chaco park and other parts of the canyon are protected from drilling through a