Summary
MONTEZUMA CREEK -- It's just after sunrise, and in the pink of a new day, an oil pump is already doing its slow, rhythmic work. It is one of four wells on Mary Johnson's land, not far from where the old woman's home sits on a mesa at the northernmost tip of the massive Navajo Nation.
Like the huge pieces of equipment that dot the landscape, Johnson is up and moving at dawn every day -- before the sun gets beastly hot -- to tend chickens and chores on this sacred Indian land where she was raised. One of the day's concerns is water. The natural springs on her land are ruined, and groundwater is 6,000 feet down, so someone has to make the 50-mile trip to fill tanks in town and haul them back.See the full content of this document
Extract
Battle Over Oil
Maybe someday water will be carried across this land, but for now only oil makes its way over barren ground in a web of pipes and tubes. In the early morning quiet, you can hear them humming and vibrating.
Water. Oil.It seems many of Johnson's 81 years have been spent watching the flow of these two fluid resources on the 160 acres given to her family generations ago. Watching each has caused her grief. Water is the reason her ancestors settled where they did, and it is gone now. Oil is the ca...See the full content of this document
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