Subject: CNN DEMONSTRATION REPORT - ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
Mining prompts protest
Placards at CNN: Group demands coverage of Navajos dispute
with Peabody Coal.
Will Anderson - Staff
Sunday, December 5, 1999
A small group of Native Americans demonstrated in Atlanta Saturday
against
what they called "ethnic cleansing" of Navajo ancestral
lands.
Members of the Southeastern Native American Alliance carried
placards
outside the CNN Center in protest of what they characterized as
the
national media's failure to report on mining on an Arizona reservation
that
has displaced thousands of Navajos.
"They're being forced off their land so that the Peabody
Coal Co. can
continue its strip mining," said Al Swilling of Cleveland,
Tenn., who
founded SENAA. "The only alternative they're being offered
is to move on to
contaminated land."
Swilling and others claim the U.S. government is in large part
responsible
for the problems on reservations in northeastern Arizona, where
Congress
tried to settle a land dispute between Navajo and Hopi tribes
in the 1970s.
Some contend the dispute was inspired by profits that both tribal
governments make from allowing mining to continue.
But Swilling disputes claims that conflict between the two
tribes is
responsible for reservation problems. His group blames the Bureau
of Indian
of Affairs in material that demonstrators handed out Saturday.
"The so-called tribal governments are puppet regimes installed
by the
administration in Washington and do not speak for the people,"
the material
says.
Only five demonstrators appeared in Atlanta Saturday; and although
they
arranged to hold the event at 11 a.m., they waited until after
the end of
the annual Christmas parade, which started on Marietta Street
at Centennial
Olympic Park, across from the CNN Center. Similar demonstrations
were
planned in New York and Los Angeles.
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