The holding cell was hot and musty, smelling of dust and stale human waste. The Navajo built the one-room jail many years before to handle as many as fifty of their wayward brethren. But today it was filled with sixty raucous young white men and women, mostly dressed for the beach. The folding tables and chairs were all occupied, leaving many to sit on the smooth cement floor. No one seemed to mind.
In the darkest corner of the cavernous cell, the young woman sat with her back against the wall to watch the show without attracting attention. Part Hopi and part Anglo, Juniper Hatch was a half-breed. She took her stature from her Anglo side: Nearly six feet tall and slim, she had the tight body of an athlete. From her mother Jenny, she had also inherited her thick red hair, today tied back in a top knot that bobbed atop her head like an antenna. Juniper was dressed like all the other protestors. She wore the standard uniform of a Grand Canyon hiker: Teva sandals, purple Patagonia swimming trunks, and a T-shirt, hers with a small red question mark.
Juniper had landed in the Navajo jail in Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Diné, otherwise recognized as the Navajo people, for protesting at the site of the proposed development called Grand Canyon Esplanade—known as the Esplanade to friend and foe alike—that would squat atop Cape Solitude on the Navajo Reservation, overlooking the Little Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, like a wet turd on the altar at the National Cathedral.
The resort, sitting directly above the sacred confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers, seemed blasphemous to many Navajo. And with every passing day, the opposition grew.
The impressive colored site plan envisioned a 1.4-mile electric tramway that would shuttle thousands of visitors daily to the bottom of the Grand Canyon in brightly colored gondolas. It also featured an elevated walkway and amphitheater below the rim, as well as a hotel, restaurant, RV center campground, and other resort attractions atop the rim. It would sprawl over 420 acres and eventually close off another 40,000 acres of Navajo land. The infrastructure alone would cost more than $65 million, with no water, electricity, sewer, or roads within miles of the project site. And to build the resort itself would triple that amount. That was a lot of money.
The entire area was sacred to the Navajo, Hopi, Havasupai, Paiute, and other native people of the Grand Canyon region. It was the Place of Emergence and the home of their most powerful guardian god, Masaw. The river runners and the local environmentalists who made up the bulk of the jailed sixty were protesting the desecration of a beloved wilderness shrine by turning it into an amusement park for fat, lazy slugs, like the ones who visited the Hualapai Skywalk further downriver in the Grand Canyon. Ultimately, the deal depended upon the approval of the Navajo Tribal Council, the land’s owners.
Juniper watched the colorful protestors shucking and jiving, waiting for their release. Its details still remained a mystery. They seemed to be in a holding pattern.
She replayed the wild events of the day from dawn when she hitched a ride with a friend from her home on Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation to the nearest Rez town of Tuba City. From there to Flagstaff, she caught a bus that deposited her around ten a.m. at the busy transit station on Santa Fe Boulevard. After that, she walked about a mile east to the Canyoneers River Running Company warehouse, where she joined the protestors preparing for a road trip out to the Esplanade development site. There, they would feed the press their story of the day.
At noon, five dozen agitators piled into two battered yellow Canyoneers school buses used to shuttle river trip clients across the desolate Navajo Reservation to the launch site at Lees Ferry. On the hour-long trip, Juniper and her newfound pals sang songs and discussed the Esplanade in the vilest of terms.
The person in charge seemed to be a dreadlocked hippie from the Flagstaff Chapter of the Sierra Club. Ritually clad in a long, cotton, tie-dye skirt, Pepper explained how as soon as they arrived at Cape Solitude, they were going to march to where the press was waiting. Then she and several selected folks, including a local Navajo rancher and the leader of the Grand Canyon River Outfitters Association, were going to proclaim their undying opposition to the obscene proposal to build a resort and amusement park ride in the Grand Canyon, defiling one of America’s most spiritual places.
But as soon as they arrived at the development site, the shit hit the fan. The press was there as promised, but so was a large contingent of Navajo Tribal Police, officers from the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office, and the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Clearly, the law enforcement community had been tipped off and mobilized en masse so they could stop the protest before it built up steam. Because when the protestors exited the two buses, with Juniper waving a homemade flag emblazoned with the movement’s logo, a blue circle with a red diagonal line running from the top left to bottom right, enclosing a green gondola, they were informed by a Navajo Police Captain that they were trespassing and needed to leave immediately. The Navajo police seemed like they were along for the ride, even though it was their land. The Anglo cops, on the other hand, acted like they were having a ball.
Juniper had attached her flag to a large oar she found in the back of the bus, and she started chanting, “HELL NO! WE WON’T GO!”
Soon, her fellow protestors joined the chorus, waving their fists defiantly and taunting the police, who looked ready for a fight.
They never got the chance to deliver their speech, but they did get filmed for the evening news as they were forcefully arrested and then loaded back onto their buses, impounded for the rough, four-hour bus ride to Window Rock—the only Navajo jail big enough to hold such a large crew. In the process, Juniper was maced, groped, and roughed up by several redneck cops.
At the jail, they were herded like cattle into the holding pen. But they were not booked. Their personal possessions were not confiscated. They were not given the opportunity to call a lawyer. Their jailors simply left them with a few cases of bottled water, then vanished.
“We were bad little boys and girls,” pronounced Pepper loudly to the group, “and now they are teaching us all a lesson. They are going to make us sit here and rot for a while in their smelly jail, and then they are going to give us back our buses and send us on our merry way. You watch.”
Yes indeedy, it had been quite the exciting day, smiled Juniper. Civil disobedience was exhilarating. But the more Juniper looked at how the whole nasty affair had played out, the more convinced she became that it just didn’t add up.
Why were there so many cops waiting for them at the northern edge of Navajo land?
Why were the white man cops there for a minor trespassing matter taking place on the Rez?
Why did they arrest the protestors right away so they couldn’t speak to the press?
Why weren’t the Navajo jailors following the normal booking process?
Why did the Navajo Police act like they were being asked to eat a giant shit sandwich?
Who was really pulling the strings here?
Juniper stood up and walked over to grab a bottle of water. Several river runners sitting around the folding table nodded in greeting.
“Long day, huh?” said a blonde Adonis with a megawatt smile.
Juniper uncapped the plastic bottle. “Yeah, I think we’re on Indian time now.”
Everyone laughed as the tall redhead turned around and returned to her seat against the back wall. Juniper was amused that no one had picked up on the fact she was an Indian. Apparently, given her dark skin, they thought she was some hellbent Hispanic girl. The Navajo cops thought that because one of them had said to his buddy, “Never seen a Beaner with red hair.”
Juniper needed her true identity to remain a secret from the Navajo authorities. If they found out they were holding the daughter of the former Hopi Tribal Chairman Joe Savutewa in their jail, things were going to get ugly real fast. The Navajo and Hopi were traditional adversaries—some might even say enemies—and her father had confronted the Navajo on several occasions during his eight-year tenure as the leader of the Hopi Nation. He had hard-heartedly ordered Navajo families removed from the Joint Use Area. He had relentlessly sued the Navajo over mineral and water rights. He had even publicly questioned the Navajo right to own the largest Indian reservation in America given that they had arrived in Arizona and New Mexico in the 1500s, while the Hopi had been there for millennia.
The Navajo disliked her old man more than Juniper did. If they could embarrass her proud father by forcing him to come to bail his daughter out of a Navajo jail, they definitely would. To bring such shame to her family would be unforgivable.
One troubling thought led to another. What would her mother Jenny Hatch think about the mess Juniper was in? Not that Jenny was around to find out. No, she was long gone. Juniper had never understood her disappearance. Something about the norovirus, maybe. And all her investigations had led to dead ends. Her father never talked about it. Juniper was only five when her mother left. She barely remembered her. Her father told everyone that Jenny caught a very rare disease, traveled to Cuba for some experimental treatment, and was never heard from again.
Was she still alive? She would be in her sixties. Did she die? And where was her twin sister Pinyon?
Following her thoughts, Juniper’s mood darkened. She gripped the underside of her legs tightly to avoid screaming. She was tired of getting the run around about her family and everything else. She was angry about how everyone played fast and loose with the truth. And it was high time for some answers.