The Forest for the Trees
Photo by Paul Natonabah
Leroy Jackson in June, 1992
Leroy jackson called the giant ponderosas around his family’s summer camp near Tsaile, Arizona, “the grandfathers.” They were hundreds of years old, taller than six-story buildings, and too wide for a grown man to encircle in his arms. So Jackson was devastated when he arrived one year to find the grandfathers gone, leaving only jagged, oozing stumps. Jackson wasn’t the only Diné (Navajo) to mourn the loss of his tribe’s sacred forests: For some 30 years, the elders had watched, powerless, as loggers—non-Native and Native alike—stripped the reservation’s hills of more than 85 percent of their old growth. A 1981 report estimated that reforestation (which still has yet to start) would take 160 years to complete, but the logging continued.
In 1990, Jackson began waging a battle against unsustainable timber practices. With wife Adella Begaye and colleagues from Diné CARE (Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment), he turned popular sentiment, the legal system, and his own voice into tools of resistance. “Tribal officials have abandoned everything our elders have taught about the sacred Chuska Mountains,” he told a Congressional committee in 1993. “Trees are living beings and not simply a renewable resource … people living in those mountains still gather herbs, make offerings at sacred sites, herd sheep in the green pastures in the summertime. But now, the herbs are going away, the springs are drying up, sacred sites are being desecrated, and the pastures are covered with slash.”
Jackson’s words, though welcome to many Navajos, scared and angered others. Over the years his answering machine fielded numerous death threats, and during a 1992 protest, Navajo loggers burned him in effigy. Then on October 1, 1993, just five days before he was scheduled to bring evidence of timber-company corruption to the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., he disappeared. Last seen by friends on a visit to Taos, on October 9 he was found in his van, parked along State Highway 64 near Tierra Amarilla. In the back, wrapped from head to toe in a blanket, he lay dead. After a long investigation, a coroner attributed the death to an allergic reaction to methadone, a vial of which was found in the vehicle. Jackson’s friends and family suspected it was something else: murder.
In his 1997 book Legends of the American Desert, former Vanity Fair reporter Alex Shoumatoff outlined the many suspicious elements of Jackson’s death: the timing and threats, and the fact that Jackson’s van wasn’t noticed in an initial all-points bulletin. Plus, although he had the opiate methadone in his system, those who knew Jackson best swore he was not a drug user. Although Jackson suffered from debilitating migraines, his neighbor and doctor, David Lange, called him “incredibly healthy.” Begaye said she had never seen him touch drugs or alcohol, and didn’t believe he would, even if he ran out of migraine medicine. Bill Richardson (then a U.S. Congressman) and Senator John McCain both asked the F.B.I. to investigate the death. But the feds didn’t pick up the case, and while it—including a private investigation funded by colleague Sam Hitt of The Forest Guardians—was never officially closed, by 1997 it had been abandoned.
For his first 30 years, Jackson had seemed an unlikely enviro-hero. Drafted into Vietnam, he joined the Green Berets, was dishonorably discharged for disorderly conduct, and then drank his way around the West. According to anthropologist John W. Sherry in the biography Land, Wind, and Hard Words, Jackson woke up one morning in a Salt Lake City jail and decided he was done with booze. Soon, he was studying engineering at the University of Utah—where he met Begaye—and counseling other alcoholics. In what was perhaps a pivotal turn, Sherry writes that he took a job at the Four Corners Power Plant, but quit after discovering that each night the managers switched off the scrubbers that prevented polluted air from raining down on his reservation.
It was the late 1980s—a time, says former Diné CARE president Earl Tulley, of great turmoil and possibility for the Navajo. In the wake of the violent fall in 1988 of tribal chairman Peter MacDonald (later convicted of racketeering), Navajos began speaking up about the tribe’s many problems. “Everyone had just believed what the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] said,” Tulley explains. A group of activists—Tulley, Jackson, Begaye, and others—began asking questions and quickly taught themselves the necessary skills: how to galvanize public support, decipher industry proposals, connect with other organizations, and leverage the legal system. Together they turned Diné CARE into an effective roadblock against seemingly endless encroachments on tribal resources. In 1988, the group turned back plans to build a toxic-waste incinerator near Dilkon, Colorado, and three years later halted construction of an asbestos dump.
By 1993, Jackson had also built substantial opposition to the unusually aggressive tactics of the timber industry in the verdant Chuskas. This rare place amid the rugged high desert is so important to the Navajo that only medicine men are permitted to visit its peaks. “Our cathedrals were the pines,” Tulley says. “[But] the buzz of chain saws was not something [the elders] could stand up against alone.” In the summer of 1993, Jackson demanded an independent audit of logging operations, run by a shadowy assemblage of federal, tribal, and corporate interests. The deeper he probed, the more corruption, and trouble, he found. Jimmie Bitsui, a board member of the Navajo Forest Products Industries (which managed all logging on the reservation), told AP reporter Brenda Norell to “tell Leroy and Diné CARE someone’s going to get hurt.” Jim Carter, a local BIA manager, frequently suggested Jackson was driven by desire for personal gain. In truth, Jackson earned almost nothing during those years. When not fighting logging, he sold blankets and jewelry from his reservation to shops around Northern New Mexico.
But while Jackson’s death may have slipped into obscurity, not so his life. The end of industrial logging on the reservation, in 1994, was widely viewed as his legacy: Under massive debt, with mounting legal challenges and public resistance, NFPI closed its operations. And Diné CARE, this year celebrating its 20th anniversary, still continues its mission. “We feel his spirit is still around,” says Begaye, “helping us.”
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