Civil rights activist Robert Tohe was living in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2003 when a friend told him the Sierra Club was looking for an environmental justice organizer. He went to a meeting of the local group, liked what he saw, and in short order found himself as the Sierra Club’s lone Native American staff organizer in what is arguably the most heavily Indigenous part of the country.
Tohe hit the ground running, organizing local and national opposition to a plan by the US Forest Service and the Arizona Snowbowl—a nontribal enterprise—to make artificial snow using treated wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks, held as sacred to the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and numerous other Southwestern tribes.
“To Navajo people, spraying reclaimed sewage on lands that are sacred to us is an affront,” Tohe says. “The [Arizona] Department of Environmental Quality said that snow made with the treated wastewater would still be unsuitable for human contact. We respectfully ask that our sacred places be accorded the same respect as Christian places of worship. Would you spray sewage on church grounds?”
After two years of grassroots pressure and legal challenges, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the proposal on the grounds that it would violate the sanctity of the San Francisco Peaks. (The Navajo creation story tells that the Holy Ones created four sacred mountains to delineate Diné Bikéyah, the Navajo homeland: Mount Hesperus [Big Sheep Mountain] in present-day Colorado in the North; Blanca Peak [White Shell Mountain] in Colorado in the East; Mt. Taylor [Turquoise Mountain] in New Mexico in the South; and the San Francisco Peaks [Summit That Never Melts] in Arizona in the West.)
Other victories and challenges that loomed large early in Tohe’s tenure with the Club included retiring Peabody Coal’s notorious Black Mesa mine and its slurry pipeline crossing Navajo and Hopi lands; effecting a “just transition” (training and placement in family-supporting jobs) for workers who lose their coal industry jobs; and working with more than a dozen tribes to place 350,000 acres on Mt. Taylor off-limits to uranium mining by getting the land listed in the New Mexico Register of Cultural Properties.
“For decades, environmental issues have been labeled as ‘fringe’ by decision-makers,” Tohe told the New York Times after the snow-making decision was handed down. “Now they’re mainstream.”
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Born just outside the Navajo reservation in the early years of the baby boom, Tohe recalls having a happy childhood with a clean environment to play in and no real hardships. "It’s once you mature a little bit and go to school, that’s when you realize some of the other things that are going on,” he says.
Among those “other things” was an episode that occurred when Tohe was in the first grade. “I had an Anglo teacher who didn’t like us speaking in our native tongue, and I got caught speaking Navajo in the back of the room,” he recalls. “The teacher brought me up to the front of the room, gave me a bar of soap, ordered me to wash my mouth out in front of the whole class, and warned me never to speak Navajo in school again.
“I hate to think about how many tribal youth were indoctrinated and brainwashed during those years,” he says. “That was the breaking point with the culture for so many people. If you forget the language, you eventually forget the culture. And when you abandon the traditional ways and lifestyle, you give up a lot of critical knowledge that has sustained us over the millennia.”
When Tohe was still in grade school, his family moved to a rural area that was frequently inaccessible in the wintertime. “There was no school bus or secondary school where we lived, so I was shipped off to a Mormon boarding school in Albuquerque where Indian students were indoctrinated and schooled in the Mormon way of life.
“We were told we had to wholesale adopt another language and culture,” he recalls. “We accepted it at face value, because we couldn't exactly question what was going on. We didn't know what would happen to us. My parents didn't know, either; they just felt that education was the best way forward. Fortunately, I had an internal resistance against adopting a non-Native lifestyle—I didn’t want to lose my native language and culture. That internal resistance laid the foundation for my future work.”
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After high school Tohe stayed in Albuquerque to attend the University of New Mexico, where he studied “everything except what I was supposed to be studying," which in his case was science and engineering.
"There were all these changes going on—civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate—and they just swept us up," he remembers. "We protested on campus after Nixon ordered a major incursion into Vietnam, and we were labelled as radicals. The National Guard was called in to restore order, and some students were wounded. For a long time nobody had the nerve to clean up the blood. Every time you walked to class, you’d see it.”
Tohe decided to leave school and hitchhike around the West. “This was 1969 and the American Indian Movement was on the rise on the West Coast. I’d heard about what was going on at Alcatraz, so several of us hitchhiked out to San Francisco to join the occupation. I stayed in one of the prison cells. There was a dormitory, a school for kids who'd accompanied their parents to the occupation, a kitchen—we’d take a boat to the wharf and get donations of food—people in San Francisco were very supportive. We got a lot of help from local musical groups; I remember Creedence Clearwater Revival donated a tugboat.
“People were always coming and going, coming and going, and journalists were forever interviewing us,” Tohe recalls. “I don’t think the authorities knew what to make of us, or how to handle the occupation. They were mostly just monitoring us from what I could tell. There may have been spies on the island; I don’t know. What I do know is that the convergence of the antiwar, civil rights, and Native American rights movements at Alcatraz changed me forever. I’ve been a civil rights activist ever since.”
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Tohe hitchhiked back to Albuquerque, intending to finish college, but at the last minute he decided instead to pursue a National Indian Youth Council internship in Washington, DC, to see how the federal government works. “The aim of the internship,” Tohe says, “was to have us work on a piece of legislation, learn how a resolution becomes a bill, how it gets passed, how money is appropriated and budgeted—all that.”
Serendipitously, a bill then before Congress sought to restore tribal control of Taos Blue Lake—a place of worship high in the mountains of northern New Mexico—to the Taos Pueblo community, after 64 years of protest, appeal, and lobbying by Taos Pueblo residents and their allies.
“The Youth Council provided us with mentors who showed us the key congressional offices we needed to visit in order to get the bill passed,” Tohe says. “We learned how to use the tools of government to support a bill we really cared about, and there was no doubt in my mind that in my career I was going to speak for those who lack the wherewithal, the knowledge, or the voice to speak out on their own.”
Tohe returned to Albuquerque and got another year of college under his belt before the Youth Council offered him a full-time job working on coal issues. “Coal gasification was a huge deal at the time,” he says, “and the coal industry wanted to develop it on Navajo Nation lands. Community members who opposed it were speaking out, but they didn’t know how to organize support for their position, so I showed them how to go about it.”
Tribal members who favored the project labeled Tohe as an anti-jobs outsider. "The coal industry was spinning it as a job creator that would bring prosperity," Tohe says, "but there are always hidden costs and dangers—to health, to the environment, to water, to the young generation—that aren’t measured or factored in when the industry is making its pitch. My strategy was to pack as much educational material as possible into my presentation in order to give people the full picture.”
40 years later, the coal gasification project hasn’t happened—yet. “Corporations, developers, and the extractive industries never give up on these things,” Tohe says. “You have to keep winning these battles again and again.”
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Listing the battles Tohe has "won again and again" over the course of a16-year career with the Sierra Club is beyond the purview of this article, but a partial list includes beating back the Trump administration’s attempts to downsize national monuments to make way for drilling; keeping uranium mining out of Bears Ears National Monument and BLM lands adjacent to Grand Canyon National Park; compelling mining companies to clean up the toxic messes they create and then leave behind; slowing the spread of fracking in western New Mexico; blocking construction of a resort/entertainment complex on Navajo lands overlooking the Grand Canyon, including a tram that would shuttle up to 10,000 tourists a day to hallowed ground on the canyon bottom ... the list goes on.
The fight to stop uranium mining and clean up its toxic legacy is an ongoing battle. Four million tons of uranium were blasted out of the earth on Navajo Nation lands starting in 1944 to make atomic weapons, but after the Cold War ended more than 500 mines were abandoned, leaving behind a toxic legacy. The last uranium was pulled out of Navajo lands in 1986, yet the Centers for Disease Control has found uranium in the bodies of babies born there today.
“When uranium mining came in we were told to just accept it as the new normal and we’d get all these benefits from it,” Tohe recalls. “All tribal leaders knew was that it was a source of income, and that’s where it started and ended. There was no way the mining companies were going to tell us the full story, because they wanted that resource real bad, and they’d do whatever they had to do to get it, even if it meant turning communities where that ore was rich in the ground into sacrifice zones.
“Now the mining companies want to start extracting it again,” he says, “and they’re telling the new generation of Navajo decision-makers the same thing they told us—‘it’s good for your culture, it’s going to help you maintain your lifestyle’—when in actuality it will just sink us deeper into this mess of toxic pollution. Younger Navajo leaders think they can do the same thing we did, only this time the Navajo people will benefit, but they don’t know what they're dealing with.”
And yet, Tohe sees reason for optimism in the fact that the younger generation is challenging the nontraditional ways that are being imposed on them. “Young people see that climate change poses a threat to their livelihood and their way of life, and they aren’t satisfied with the answers they’re being given," he says.
“The first thing I'd say to a young Native American person who wants to get involved in environmental and justice work is reclaim your native language. Learn the native tongue because that will be a key to understanding and unlocking the wisdom of the ancients—the traditional ways. Knowledge about how to care for the land is in our DNA.
"Indigenous people see the earth as a living entity—our mother," he says. "Before we extract something from the earth, we always ask, ‘Why is it here? Was it put here for a reason? Is it meant to be used by humans, or should it be left alone as part of nature?’
"John Muir said that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. If we can recognize the interconnectedness of all things, we'll be OK."
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Editor's note: Tohe was recently diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. He was gracious enough to welcome this reporter into his home even though he was still recovering from a brutal round of chemotherapy that prompted his decision to enter hospice scarcely 24 hours before my visit. This reflection was drawn from our conversation that mid-October afternoon. What follows is an open letter to Robert's friends and colleagues from Sara Dillon, the Sierra Club's Western Region senior organizer, who worked closely with Robert.
Dear friends and colleagues,
It is with great sadness that I share the news with you that long-time Sierra Club environmental justice organizer Robert Tohe is battling stomach cancer and it has recently been diagnosed as terminal.
Robert is spending time at home with his family and community on the eastern part of the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. He asks for your prayers and healing thoughts.
Robert and his wife Hazel have been fearless advocates for environmental justice and Indigenous organizing in Arizona and New Mexico and beyond. Hazel is currently working for a community health equity nonprofit program on a contract basis and, as such, she takes half-time pay as she spends time with and cares for Robert.
Please consider helping Hazel take this time to be with Robert without economic worry by making a donation to her PayPal account: https://www.paypal.me/hjtohe
You can also send your thoughts and support to Robert and Hazel at their mailing address:
P.O. Box 3952
Yatahey, NM 87375
I also ask that you take a brief moment to record a few seconds of video on your phone to share with Robert. Please email your video to me at <sara.dillon@sierraclub.org> by December 22. We will compile these short messages into a video to share with Robert.
I look forward to receiving your videos and other messages to send along to Robert.