Black Mesa is a high desert, arid, with few streams or rivers aboveground. Water tends to come from above or below: sometimes, as a gentle rain. Other times, a rushing monsoon. Navajo and Hopi people have called it home for thousands of years. Its water reservoirs— a complex system of underground pools called “aquifers”— sustain people, livestock, and agriculture on the plateau. More recently, that scarce resource fed the needs of Peabody Coal, an extractive industry that drained the Mesa dry over the last half century. Nicole Horseherder helped establish the non-profit Sacred Water Speaks with a clear goal: get Peabody Energy off the aquifer and bring water back to her community. Amber McCrary reads “Monsoon Musings,” a poem she wrote about the moments when heavy rains arrive in her desert homeland.
Black Mesa is a high desert, arid, with few streams or rivers aboveground. Water tends to come from above or below: sometimes, as a gentle rain. Other times, a rushing monsoon. Navajo and Hopi people have called it home for thousands of years. Its water reservoirs— a complex system of underground pools called “aquifers”— sustain people, livestock, and agriculture on the plateau. More recently, that scarce resource fed the needs of Peabody Coal, an extractive industry that drained the Mesa dry over the last half century.
Nicole Horseherder helped establish the non-profit Sacred Water Speaks with a clear goal: get Peabody Energy off the aquifer and bring water back to her community. Amber McCrary reads “Monsoon Musings,” a poem she wrote about the moments when heavy rains arrive in her desert homeland.
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Episode 3: The Aquifer
AMBER MCCRARY
“Monsoon Musings”
Fill me with your water
I see your gray clouds from afar
We aren’t scared
Yet celebratory
Your gray clouds, moving fast but not violent
Desert winds increase
As our hearts beat with excitement
This undulation of drops
Come fast as they leave
We wait all year for you
Celebrate around your arrival
Olla’s hollow for your yearly presence
We all muse into your monsoon
Dance for hours
Sing with throats uncollapsing
Sand dances for you in this stiff air
Fill us with your language
Fill us with your breath
Tell us you will come back
Then we will celebrate until the next time
Remember you as our muse
Remember you as our life
our love
LEAH THOMAS:
As the Colorado River carves a line westward, it skirts an expansive desert to the east. Orange, and rocky: a hazy horizon molded by striped plateaus and buttes. Leaving the deep Earth in Supai, this story takes place on a land suspended somewhere between the flat plains of Navajo Nation and the crown of the blue sky overhead—Black Mesa.
Black Mesa is a high desert, arid, with few streams or rivers aboveground. Water here tends to come from above or below: sometimes as a gentle rain. Other times, as a monsoon, rushing over arroyos. When it rains, the toads croak.
Navajo and Hopi people have called Black Mesa home for thousands of years. Its water reservoirs—a complex system of underground pools called “aquifers”—sustain people, livestock, and agriculture on the plateau through springs and shallows. More recently, that scarce resource fed the needs of Peabody Coal, an extractive industry that quite literally drained the Mesa dry over the last half century.
But, today, there are no smokestacks on the horizon. They came down in 2020, a year after the Navajo Generating Station—the largest coal-burning plant in the American West—closed its doors for good. Now, the Mesa stands at a crossroads.
This is a story about what happens when water stewardship transfers from the people to industry, the incredible campaign waged to win that resource back, and the transition an exhausted community now faces.
I’m Leah Thomas. I’m the founder of Intersectional Environmentalist, an organization dedicated to amplifying the voices of communities of color fighting against environmental injustice.
From Wonder Media Network, this is As She Rises. For our third season, we’re traveling down the Colorado River, listening to stories of resilience.
At the top of the show, you heard Monsoon Musings by Amber McCrary. Amber’s family hails from the land surrounding Black Mesa. She’s familiar with the tenuous relationship that exists between that land, its people, and the extractive industries that have settled there. Industries that take water, power, and resources from this desert landscape, and ship it across hundreds of miles to power the lights of Los Angeles and irrigate the golf courses of Las Vegas.
It’s a long-standing state of affairs today’s guest is familiar with.
NICOLE
[Nicole introduces herself in Navajo]
My name is Nicole Horseherder. I'm from Black Mesa. I am the director of an organization called Tó Nizhoní Aní, which we translate to mean Sacred Water Speaks.
Nicole Horseherder has lived most all her life on Black Mesa. And as is the case across the Southwest, Nicole has watched her home, and its relationship to water, transform—watching climate change happen before her eyes.
NICOLE:
Growing up on Black Mesa, my earliest childhood memories is the outdoors. I spent a lot of time outside. I spent a lot of time following my grandmother with the sheep walking across the land. She was a woman who probably walked maybe six miles a day. We didn't have running water. We relied on these springs and seeps and the seasonal rains to get our water needs. We are dry farmers, so we relied on the monsoons, but these things were reliable. My grandmother always used to make us drink at least a cup of water before we, we leave. In my childhood, I don't remember being thirsty. For sure, we took it for granted. As a child, I did. I just expected these springs and seeps to always be there.
Our people, Diné people, we have a relationship with water, as our mother, as our father. It has a life. It gives life. It takes life. It's powerful. It is the foundation of health. And I think that’s what guides our lives as the original people of this land. And that's what we try to model for our children. So they never forget that when their human mother and human father is gone from this earth, that they always, always have their earth mother and their universal father. We live in the cycle of, of water, each and every day. It's a reminder of how much of our lives and ourselves are made up of water and how very connected we are.
LEAH:
When Nicole returned home from college, that cycle had been interrupted. The seeps, the aquifers… they just weren’t the same.
NICOLE:
I started to see some changes. And they were so subtle. They were so subtle that it doesn't cause concern when it's like that. But much later when the, some of the springs disappeared and, and they didn't come back, that's when the red flags started coming up. And then I realized that the local water sources were gone. A lot of my elders, including my grandmother, already noticed the springs and the seeps drying up.
LEAH:
So Nicole and the elders in her community spearheaded the first investigations into where the water had gone. And the culprit was revealed: Peabody Energy.
Peabody Energy is a coal and energy company with several mines across the US. Back in the 1960s, one of its subsidiaries, Peabody Western Coal, signed a series of contracts with the Navajo and Hopi tribal governments. Peabody promised the Tribes jobs and revenue in the coal industry, as well as a coal-fired power plant on reservation lands—essentially creating a self-sufficient coal economy on Navajo Nation. In return, Peabody received mineral rights in the area—and access to a very important water source on Black Mesa.
Under Black Mesa, several aquifers embedded in the rock provide water aboveground through springs and seeps. It’s a complex system, and while several pools hydrate surrounding areas, very few of them hold significant sources of water—and almost none have potable water. The largest drinkable water source in this system is the Navajo aquifer, or N-aquifer. It’s actually the sole source of drinking water for the 50,000 Native people and 14 communities living on Black Mesa. When water from the N-aquifer comes to the surface, it’s some of the cleanest water around—not just on Black Mesa, not just in Arizona, but in all of the Southwest.
The N-aquifer isn’t just drinking water—it’s one of the most plentiful, dependable water sources in the desert of northern Arizona.
Peabody developed coal strip mines across the Southwest, including two on Black Mesa. The one closer to Nicole’s home used a slurry pipeline: or, a water-powered transport line for moving coal out of the mine and over to generating stations. So, when Peabody set up its operations across the Southwest—operations that required huge amounts of water to function… where did they get the water? The most reliable water source around: the N-aquifer.
Peabody’s effects on the N-aquifer were so severe, they garnered the attention of the National Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. In 2000, they published a study, called “Drawdown: Groundwater Mining on Black Mesa,” which investigated the state of the N-aquifer. And even though she’d seen Peabody’s effects firsthand, the report shocked Nicole.
NICOLE:
And what it told us is that the ice age, pristine water that existed in the Navajo aquifer at one time was being pumped day and night by Peabody Coal Company, in amounts and speed that was clearly contributing to the eventual, you know, destruction of our aquifer.
It was horrendous what was happening. What made this worse was that when we approached our tribal council, the Navajo Nation Council, half the council delegates at the time didn't know that Navajo water was being used to slurry coal, like this. Unacceptable, just unacceptable, that leadership would not know what's happening right there with industry that's been contracted by the Navajo Nation and had no idea that the water was being taken right out from under Navajo people. Just unacceptable.
LEAH:
The Drawdown study confirmed Peabody’s role in the aquifer shortage.
For over thirty years, Peabody channeled water out of the aquifer at a rate of four to six thousand acre-feet a year. One acre-foot is enough water to cover a football field in a foot of water. That’s more than three times the rate at which researchers know the aquifer is able to recharge. By the time Nicole had come home and seen those dry seeps for the first time, Peabody had been a fixture in the area for more than three decades, pumping millions of gallons of water a day, often to a power plant nearly 300 miles away. The aquifer was parched.
In 2000, Nicole helped establish Sacred Water Speaks, a Diné-led nonprofit, with a clear task: get Peabody Energy off the N-aquifer. For the next five years, Nicole and her allies developed a number of strategies to override Peabody’s claim to the groundwater. It was no small task. They’d have to contend with multiple state governments, persuade chapters of the Navajo Nation to speak out against the mining operation, and, of course, go up against Peabody Energy itself.
Nicole’s campaign confronted the California Public Utility Commission, which was a majority shareholder in Peabody’s coal transport. They demanded that the owner of a partner generating station stop accepting Peabody coal. They reached out to each chapter of the Navajo Nation—110 in total—to sign a resolution supporting the end of Peabody pumping the N-aquifer. It passed in the majority of the chapters.
The work, though, was grueling. Nicole became an interpreter of sorts, translating engineering and legal documents between extractive industries and Navajo communities—literally, for the first time.
NICOLE:
A lot of hours were spent traveling to communities on really rough roads. Some communities didn't pass it, some communities tabled it, some communities were confused. But, um, one of my first jobs with Tó Nizhoní Aní was as an interpreter. I was basically interpreting the technical information straight out of the NRDC study and explaining to the people in our Diné language what was happening to the aquifer. And probably this is one of the first times that technical information like that, talking about the geology and the hydrology and some of the physics of how the water comes to the surface, was being explained to these communities. And it was beautiful because it showed that our language could grow. It showed that our language could accommodate any situation, and it could be used in this way to explain very technical, very complex issues and ideas. And the people understood. The people were understanding what was happening. And it was a very intense time, but it was also groundbreaking in many ways.
LEAH:
Five years into the campaign, a breakthrough: the California Public Utility Commission, or CPUC, ruled that in times of critical impact to water, potable water could not be used for industrial purposes. The ruling was partially influenced by the individual Navajo Chapter treaties gathered by Sacred Water Speaks. When it came time to renew the contracts releasing mineral and aquifer rights to Peabody, they fell through. The slurry pipeline to Black Mesa mine—and the mine itself—shut down.
This was a huge success and the first step towards reclaiming the N-aquifer from Peabody. But it wasn’t the end of the story. Peabody continued draining the aquifer in ways that skirted the CPUC ruling. And though the slurry pipeline had closed, other mines continued to operate… all to feed some of the biggest polluters in the area: the generating stations. The N-aquifer would be at risk as long as those plants were around.
So, Nicole faced her biggest challenge yet. She needed to decommission a power plant.
We’ll hear about that right after this quick break from our partner.
[MIDROLL]
LEAH:
By 2006, Black Mesa Mine and its slurry pipeline had been shut down—but the Navajo Generating Station remained.
Even if the N-aquifer water wasn’t being used for slurry, Peabody still used it to support day-to-day operations… Using an entire community’s only source of drinking water to wet roads and clean off equipment.
Nicole began pushing for the Navajo Nation to move off of coal fired power all together.
NICOLE:
Five years prior, we were already saying, the market for coal is going down. You're losing money fast. And our message was really directed at the Navajo Nation, and it was, you know, you've got to come up with an alternative. You've got to come up with a transition plan because this is coming down the pipeline. We're here to tell you that this is what the market is telling us, and you need to look out for that, and it's gonna bring changes to the nation. And if you're not ready, then we're gonna end up going off an economic cliff.
LEAH:
This next chapter took another 15 years of tireless work: campaigning against extractive industries, publicizing Peabody’s effects on the Mesa, doing everything possible to avoid Peabody sinking any further into the land.
Finally, the time came in the 2010s for Peabody to renew their leases on Navajo Nation. This was the time to strike.
Nicole had made it clear just how detrimental Peabody was to Black Mesa’s water source. The issue remained, however, that Navajo Nation had gotten a power plant out of the contract. It was coal-burning, imperfect in many respects, and toxic—but it supplied power and money to the nation. Even advocates of pushing Peabody out of the area weren’t sure there was a clear future for Black Mesa without the Navajo Generating Station.
But Nicole saw past that. Whether the plant went to another buyer or a tribal enterprise, the issue wasn’t who owned Navajo Generating Station. The issue was the station itself. There was no clean future in the shadow of the largest coal-burning plant in the West.
NICOLE:
The Navajo transitional energy company tried to come in and take over the power plant also. Through our efforts, we blocked that at least three times before they finally said, “We give up. We're not gonna try to take this plant over.” And at that point, that led to the final decommissioning and remediation efforts of the power plant.
LEAH:
In December of 2020, Nicole stood in the brisk cold of the Arizona desert, and watched as the smokestacks of the Navajo Generating Station came down. And after all these years of an exhausting fight… there wasn’t much relief.
[CLIP: DEMOLITION OF THE NGS]
NICOLE:
It's a numbing experience. You know, I wasn't even gonna go to the demolition of the smokestacks, but it wasn't until, a colleague of mine said, “You really should be there. You can make that connection between something that you fought long and hard to shut down, where you can actually physically see it coming down.”
The costs to myself as a person and the cost to my family are greater than any victory in this 20-year campaign. The assault on our only potable water sources continues. Someone else needs to pick up this fight.
You understand that it's the environment that supports you, it's the environment that provides the health and the wellbeing for the human being and the human family, the human system. If you understand that, then you fight for the water, and you fight for the land, and you fight for the air. These are the elements of life that sustain us. But yet, every day we live with companies and leadership that compromise these elements of life and sacrifice these elements of life.
LEAH:
When it comes to fighting extractive industries, we often only think as far ahead as stopping the action, closing the mine. Which is hard enough on its own. But what about the community that’s left to pick up the pieces afterwards? Now, with less water. Now, with poisoned water. A resource fought for and totally changed by the fight waged.
It’s a moment of uncertainty, where the patterns of the past are still so recent, ingrained in the way things are. And yet: there’s something new on the horizon. Something unknown, and maybe not quite understood. But it’s a different way of life, one informed by every moment up until this point.
Today, Sacred Water Speaks continues to head grassroots campaigns for environmental justice on Black Mesa. As the era of coal-dominated energy comes to a close, Nicole’s turned her attention to the future.
It’s a long process that includes bringing stakeholders back to the table to invest in the community they inserted themselves into. Sacred Water Speaks seeks a “Just Transition.”
NICOLE:
What we could potentially move to is something cleaner that doesn't use water in the way that coal mining, you know, requires and something that's not gonna displace people. Something in which we're being paid a fair market value for the, the land that is being used and the idle infrastructure that's left behind by these big power plants, like transmission lines. Let's put some clean energy on those lines. Let's create partnerships with the Navajo nation that are mutually beneficial instead of just one-sided. You know, our people have beared the cost of industry for so many decades.
It's time that utilities stop treating Indigenous people, you know, the original inhabitants of these lands, like trash, like people that can be sacrificed. They're literally destroying this homeland that we now call the United States.
It's important to lead our communities to be the ones to say how this should happen. Because so much of what has already happened has been a lot of decisions made for us. And, uh, a lot of decisions made on behalf of our communities and our resources in which we were never part of the decision making. We were never told there was no consent. And that's, that's gotta change. So it's important that we stay in front of transition and say how transition happens.
What's the priority here? What's the most important thing that we're fighting for here? We're fighting for the water for the future generations. We have to focus on that. We have to make sure that we stay focused on that, and that nothing else is distracting us.
LEAH:
Nicole has sacrificed so much of her life to this cause. Her words are a reminder that these fights aren’t won passively; they’re difficult, exhausting, and long. This is a fight for the next generation, for them to live better lives, and for them to pick up for the next generation after them.
Today, Black Mesa is looking at a much different future than it would’ve without Nicole’s work. So it’s on us to keep forging ahead: to thank the people who’ve come before us, and protect what we have for those who come after.
That’s a practice we’ll learn more about as we continue down the river, over the border into Southern California, where a farming community faces another uncertain future as a massive inland sea begins to dry up.
All season long, we’re traveling down the Colorado River and listening to stories of resilience.
To read more of Amber’s poetry, check out ambermccrary.com.
To support Nicole’s work, head to our show notes for a link to Sacred Water Speaks, where you can find more information about current campaigns and donate.
As She Rises is a Wonder Media Network Production. Our creator and editor is Grace Lynch. Our executive producer is Jenny Kaplan. Emily Rudder is our Head of Development. The show is produced by Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Ale Tejeda, Brittany Martinez, Adesuwa Agbonile, and Sara Schleede. Original music by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Jessica Jarvis.
Until next time.