20/20 at Big Mountain: How Television Tried to Craft a Narrative of Indigenous Reality ... and Failed
A story of personal experience in 1986...
It was June 1986. I was at Big Mountain / Black Mesa returning with my sons Julian and Adrian and my wife Angela to the land where I first encountered “Indians” and “Indian law”.
We stayed at Diné Grandmother Roberta Blackgoat’s place, where I helped her son Danny work on building a shed.
Big Mountain was in crisis that summer. People from around the world arrived to support Diné resisting a deadline to “relocate” from an area the US declared to be exclusively Hopi. The shed building was a defiance of the US order to cease maintaining Diné housing.
For as long as anyone can recall, Big Mountain has been home to both Hopi and Diné. They have maintained a balance through ceremony, ritual, seasonal exchange, bluff and posture, occasional direct wounding, but no efforts to rub one another out. Traditional Hopi and Diné acknowledge the right of the other to share this region of Earth.
American "civilization" came to Big Mountain in the form of Kit Carsons’s violence, executive orders, and treaties negotiated under US threats of extermination, bounding the land according to lines on paper maps, squeezing Hopi and Diné into smaller arcs of the planet than either had lived on for generations.
The US "reservations" for Hopi and Diné disrupted their original relations to the land and each other.
In 1986, the Hopi and Diné around Big Mountain were standing in the way of American access to “resources” — coal for electricity, electricity for "development."
The “relocation” project was to fence Hopi and Diné into separate areas aimed to clear the way for coal extraction.
The official story was that joint ownership of the land ‘impeded the ability of the two tribal councils to effectively negotiate with mining companies’.
Conveniently, Peabody Coal Company and the Hopi Tribal Council were represented by the same lawyer, John Boyden, a gross conflict of interest that Charles Wilkinson would reveal in his 1999 memoir, Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest.
People at Big Mountain resisted displacement of their lives and division of their lands. In this, they embodied the politics of Indigenous Peoples everywhere on Earth, confronting the global nation-state industrial system, speaking for "all our relations" against a system that knows no relation except the market.
Big Mountain in 1986 became a site for politics, a story for the media: Indigenous peoples confronting the nation-state industrial system.
Media arrived to ‘cover’ the story.
On a day when David Monongye, Hopi traditional leader, was expected to visit the local Navajo community, a crew arrived from "20/20," the ABC television newsmagazine. They clambered out of their van — camera and sound technicians, the producer, and the "star"—the face for the camera.
The producer for 20/20, Danny Schechter, had a reputation for understanding politics of resistance; in his radio days in Boston, he was known as "Danny Schechter, the news dissector." While Danny looked at his notes, technicians unobtrusively set to work gathering material for their editors.
The star — the face — was another matter. He looked around nervously, staying close to the van. He clearly felt out of place, though for the broadcast audience he would seem the confident expert: informed, involved, concerned.
His real concern was to protect himself, especially his hair, from the sun, wind, and dust of the hot desert day. He kept jumping back into the van, sitting in air-conditioned seclusion, combing his hair. He seemed a pitiful creature, if pity is relevant for someone earning so much money doing so little work.
Part-way through the morning, one of the crew stepped on a Hopi Kachina figure — a representation of one of the Hopi gods — that was placed on the ground, and broke it. He tossed the pieces aside as one might a broken doll from a toy store.
I heard Danny laugh and say he hoped this wouldn't bring bad luck.
None of us knew that before the day was out the star would manage to lock himself and the crew out of the running van, creating a crisis more palpable to them than the one they were filming.
The heart of my story is the two moments when I saw the truth of television, the fabrication of mass media, America's story to itself about “Indians”.
I was sitting on a rock with Angela, looking around, watching the goings-on. There's a beautiful photo of that moment, taken by my older son, Julian.
Danny came over and asked if he could interview me for the show. I said I wouldn't mind; what did he have in mind? "Just a few questions about why you're here," he said.
So, he got the camera and microphone set up and asked, "Why are you at Big Mountain?"
I started to talk about my work as a founding staff attorney in the Shiprock office of Dinébe’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’diit’ahii, Navajo legal services, about how that led to an academic career questioning law and American culture, and about how the Diné helped me to understand life.
"Wait!" he said, "That's not it. That's not what I mean. I want you to say why you are here today at Big Mountain. Let's begin again." So, we did.
He put the question again, "What are you doing here at Big Mountain?"
Again, I began to talk about my relation to Big Mountain and the peoples who have lived around it since time immemorial, how they taught me the relationship between humans and land.
"Wait!" he said again, "That's not it. You are talking too personally. I want you to tell me why outsiders would come to this place, why all these non-Indians are here. That's what I'm looking for."
"Well," I said, "I can't do that. I can't tell you why all these other people are here. You'll have to ask them. I can't speak for anyone but myself. I can only tell you what it means to me, why I am here."
"That's not going to work," he said.
He gave up. I didn't fit the narrative in the show he imagined, the Anglo outsider speaking generically for all outsiders at Big Mountain. My personal story didn't fit his mass media frame. I suddenly sensed the fakery of this purported documentary.
I also knew I wasn't going to get the 15 seconds of fame Andy Warhol had promised.
The full impact of the fakery of the media narrative came to me with the arrival of Grandfather David, Thomas Banyacya, and two other Hopi elders in a pickup truck.
Danny was surprised, having counted on them arriving later; but he knew he had a story and began to arrange the crew.
The face, revealing his superficial grasp of the situation, nervously questioned whether there would be a fight between the Hopi and Navajo and retreated into the van. Danny assured him there would be no fight and ushered him into the circle of Hopi visitors, speaking softly to him the questions he should ask.
Grandfather David did not wait for questions. Through Thomas Banyacya's translation, he began speaking of traditional Hopi concerns, and saying they were "of one mind" with their Diné neighbors.
Grandfather David spoke about Earth and Peoples and interruptions of natural ways by governments and corporations. He spoke about “our true white brothers” who will join Native peoples in the effort to restore balance in our relations with Earth.
His message was one he consistently delivered, as at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, where Thomas Banyacya also translated:
Grandfather David said all this slowly, taking time to let the translated words move in our minds. All of it was going into the cameras and microphones. When he finished, a ripple of assent moved through the circle of elders.
The face, nonplused, unsure what was happening, unsure why he was here in this hot, dry desert where the wind continually unbrushed his hair, looked at the circle of elders for a moment.
That Grandfather David had finished speaking was undeniable. That the elders had agreed and were satisfied was clear.
The face hesitated a moment more, then suddenly put his microphone under the nose of one of the elders and asked, "What do you think about what he just said?"
The elder didn't speak. Perhaps he didn't understand English. Perhaps he didn't understand the possibility this man hadn't understood that Grandfather David had spoken for all of them.
It was obvious the face did not understand what it meant that the elders were "of one mind."
His effort to get another elder to speak also fizzled.
The significance of the two aborted interviews came to me: media reality tries to fit people and events into pre-formulated narratives intended to implant in viewers’ minds a sense they have seen truth.
Danny wanted me to represent a generic ‘White American’ view, not an actual personal narrative.
The face wanted to separate the Hopi elders into ‘personalties’ with divergent ‘opinions’, maybe get them to argue with each other to drive viewer interest.
The crew began to focus on other aspects of the scene. Danny began talking with his assistant. The face went back to the van, where he realized he had locked the keys inside, with the engine running.
The locked running van created a crisis. The crew became desperate and eventually smashed a window to get in, turning the vehicle that been their spaceship and haven in the desert into a dust-filled torture chamber for their escape.
As the distraught crew stepped over broken glass from the smashed window to get into their van, one of them said, "What shall we do about the glass?" Another said, "We have visited their sacred site and we are leaving an offering." The others laughed.
Perhaps none of their videotape survived the journey: None of the scenes they shot that day were in the program when it aired. Instead, the broadcast borrowed clips from the documentary "Broken Rainbow" by Maria Florio and Victoria Mudd.
We are victims of the notion that seeing is believing. We forget that what we see in mediated vision is a "show," a "program."
You know the story of Plato's cave? The allegory of truth and representation? What people take to be real in the cave is only a shadow of an image of the truth outside the cave. Plato described the people in the cave watching shadows cast on the wall by unseen actors carrying objects in front of an unseen fire pit.
Modern mass media is a cave where shadows appear on electric screens, cast by unseen editors who move actors in front of cameras out of sight of the viewers' eyes.
The same process is repeated with every new story — ‘news story’.
Current media narratives aimed at shaping our thoughts about Indigenous peoples’ lands involve Thacker Pass and Oak Flat.
Greetings Peter: What a fantastic, beautiful first hand story that illustrates the inauthentic facade that goes by the name “mass media.” I love your brilliant ability to make the ludicrous hysterically funny, while at the same time making the profound nature of the Elders’ protocols, and deep wisdom and connection with the Earth so evident. You did a great job of communicating your own and your family’s connection with the People. Thanks for this amazing and gifted substack post. I love the photo of you and Angela.
I am blown away reading this!