The contamination of the atmosphere by Four Corners Power Plant is so pervasive that smoke from the plant was the only evidence of current human activity on earth visible from the moon during the Apollo space program.

"At the end of this summer, before I came back to school, the people in my town got together and held a prayer ceremony for me in the Native American Church--which is an attempt to combine Christianity with the Navajo culture. Although I am not a member of the church, the ceremony was a gesture which I accepted from the people because it was their way to support me in coming back to school here. All through the night people sat around the fire in a hogan singing, praying and chanting with the drums. Old people sat up all night long praying and singing so that I could come back and help them. There were times when no music was played and each person prayed silently to himself. Other times the Road Man (medicine man) passed the prayer stick to some one who would sing and chant to the accompaniment of the water drum. This is a religion of the earth, and the ceremony involved humbling me to all living things. The fire, the smoke, the peyote, are all seen as means of putting the body and the prayer out into the elements. The purpose of this ceremony was to call upon the forces of nature to give me strength and wisdom to come back."

Sue Williams '77, a Sisseton Sioux by birth, was raised on Window Rock Reservation--a Navajo reservation approximately three times the size of Massachusetts, which encompasses 1/2 of northern Arizona, a good portion of northeastern New Mexico, and a smaller chunk of southern Utah. Williams, a resident tutor at Quincy House, is now in her first year at Harvard Law School, after majoring in economics as an undergraduate.

"All through the night, people kept telling me to come back. They kept repeating over and over 'our young people get educated, they leave us, and they don't come back and help us. Our land is being taken away. Look what's happening to us.' I made a committment that night, I reaffirmed a commit ment that I have, to go back home and help those people there at home."

After she graduated from Radcliffe, Williams deffered her admission to Harvard Law School, and returned to Window Rock where she worked as Chairman of the Navajo Tax Commission, implementing a tax she developed in her senior thesis. This tax program, which is currently being disputed it the courts, may give Indians the right to tax non-Indians on reservations.

In 1962 the Tribal Council (the elected representative body of the Tribal Government set up by the Department of the Interior) signed a lease with a consortium of utility companies approving the building of Four Corners Power Plant (the largest power plant in the southwest) and sanctioning the digging of a large strip mine--the largest in the country. The reservation remained quiet, the mine was dug, the plant was built, and the Tribal Council seemed content with the royalty provisions of less than 3% on a ton of coal, and agreed not to tax the utilities for 35 years. In 1968 the Tribal Council signed a similar lease with a different consortium of utility companies allowing them to build the Navajo Generating Station, approving the digging of Black Mesa strip mine. Once again they agreed not to tax for 35 years. This time, protests broke out when the Navajos heard that Black Mesa, sacred Indian land, was going to be destroyed for a strip mine. In the six years after the signing of the first lease, the Navajos had seen the destruction caused by a strip mine and had watched Four Corners spew 123 million pounds of sulphur dioxide into the air each year. Six years of watching the energy companies desecrate their environment had taught people what another strip mine and power plant meant, and they weren't going to see sacred land destroyed so that people in southern Arizona, southern Utah, and Los Angeles, could be supplied with more electricity.

However the protests were unsuccessful, the mine was dug, and the plant was built. The Tribal Council had already signed the leases, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (an agency within the Department of the Interior entrusted with safe-guarding Indian interests) had approved them.

Williams says it was during the Black Mesa protests when she was a sophmore in high school, that she first decided to go to college and become a lawyer.

"I was very naive then," she says, "I thought I had to go to a good college, get good grades, go to law school, and get a good education, so that I can deal with all these well-educated non-Indian people on an equal ground. I eventually decided to go to Harvard because I hadn't seen the east, and once again from my very naive framework, thought that economics at Harvard would be really very good," she says, laughing at herself.

"It was difficult being here at first," Williams continues, "but I also wanted to understand this other way of life because in some very significant sense, this institution, and the kinds of people who come here, represented the attitudes and the experiences of people who might be seen as our oppressors."

Williams says she was once a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM)--an indian activist group) when it first started. I believed there had to be the board that whacked the donkey on the back and said, 'wake up America. Look what's happening!" I think it served it's place, and there still is that need, but there's also a need to say O.K., now that we have your attention, now that we've made these problems known, let's have a second wave of people come in and try to deal with these problems. That's where I've tried to fit in. That's where I see my life's purpose--in that second wave."

"For the last 150 years we've known that we don't play and win wars using bows and arrows," Williams continues. "We are having to use white man's tools. White man's tools mean having a knowledge of economics, having a knowledge of the law, and fighting them on their own terms. So while it may be all well, and good and humanitarian, in our legal briefs and commercial agreements to say?--we're destroying a culture, we're destroying a way of life, and these are our concerns, it requires more than that. What we're going to have to do is show, in a straightforward economic analysis, that these power plant leases and coal leases, do not give the tribe a fair deal. And we submit that we can hold up to any comparison anywhere in the world, that we are getting the shaft all the way. And that's what a court is going to hear. That's what a court is going to listen to. Not the religious arguments."

Williams says she developed the Tax Program, the first comprehensive Indian tax program in the country, in an attempt to raise badly needed money, and to correct some of the injustices in the two power plant leases and their coal leases. The three-part tax program consists of the Business Activity Tax (based on gross receipts over $500,000 per year), the Possesory Interest Tax (which is based on the difference between what a leasor should be getting and what he is getting over the life of the lease) and the Sulphur Emissions Charge (which Williams says is legally a regulatory measure and not a tax).

"As we saw it back in 1975, there was a real problem with the leases. We felt there was a gross violation of trust responsibility on the part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in signing and approving those leases which have essentially created islands in the Navajo nation which the tribe cannot touch."

"We think there's so much at stake in not addressing the very severe problem with the leases. We have, we feel, an entire culture at stake when you have activities such as these destroying the enviornment, destroying the land, and creating economic and social disruption, which the tribe is unable to control. That is the crucial point. We think there ought not to be paths set which will destroy the environment and are in conflict with the values of the Navajos'."