Battle over oil

MONTEZUMA CREEK — It's just after sunrise, and in the pink of a new day, an oil pump is already doing its slow, rhythmic work. It is one of four wells on Mary Johnson's land, not far from where the old woman's home sits on a mesa at the northernmost tip of the massive Navajo Nation.

Like the huge pieces of equipment that dot the landscape, Johnson is up and moving at dawn every day — before the sun gets beastly hot — to tend chickens and chores on this sacred Indian land where she was raised. One of the day's concerns is water. The natural springs on her land are ruined, and groundwater is 6,000 feet down, so someone has to make the 50-mile trip to fill tanks in town and haul them back.

Maybe someday water will be carried across this land, but for now only oil makes its way over barren ground in a web of pipes and tubes. In the early morning quiet, you can hear them humming and vibrating.

Water. Oil.

It seems many of Johnson's 81 years have been spent watching the flow of these two fluid resources on the 160 acres given to her family generations ago. Watching each has caused her grief. Water is the reason her ancestors settled where they did, and it is gone now. Oil is the cause of a yearslong battle over payment for the resource pumped and transported across her land.

"It has always been a fight," Johnson, who speaks only Navajo, says through a translator. "No one is representing us."

In the past 50 years, oil companies have made billions off the oil in Montezuma Creek's Aneth field. Because of questionable conditions on old royalty agreements, lack of payment on others and environmental concerns, Johnson and her family have been in conflict half her life.

"All those years, they were never honest with her," said her daughter, Susie Philemon. She is furious at the oil companies.

"I hope to God they suck out every last drop of the oil so they can get the hell out of here."

Johnson was one of 13 children born in a hogan that still stands just down the rise. One day in late summer she takes a visitor there. Through a translator the soft-spoken woman says there used to be three fresh springs within a short walk of the hogan.

"We would take a bucket and get water," she said. Her hands dance like the gurgling spring she is describing. "It bubbled up right here. It was warm in the winter, and there was good vegetation for the animals."

She tended corn, watermelon and squash near the spring.

But the oil wells went in about a quarter-mile away, and the pipelines to carry the resource crossed through the area, heating up and buzzing and clicking.