The behavior by Senator John McCain in manipulating the laws and circumstances of this horrific affair is pervasively criminal.
A public research website: http://www.cain2008.org has brought together diverse historical elements of factual proof that Senator John McCain’s was the key “point man” introducing, enacting and enforcing law that removed Dineh-Navajo Families from their reservation on the Black Mesa in Arizona. The McCain revised law relocated them to Church’s Hill, Nevada (a Nuclear Waste Superfund Site, called “the New Lands” in PL 93-531). The Dineh-Navajo, a deeply spiritual and peaceful people, engaged in only peaceful resistance to being moved off lands they’d owned since 1500 A.D. Nonetheless, the Public Press and UN depicted brutalization, rights deprivation and forcible relocation.
ACSA study reveals that after assembling a team of “pro-Peabody Western Coal” Indians and obtaining a false “Hopi-Navajo” Tribal Council designation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for these paid Tribal representatives, in the period 1974-1996, Senator McCain was able to get large bands of the Dineh-Navajo relocated off their lands, so that Peabody Western could mine the coal under their farms at nominal expense. Common Cause has suggested McCain was indirectly compensated by street name cash contributions to his Federal Election Fund during three Presidential runs, and through family business with Las Vegas Casinos who benefited from the coal driven power he supplied.
According to http://www.cain2008.org, as verified by the Library of Congress and the Congressional Record, Senator McCain, as author and as chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, created the final agreement and amended 1974 Act as captained through the Senate in 1996. Senator McCain proposed a land partitioning scheme which led to the construction of a fence along the Dineh Range blocking their ability to field range their cattle (PL S.1973-1 1996 Dineh Proposal for Land Partitioning), eventually leading to seizure of their cattle for bridging the fence, and capping of their wells, which water was then sequestered for use by Peabody Western Group.