Dear U.S. Bureau of Land Management Director Stone-Manning,
With this notice the Hopi Tribe joins the Pueblo of Zuni, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Archaeology Southwest in the findings of fatal flaws in the process used by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to complete the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) Section 106 process for the proposed SunZia Undertaking.
The Hopi Tribe previously responded to BLM correspondence in letters dated June 9, 2009; May 2 and December 4, 2012; July 22, 2013; April 12, 2017; and February 15, 2018. Despite our requests and suggestions, BLM proceeded to approve two final environmental impact statements and the substandard historic property treatment plans-all without effective effort to place the archaeological surveys in the broader contexts of region-scale Hopi, O’odham, Zuni, or Apache history and geography.