The Diné (Navajo) activist and musician Klee Benally has died at the age of 48 in Arizona. Benally, who was from Black Mesa, spent years organizing against uranium mining on Native land and to protect the sacred San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, Arizona. He was also the former lead singer of the Indigenous punk band Blackfire. Benally had just published a new book titled “No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred.” In the book, he writes, “If history is written by the conquerors, it will be unwritten by those who refuse to be conquered.” Klee Benally spoke to Democracy Now! in 2014 when we did the show from Flagstaff, Arizona.

Klee Benally: “But many of our people don’t have running water; they don’t have electricity. Yet our lands have been exploited. We have coal-fired — three coal-fired power plants that pollute our air. We have these abandoned uranium mines and new mines that are threatening the region. We have fracking, hydraulic fracking, that’s threatening our land, as well. But this isn’t just an issue for here. Wherever there’s an environmental crisis, there’s a cultural crisis, because we are people of the Earth.”