Huck Greyeyes is the medicine man of the Navajo nation at black Mesa, Arizona. In Nepal, he may have been a jhankri. But he is more than a shaman, he is the soul of a people pushed to the edge. He was my soul father, we bonded as soon as we met at a UN conference on indigenous peoples a few years ago. He was conducting the opening prayer in New York, in the cavernous General Assembly Hall where it is usually heads of governments in suits and ties who get up to speak. I felt that kinship of spirit. He looked like us, and he prayed like us.

I feel his sorrow now, when I get this email appeal from his people. His sadness and despair represents the sorrow of Native American peoples. Huck Greyeyes' people are a proud nation, but a dying one. It is the plight of indigenous peoples everywhere, struggle to save a way of life against a creeping global monoculture, a process accelerated by a corporate thirst for water and minerals.

They are asked to parade in ceremonial costumes as token gestures to a cause. Across the world, indigenous peoples are displayed in colourful clothes, as if what they wear were all-important. As if these outer trappings could save the culture. Actually, it does not matter if Huck Greyeyes wears Levis. Identity means recognition of us as a people, human beings and citizens with equal rights.

Here is an appeal from Huck Greyeyes in Black Mesa that I pass on to readers:

We wish to submit this open letter to the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and the US government to demand corporate accountability in light of the Bush administration's decision last week to relax air-quality rules governing older coal-fired power plants, the Enron scandal in Black Mesa and the current drought disaster.

Can't you see we are suffering from the effects of corporate greed in collusion with the US and tribal governments? "Grandfathered" coal-fired power plants in our region constitute the largest source of greenhouse gases in North America. Fossil fuel emissions impact global climate change.

We are directly affected because our ancestral homeland contains major deposits of coal which are being extracted by Peabody Coal Company owned by Lehman Brothers. The coal from Peabody's Black Mesa mine is transported to the Mojave Power plant through a slurry pipeline owned by Enron Corporation that pumps 3.3 million gallons of pristine water from our sole source aquifer each day. Stop the corporate waste! In a region where water is extremely scare, our only source of drinking water is being depleted and contaminated to transport coal without any permit from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And all this is happening during a drought emergency.

We pray you will act now to fulfil your trust responsibility to us and demand corporate accountability by Peabody, Enron and Lehman Brothers who are operating in collusion with the US government. We pray you will stop looking at the $45 million in revenue you receive each year from them, long enough to see that water is more precious than gold and not a drop should be wasted.

Our distinct identity as a people is crucially linked to the lands we have occupied since time immemorial. Displacement from our territories means death and the destruction of our identity, culture and way of life. Without water we cannot survive.

We believe our human rights should not be denied and should take precedence over national overeignty-whether it be the sovereignty of independent nations or the dependent sovereign status accorded to tribal governments.