Apaches take fight to save 'sacred site' to Supreme Court
A group of Native Americans is vowing to appeal to the United States Supreme Court after a federal appellate court ruled that the federal government can transfer a plot of land they view as a sacred site to an Australian mining company, which could destroy the land.
The religious liberty law firm Becket released a statement on Friday condemning a federal court for greenlighting the destruction of a sacred Native American site. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit released an opinion Friday ruling that the federal government can transfer Oak Flat, a federally owned plot of land in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, to the mining company Resolution Copper.
The Western Apache Indians, who view the land as a sacred religious site, had sought a ruling declaring that the transfer violated their rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and an 1852 treaty between the U.S. and the Apaches. Friday’s opinion upheld a lower court ruling denying their request.
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The en banc decision featured six judges siding with the federal government and five judges ruling in favor of the Apache Native Americans. Judge Daniel Collins, appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump, wrote the opinion and was joined by fellow Trump-appointed Judges Mark Bennett, Danielle Forrest, Ryan Nelson and Lawrence VanDyke as well as former President George W. Bush-appointed Carlos Bea.
Judge Mary Murguia, appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, authored the dissent. Judges Marsha Berzon and Ronald Gould, appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, joined in the dissent along with President Joe Biden-appointed Judge Salvador Mendoza and Trump-appointed Judge Kenneth Lee.
“Blasting a Native American sacred site into oblivion is one of the most egregious violations of religious freedom imaginable,” said Becket Vice President and Senior Counsel Luke Goodrich. “The Supreme Court has a strong track record of protecting religious freedom for people of other faiths, and we fully expect the Court to uphold that same freedom for Native Americans who simply want to continue core religious practices at a sacred site that has belonged to them since before the United States existed.”
Apache Stronghold, a “coalition of Apaches, other native peoples, and non-Native allies,” first filed a lawsuit to stop the transfer of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper in early 2021. Congress authorized the transfer of Oak Flat to the mining company in 2014, 19 years after copper was discovered underground.
The federal government had protected Oak Flat from mining and other similar practices beginning in 1955, and the plot of land is included on the National Register of Historic Places, which describes it as “an important feature of the Western Apache landscape as a sacred site.”
“Oak Flat is like Mount Sinai to us — our most sacred site where we connect with our Creator, our faith, our families, and our land,” Apache Stronghold member Wendsler Nosie explained following Friday’s ruling. “Today’s ruling targets the spiritual lifeblood of my people, but it will not stop our struggle to save Oak Flat. We vow to appeal to the [United States] Supreme Court.”
As Goodrich explained in a video outlining the significance of Oak Flat to the Apache people and the implications of its transfer to Resolution Copper, “The copper deposit is over a mile underground and there’s no way to get to it from the surface.”
Goodrich added: “The copper company’s plan is to tunnel underneath Oak Flat and blast the copper with dynamite and then have robots take out the ore, but over time, the amount of ground they’re going to remove is going to cause the surface of Oak Flat to collapse into a crater that’s 2 miles wide and over 1,000 feet deep and Oak Flat will just be gone, swallowed in a crater and gone forever.”
The video warned that the destruction of Oak Flat, which contains Native American burial grounds, would interfere with the ability of Apaches to participate in “ancient ceremonies, hidden from outsiders” that are a part of their “geocentric religion.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
