Friday, June 6, 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

(Photo: Gabriel Pietrorazio / KJZZ)

Oak Flat is set to become one of the biggest copper mines in the world following a U.S. Supreme Court decision not to hear the case last month, but the Apache people who consider it to be a sacred site are still fighting to protect it.

More than a dozen opponents to the project will appear at the Phoenix federal courthouse Friday where the Harvard-educated, Trump-appointed U.S District Court Judge Dominic Lanza will hear from plaintiffs representing a pair of separate lawsuits against the U.S. Forest Service.

KJZZ’s Gabriel Pietrorazio takes us inside Oak Flat, as he concludes his two-part series.

President Ulysses S. Grant established the San Carlos Apache Reservation in 1871.

Jeffrey Shepherd is a history professor at The University of Texas at El Paso.

“So you get this flurry of executive orders, but it’s also tied with the just, just horribly violent clampdown on Apaches in the Southwest.”

This led to rounding up thousands of Apaches, including Geronimo, and marching them to Old San Carlos — nicknamed “Hell’s Forty Acres” — as prisoners of war under military occupation.

Sharpshooters surveyed the landscape for fleeing Apaches. As many as 4,000 Western Apaches, Mojave, Yavapai, and Chiracahua Apaches were held captive under deplorable conditions by 1874.

Some even refer to it as a concentration camp — that became their new homeland.

Yet, these communities are made up of complex kinship networks of bands and clans, like Tonto, Yavapai, Chiricahua, and many more.

Today’s San Carlos tribal membership is essentially a melting pot of many Apache ancestors, including the White Mountain, Cibecue, Coyotero, Mimbres, Chiricahua, Pinal, Apache Peaks, Aravaipa, Tonto, Mogollon, and Chilecon bands.

But back then, not all of them got along, according to Marcus Macktima (San Carlos Apache), an assistant history professor at Northern Arizona University.

“Obviously, when you bring all of these different people together on the reservation, there’s going to be some ancient, cultural, historical clashes, because there was no Apache nation. That didn’t exist. We wouldn’t have ever confined ourselves in that way at all.”

The San Carlos Apache Tribe only gained federal recognition less than a century ago, when the U.S. unified these distinct bands and clans through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

Long before that, Apaches were nomadic and traveled to hunt, gather, and farm seasonally.

So when the U.S. temporarily restricted movement with reservations, that upended their entire way of life, while also severing their ties to Chi’chil Biłdagoteel until the U.S. released them, added Shepherd.

“They’re really waging a military but also bureaucratic war on Apaches, as a people, but also upon their land.”

Mineral wealth, in large part, was a motivator for resizing their reservation six times — between 1873 and 1912 — by the U.S. and even the tribe itself.

The chance to discover old Spanish silver mines, especially, attracted expeditions to the Southwest, said Macktima.

“That’s driving people into Arizona. And of course, that means the extermination of Apache peoples in the region.”

Shepherd stressed that’s not hyperbole.

“Rounding people up, concentrating them on reservations, deporting them, and as that happens, we start to see the emergence of that federal land management regime take over the territory as public domain.”

In 1896, a tribal measure passed with 56% of the vote to reincorporate a 232,000-acre mineral strip – mostly containing coal — from off-reservation into the public domain in exchange for $12,433 annually — more than $470,000 when adjusted for inflation, explained Macktima.

“In the late 19th century, they’re talking about minerals and getting rid of the [San Carlos] reservation to allow for prospecting, and they do that, but the Apaches who agree are not from that reservation.”

Aravaipa Pinal Apaches primarily opposed that decision because it harmed their territorial farmlands, while Yavapais and White Mountain Apaches didn’t, with Macktima adding, “so all these different Apaches are coming in saying, ‘Hey, we should go ahead and give this up.’”

These ceded lands were supposed to be supervised by the U.S. government for mineral recovery with all revenues returning to the tribe.

It wasn’t profitable, so the tribe sought to regain its territory.

That mineral strip along the southern border of the reservation was eventually returned to the San Carlos Apache Tribe in 1969.

Unlike the mineral strip, Oak Flat has remained in the public domain since 1955, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower incorporated that site into the Tonto National Forest — where it remains protected to this day.

Macktima believes if the Apaches remained nomadic, “Oak Flat would still become a very prominent place for Apaches to travel to, and if the reservation didn’t exist, then you would still see a lot of that into the modern day.”

Devastating wild fires across western Canada have forced thousands of people from their homes, including those in Indigenous communities.

Two provinces, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, have declared states of emergency.

Air quality from the fires is being felt as far south as Georgia – and even Europe is feeling it.

As Dan Karpenchuk reports, for many first nations, the crisis now is one of temporary accommodation.

According to the latest statistics, and they change quickly, more than 30,000 people in Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been forced to leave their homes and are displaced.

Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, many Indigenous people have been flown out of remote communites, and satellite images show that in some regions the situation is worsening.

Recently, First Nations leaders in Manitoba gathered to address the issue of temporary space for those forced to flee. But in Winnipeg, Manitoba’s largest city, there isn’t much left.

Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Kyra Wilson says the situation has become dire.

“And we see young children and families waiting in whatever environment that they’re in, waiting to go to their secondary accommodation, whatever that is, And it’s really sad to see our children having to sleep; on floors, people are sitting waiting in hallways, waiting outside. And right now we just need everybody to come together.”

In Ottawa, the federal government has deployed military personnel to help fight the fires.

Officials says the firefighting service has now been stretched the maximum and the call has gone out to Canada’s international partners for help.

 

Get National Native News delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up for our daily newsletter today.