At an Apache sacred site in Arizona, Chi’chil Bildagoteel—known in English as Oak Flat—Catholic sisters joined Apache elders and youth this year, on July 18 through 20, for a weekend of prayer and peaceful demonstration for Oak Flat’s protection against the threat of becoming a copper mine.
Surrounded by ancient oak trees, the nine sisters held signs that said: “Nuns ❤️ Oak Flat,” “Sisters in Solidarity,” “Nuns support Apache religious freedoms,” and “Complicit No More.” Apache Crown Dancers, who depict the Apache creation story through dance, invited the sisters to join them. In a circle, they danced to drums and took part in the storytelling.
On Friday evening, members of the Apache Stronghold made a dinner of acorn stew for everyone, a traditional dish madewith ingredients supplied by the oak trees. The gathering grew to 200 people—other faith leaders, activists, and residents from nearby towns.
Apache Stronghold—an organization made up of Apache and Native American advocacy groups founded by Dr. Wendsler Nosie Sr., an Apache elder—organized the July weekend.
Sister Susan Leslie, a Dominican Sister of Peace present at Oak Flat, says she “went expecting to be a person of prayerful support for what was going on; what I did not anticipate was that the Apache people would invite us into their ceremonies so that we weren’t just bystanders, but we were actively engaged. It was an experience of people who were incredibly rooted in their faith.”
The fight to protect Oak Flat
Oak Flat is an irreplaceable sacred site for the Apache. It’s where their creation story takes place and where many sacred ceremonies are held. Today, though, the site is at risk of being destroyed and turned into a copper mine. A land transfer of more than 2,000 acres of public land to Resolution Copper, a multinational mining corporation, is set to take place on August 19.
Oak Flat is currently a public campground in Tonto National Forest outside of Phoenix. In 2014, the federal government approved the land transfer—and Apache Stronghold has been fighting ever since. The group sued the federal government on religious freedom grounds in Apache Stronghold v. United States. After a years-long legal battle, in May, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to further review the Apache Stronghold v. United States case.
On August 6, a judge in Phoenix heard a case to try to get an injunction. Two more lawsuits aimed at protecting the land are scheduled before the transfer date.
The land transfer raises serious environmental concerns as well: Resolution Copper would turn Oak Flat into a two-mile crater to extract 40 billion pounds of copper over 40 years. The mining would require massive water usage; toxic mine tailings—materials like hard metal and radioactive substances—could leak into the environment and cause harm.
“Destroying Oak Flat is an absolutely outrageous injustice to the Apache but also to all of us who live on this earth. The U.S. government should really be ashamed,” says Sarah Bradley, one of the co-founders of Land Justice Futures, an organization that helps religious communities integrate land justice with the properties they own.
Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining), a Diné elder and advocate who was present at the July weekend of prayer and action, says this case goes beyond Oak Flat itself. “This is precedent-setting. It’s so important for anybody who has that relationship to Earth and life to make their voice heard,” she says.
When Bradley learned about Nosie’s call for faith leaders to join the Apache Stronghold in July, she invited Catholic sisters to come out to Oak Flat to make their presence known.
“This is a moral and spiritual call and calling,” Bradley says. “We went there to stand in solidarity with the Apache Stronghold. To stand with a Catholic sister on my left and an Indigenous elder on my right and hold hands and participate in those songs and dances with the Apache is an imprint that I believe carries power for what we can make possible in the future.”
Two justices dissented when the Supreme Court declined to further review the Apache Stronghold case: Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. Gorsuch said that if the case were about a historic cathedral, “I have no doubt that we would find that case worth our time.”
But even that argument doesn’t get at the depth of how significant and irreplaceable Oak Flat is, McCabe says. A cathedral “could be rebuilt,” she says. “Whereas, the relationship of Indigenous peoples, our spiritual life, and our spiritual commitments—we have vows we are very concerned with fulfilling in our relationship to Earth and to our people.”
The fight right now is “calling on the Supreme Court to apply their own legal reasoning that they just codified in a case about religious freedom and to apply it to the Apache,” Bradley says, referring to the recent Mahmoud v. Taylor case, which ruled in favor of parents opting children out of LGBTQ+-inclusive instruction in schools on religious freedom grounds. “To say that Apache religion matters just as much as Christian rights to religion and worship.”
A National Library of Medicine study estimated that more than a million Native Americans live within about six miles of metal mines such as copper, nickel, and lithium. “What is enough?” Bradley says. “When is it too much to ask for from Indigenous communities? They should not be sacrifice zones.”
“Complicit no more”
Land Justice Futures, an organization that was born out of Nuns and Nones, centers racial and ecological justice in the “decisions that are made about the lands that religious landowners own,” Bradley says.
Right now, Land Justice Futures is working with 19 communities of women religious across the United States. Land Justice Futures works with other faith-based organizers, such as the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, which came out of the Mennonite tradition.
McCabe works with Land Justice Futures to help educate religious communities. At Oak Flat, “it felt very vulnerable to bring [Catholic sisters] into that situation, even though I feel like we have prepared ourselves to some degree,” McCabe says. “We need to do this work together. The example that [Nosie] set helped change the hearts and minds of other Indigenous people present.”
The sisters’ willingness to participate in ceremonial dance and song was powerful for McCabe. Engaging in land justice work, and educating sisters about the harms of the doctrine of discovery—15th- and 16th-century papal bulls used to justify colonization and seizure of land by Christians—is “very intense because of my own family’s history,” she says.
McCabe’s grandparents were taken into Dutch Christian Reformed Missionary Residential Boarding Schools, as well as many of McCabe’s family members. “That whole way of assimilation—my family is very steeped in it. It’s been a very emotional, very intense process to work with the sisters.”
Many Indigenous people carry trauma from being part of residential schools run by Catholic sisters, so it’s “very triggering for them to even consider being in the presence of nuns,” McCabe says. “The church’s role in the traumatizing of Indigenous peoples is so deep.”
McCabe continues to have conversations and puts in “time and labor—including emotional and trauma labor—to move forward with an educational process for the sisters. I have found it really healing for myself to watch the light come on.”
At one of the sessions about the Doctrine of Discovery, an Indigenous matriarch asked the sisters if they would be willing to declare themselves “complicit no more” with the Doctrine of Discovery.
“It’s a tremendous interruption of a very powerful narrative that nation states have built themselves on, including the United States,” McCabe says, noting that as recently as 2005, Ruth Bader Ginsberg cited the Doctrine of Discovery as a legal basis for land treaty rights in New York.
With the work of Land Justice Futures, McCabe wants to see a continued movement of land return to Indigenous communities. The women religious communities they’ve worked with “don’t want to have the legacy of terror and trauma of Indigenous people and the children,” she says. “They would like to leave something beyond that.”
Leslie says she is committed to land justice and “to do what we can so that we are no longer complicit in the abuse of Native Americans and the abuse of the land, of creation.”
For centuries, Indigenous people “have been pushed off their lands. There’s been genocide,” Leslie says. “Over the years, that set up the pattern of how Indigenous people were treated in this country,” including today, with many Indigenous people living on reservations that are fractions of the lands they once stewarded.
As Catholic sisters, “even though we ourselves are not the ones who did this, we are inheritors,” Leslie says. “It was our church that made those decisions back in the 1400s that still impact Indigenous people today. We claim to live according to gospel values, so we need to really do that. We have to make reparations for what has gone on.”
With their fight for Oak Flat, the Apache are directing our attention away from our system of exploitation, distraction, and addiction to greed to “devotion, prayer, and action toward what matters most, which is life,” Bradley says.
For those following the Oak Flat case, Bradley says to watch Apache Stronghold’s website for actions to take, which includes praying for Oak Flat’s protection. “That’s the Apache Stronghold’s number-one consistent request—to join them in prayer to be of one drum, one circle, one prayer,” she says.
Land Justice Futures will be holding an Introduction to Land Justice webinar on August 27, where people can learn background information and context for the work of land justice, Bradley says.
McCabe calls on the Christian community and beyond to “speak on behalf of the religious freedom of Indigenous people,” she says. “I call on them to be visible, to make calls, to speak out. I call on them to identify as Catholics who are no longer willing to be complicit with the doctrine of discovery.”
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