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By Mariya Manzhos

In September 2020, Vanessa Nosie strapped her four-day-old daughter Shá'yú in a car seat and told her husband to drive west, straight from the hospital in Globe, Arizona, where she had just given birth. They drove to Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, or Oak Flat, the Apache sacred land, where Vanessa prayed, picked acorn and sumac berries with her grandmother, and held ceremonies for women in her family. There, she pressed Shá'yú's tiny bare feet to the ground, her first encounter with Oak Flat. One day, Vanessa hoped, Shá'yú too would have her sunrise dance at Oak Flat, a coming-of-age ceremony inseparable from this land.

The urgency behind Shá'yú's road trip was fueled by the threat of a mining project by Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of two international mining giants, Rio Tinto and BHP, that would shut down access to the land and begin turning Oak Flat into a 1,100-feet-deep and two-mile-wide crater, if the project moved forward. What if her daughter missed her chance? “Our direct connection to God is here, it’s where we listen to the Creator,” Vanessa told me. “Oak Flat is crucial for our survival.”

On a chilly Friday night in January, Vanessa fetched a handful of sticky dough out of a bucket, dipped it in flour, and massaged the mass into a smooth ball. Vanessa’s family — kids, parents, sisters and a few activists — huddled around the fire at the Oak Flat campground, which has become a kind of headquarters for the Apache Stronghold, a group of San Carlos Apaches that coalesced to fight the government to preserve their land. Vanessa’s father and the group’s spiritual leader, Wendsler Nosie Sr., who now lives at Oak Flat in a trailer, has described the land as a Mount Sinai of the Apache people — a place of spiritual rootedness that’s core to being an Apache. I was among a dozen visitors who joined the Apache Stronghold members for the weekend, because I wanted to better understand the significance of Oak Flat for the Apache religion.

https://www.deseret.com/magazine/2024/04/09/becket-law-oak-flat-case/