But for the Havasu ‘Baaja, known in the world as the Havasupai tribe or “blue-green water people,” the bureaucracy of the remote hills is the center of their lands and non-secular life.
Red Butte (Wii’I Gdwiisa or “Clenched Fist Mountain”) is the stomach of Mother Earth. Mat Taav Tiivjunmdva, a meadow about 3 miles north of the unique mountain near the south bank of the canyon, is its navel.
But Red Butte and Mat Taav Tiivjunmdva are components of the Kaibab National Forest and are not within the land barriers of the Havasupai, who were evicted from Grand Canyon National Park in 1919, meaning that a federal company and not Havasupai controls the land. . , who uses it and how. This means that Havasupai will have to protect its interests along with other public land users.
And this means that someone else can use the land and, in the eyes of the Havasupai, desecrate it.
Indigenous peoples have considered safe places, such as mountains, springs, specific groves, rock formations or petroglyph sites, as sacred spaces, these sites serve as churches, as well as synagogues, mosques, temples or other structures at the service of Christians, Jews. , Muslims, Hindus and other devout communities.
But like Red Butte and Mat Taav Tiivjunmdva, many of those spaces lie outside the boundaries of tribal lands, on public lands. Some of the best-known options are found in Arizona and the southern Colorado River Valley.
Federal legislation to protect those spaces, or the devout practices of Native Americans, are insufficient. Some legal experts argue that the federal government appears to be applying double standards when it comes to enforcing the devout rights of indigenous peoples.
Tribes face a revolving door from federal officials and opposition from stakeholders such as recreational businesses or extractive businesses; they also face a lack of public wisdom about those put and why indigenous peoples fight against them, or at least against them.
At Red Butte, the clash developed from the forests and other lands surrounding the Grand Canyon, which are impregnated with uranium ore that pierces the floor in long “rupture pipes. “
The Mining Act of 1872 granted U. S. citizens the right to claim federal lands, leading to a now-dormant mine on the plateau near Mat Taav Tiivjunmdva.
The 750-member Havasupai Tribe, the only American tribe still living under the South Coast of the Grand Canyon, has long been involved with the mine. They worry that radioactive fabrics could simply contaminate their water source and spoil the bright turquoise waters sought through the mine. tourists who obtain tribal members with their main source of income, making the remnants of their ancestors uninhabitable.
Environmental damage can simply irreparably adjust the Canyon’s ecology, the Havasupai say, and as it gets worse, it can perish as a distinct people.
“When (the mining company) heard about our protest (against them), they came up to us and presented us with cash and we said, ‘No, we don’t need your cash,'” former Havasupai Chairman Rex Tilousi told a news conference. 1992 hearing on uranium mining in Aboriginal communities.
“Money does not value the future, the destruction, the pollution of our house, the waters, the air, the land, the flora, the fauna. When those things are polluted, the cash will never cover the destruction that will occur if we let in those mining corporations and desecrate the spaces that we are very sacred. “
The Havasupai and their environmental allies have lost at least two legal battles to save the mine’s development. In one case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that because Red Butte had not been designated as a “historic property” eligible for boarding on the National Register of Historic Places until 2010, the Forest Service did not have to consider the site when conducting an environmental impact in tribal assessment and consultation in 1986.
The tribe said its only hope of preventing the opening of more mines is a ban on land progression near the Canyon, a move that passed the U. S. House of Representatives in February and awaits Senate action.
But the mine near Red Butte would close because it predates the legislation.
It’s this kind of bureaucratic impediment that Indigenous peoples continue to fight throughout Arizona and the Southwest. Its long-standing non-secular ties to land have been severed through laws, redesigned boundaries, and regulations that open public lands to successful uses.
Not far from Red Butte, near Flagstaff, Arizona, the peaks of San Francisco have been in the midst of conflict over the use of sewage recovered from a peak known as the home of the Hopi katsinam, the other holy people who bring invigorating rain to the 3 Hopi tables among other activities. More than a dozen tribes the sacred peaks.
South Mountain in Phoenix, which is part of the country’s largest urban park, is a sacred area for the O’odham and Pee Posh villages, but a demolished summit spur for a road structure.
Mount Graham, in eastern Arizona, lost other people via Apache with the blow of a presidential pen and broke badly through decades of logging, recreation and a massive observatory.
Oak Flat, near Superior, Arizona, is doomed to be erased even though it is a sacred place of great importance to the Apaches.
The Blythe Intaglios, some of the largest geoglyphs in the United States, some protect, but others in the region are threatened with vandalism or unintentional destruction.
The tribes tried to maintain those spaces, but lost lawsuits and administrative decisions, their non-secular claims dismissed by law.
And over time, those places considered sacred by indigenous peoples, from remote mountains to Phoenix City Park, have contested spaces.
South Mountain
The federal government’s philosophy of announcing ethical and devout superiority over Aboriginal peoples possibly dates back to a directive issued through a fifteenth-century pope.
Steven Newcomb, Shawnee and Lenape, has been reading for nearly 40 years how foreign law affects U. S. law that applies to Indigenous nations and peoples. His studies revealed that in 1493, the publication of a papal bull or decree granted authority over the Western Hemisphere to Christian leaders.
This executive order influenced how America views Christianity as an amazing religion, Newcomb said, of “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. “Chief Justice John Marshall referred to the “doctrine of discovery” in at least one of the 3 decisions he wrote in the early nineteenth century, known as the Marshall trilogy, which laid the groundwork for Indian federal law.
Marshall wrote that in 1496, King Henry VII of Great Britain commissioned the explorer John Cabot to fix himself on countries unknown to Christians and claim them on behalf of the king. He affirmed the right to take possession of the United States, “despite the profession of the natives, who were pagans, and, at the same time, admitting the earlier name of any Christian of other persons who have made a prior notice ».
“The difference that is made through the leader of justice is between Christians and locals who are ‘pagans,'” Newcomb said. “What is used in opposition to local nations is the Bible and Christianity, and the concept that the other selected people were selected to recover the lands that God bequeathed to them as property or eternal inheritance. “
From 1883 to 1934, the United States officially banned Native American practices through the Indian Crimes Code. The document aimed to destroy indigenous cultures by putting an end to cultural practices.
Retired law professor Robert N. Clinton noted in a 2008 blog post that medical practices, Indigenous dances, wedding gifts to the bride’s family, classic reciprocal gifts and other customs were punishable offenses, refusing to eat for crimes, other times with criminal sentences.
Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier has adopted a more progressive approach on Aboriginal issues. In 1934 he published a circular to end the practice: “The cultural freedom of the Indians will have to be considered in all respects as equivalent to that of any country. Non-Indian group.
Congress passed the Native American Religious Freedom Act of 1978, known as airfa, with the intention of repealing long-standing federal policies that prohibited Indigenous peoples from practicing their religion.
This policy established federal policies to “protect and maintain for American Indians their inherent right to the freedom to believe, express, and exercise the classical religions of American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Hawaiians. “The law also required access to cultural sites, the use and ownership of sacred objects, and freedom of worship.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 prohibits state or federal governments from imposing truly extensive burdens on a person’s devout exercise, under certain conditions.
Other federal statutes govern how agencies make decisions about projects on public lands and protect indigenous cultural and devout spaces, all of which have loopholes.
Marc Fink, a suggested senior at the Center for Biological Diversity, said legislation like the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, gives the public the opportunity to participate in decision-making on public lands, allowing other agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. USA And state agencies to influence projects and create the opportunity for public lands agencies to “look forward” on projects that can have an effect on ecologies.
But Fink said the courts have made clear that nepa is a procedural law and not an act of enforcement, meaning federal agencies are not required to report when they make a final decision on an assignment known as a resolution record, unless they comply with applicable law. such as the Endangered Species Act or the Clean Water Act.
While those involve some provisions for public and personal lands, NEPA and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, or NHPA, expand coverage of cultural heritage sites, ancestral burials and landscapes primarily on public lands, said Shannon O’Loughlin, executive director and attorney for the Association of American Indian Affairs.
He said this creates a “chessboard” for cultural heritage coverage between federal lands, other public lands and personal lands.
“Our cultural heritage and sacred places will be treated with the same kind of coverage in a comprehensive manner across the country, not just on federal lands,” he said.
In some Midwestern states or along the Mississippi River, where mound-building cultures for centuries before Europeans arrived, O’Loughlin said, non-natives feel they have carte blanche to dig and loot sacred sites.
“These states have treated those sites as if they were their own cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples around them,” he said.
Tribal consultation, which is mandatory in all areas of federal land allocation proposals, is a painful issue for tribes.
“Nepa and NHPA require consultation processes to be followed,” O’Loughlin said. “For many, the query is just a procedural checkbox. “
And, he said, effective consultation is site-based at some point. “It’s based on what the company is like,” O’Loughlin said.
This provides federal land managers with wonderful freedom in the use and coverage of lands and resources,” said John Welch, a professor at Simon Fraser University and head of coverage and landscape systems at Southwest Archaeology.
“Sacred sites lack enforceable protections,” he said.
The Republic of Arizona, which belongs to the USA TODAY network, spoke with many tribal leaders and tribal organizations who agreed almost unanimously with O’Loughlin and Welch’s assessments.
In one example, The Republic received a letter from the People of Zuni to President Joe Biden regarding an executive order ordering the promotion of racial justice and for underserved communities.
“Without directly confronting, in a basic and restorative manner and continually addressing and materially correcting the geographical injustices of governmental and colonial actions, systems and procedures that have happened – and continue to happen – in the area and time, the Biden-Harris administration. . . . We cannot move forward sincerely, meaningfully, honestly either to moderate degrees or in the bureaucracy of justice and for indigenous peoples,” read the letter, signed through Zuni Governor Val R. Panteah.
“On the contrary,” the letter says, “the Administration will perpetuate and reproduce the continuing injustices of the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples from indigenous lands. “
The agencies consult only superficially or, in the worst case, claim that simply terminating a letter of notice to the tribe follows consultation protocols. Others only touch a tribal network at the end of an assignment, which does not give the tribe the opportunity to take Participate in discussions or assistance expand the assignment in a way that all parties can live together.
O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, has faced coverage of cultural and sacred sites opposed to the white air and water law or coverage of endangered species, which are regulated nationally and only on public lands.
“If an eagle dies and falls on an asset here, I surely don’t have a right to that eagle,” O’Loughlin said. “I can’t take part of it, I can’t use it and I can’t do anything with it. “I have to call the federal authorities. “
It refers to federal legislation and regulations that protect eagles and their parts. Even as a member of a federally identified tribe that has the right to own and use eagle feathers or eagle parts, O’Loughlin will still have to comply with that legislation.
She said that because the Native American Burial Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, does not require burials to be left in place, the government’s position turns out to be, “We just have to dig it up and pay for ancestors to be stored in a museum. “
The result: “There is nothing in federal law that is required for a place to be sacred,” O’Loughlin said. “There is no legal responsibility to save a sacred place. “
Intaille Blythe
Damage to Indigenous cultures through the destruction of sacred sites can be catastrophic, said David Martinez, an associate professor of Native American studies at Arizona State University.
“If you put a road through a sacred site, then you put anything that doesn’t respect that area as belonging to the spirits that inhabit it,” he said. “One of the ultimate immediate consequences is that the component of your culture is probably maximum. perish. “
Indigenous cultural rights advocates point out that the land itself is a position, its sacred meaning. If those sites are altered or destroyed, they say, the spirituality they keep disappears.
That’s because once the position is erased or infected with artifacts that, according to Martinez, Americans progress, many doctors will not return to this site.
“They think it’s contaminated,” said Martinez, a registered member of the Gila River Indian network who is Akimel O’odham and Hia Ced O’odham.
Despite decades of studies through federal agencies, indigenous devout practices that rely on fast sites are systematically made when land use decisions are made.
The Republic has reviewed reports spanning the past decade in Arizona and found that the federal environmental impact in the studies thoroughly explains the cultural damage that can happen with opportunities for allocation and recommends mitigation strategies, such as the removal of archaeological artifacts.
Mining corporations and developers argue that their projects will be environmentally friendly. They promise to fund archaeological projects and rent tribal members to artifacts or plants they can before the earth succumbs to excavation or paving.
But practitioners of tribal culture and legal experts argue that first amendment legislation and policies designed for devout rights are far from protecting indigenous devout rights. Law professors Stephanie Hall Barclay and Michalyn Steele recently published an article in Harvard Law Review detailing the shortcomings of that legislation.
“The brutal destruction of indigenous holy sites is just a disturbing relic of the past,” they wrote. In 2020, the United States blew up Apache cemeteries to make the border wall floor transparent. In 2018, a federal court ruled that an Indigenous cemetery and a stone altar still used for devout ceremonies can be razed “just to widen a road. “
The researchers wrote that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the First Amendment’s flexible adjustment clause, and other similar legal ions have been eviscerated through the courts regarding Indigenous religion, depriving them of their ability to sacred places.
Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery, a case that is taught in many Indian courts as one of the main culprits in the weakening of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, paved the way for other instances of Indigenous sacred sites in the future.
In 1988, the U. S. Supreme Court of Justice was a member of the United States of America. U. S. He opposed tribes in Northern California seeking to save a forest road from sacred sites that they irreparably damaged, even after the advised environment had an effect on examining those who opposed the U. S. Forest Service. U. S. By the structure of the road. .
“Even assuming that the government’s moves here will virtually destroy Indians’ ability to practice their religion, the Constitution simply provides a precept that can justify defending the defendants’ legal claims,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote to the majority. . .
The court also wrote that the federal government has the right to use its lands as it sees fit, and that if the government forces a tribe or member of a tribe to resign from a government, you will get advantages like social security or other advantages to practice your religion, it’s a really big burden for those devout practices.
“When the government has created a barrier that physically prevents christian worshippers from accessing their sacred spaces, it is a huge burden on devout exercise,” said Barclay, a non-Indian, and Steele, a citizen of the Seneca Indian nation. of New York, he wrote. ” But when secular government destroys and suppresses access to Indigenous sacred sites, making past devout ceremonies more physically unlikely in those places, coercion evaporates. “
Barclay and Steele agree with O’Loughlin’s assessment that protected species get more coverage than indigenous peoples for their devout practices on government lands.
In recent years, several sacred and cultural sites in Arizona and Southern California have been threatened or damaged. Practitioners and advocates of tribal culture say they have been contaminated spiritually, chemically or physically, resulting in cultural and devout losses forever.
“The confidence of many communities is that progress has disrupted communication between other people and the spirit,” Martinez said.
And if ceremonies prevent them from taking a stand on this site, he said, or if healers or other cultural practitioners prevent them from practicing their religion, cultures suffer, forget and may perish.
Flat oak
Sacred lands still face new threats. One progression that considers the Mojave as the Quechanos, Chemehuevi and other peoples of the southern desert is the expansion of solar-force plants.
“With the usurpation of solar energy,” said Amelia Flores, president of the Colorado River Indian tribes, “we have tried to identify a dating with the BLM, because it controls those lands that house sites that our ancestors carved, whether it’s petroglyphs, rocky sanctuaries or even trails. “
Approximately 10 million acres of land controlled through the Bureau of Land Management in California’s Mojave and Sonoran Deserts belong to the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan.
Developed through federal and state agencies, the plan, which encompasses a total of 22. 6 million acres of land, adding federal and non-federal lands, recognizes the rich cultural and tribal heritage of Southeastern California, as well as a varied diversity of plants and animals such as desert turtles, which are threatened. The plan aims at delicate cultural and ecological sites while allowing solar plants to germinate like black lakes on the desert floor at certain locations.
But tribes still fear that millennial evidence of their hard-to-work lifestyles will disappear from bulldozers and sidewalks. Environmental teams share this concern, especially after the Trump administration tried to amend the plan to allow for faster approvals of renewable energy and broadband projects. Biden’s administration reversed that resolution in February.
President Joe Biden has made tribal consultation and intergovernmental strengthening a priority. The day he took office, Biden issued a memo to federal agencies that he said reaffirmed the principles of the Clinton-era executive order.
A memorandum of understanding created interagency protocols for the coverage of sacred sites in 2012, although the original agreement expired in 2017, but has been extended until 2024.
On the first day of her tenure in March, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland met with several Native American journalists, adding a journalist from the Republic, about her goals of managing America’s largest firm. give tribes a greater voice in controlling public lands.
“I need to make sure that each and every tribe has the opportunity to communicate with me, to communicate with other federal government agencies, and that those voices are incredibly important,” he said. “I need the era when the tribes were behind Burner to end, and I need to make sure they have genuine opportunities to sit at the table. “
The Interior Ministry declined to comment on the story.
The Forest Service “is committed to ensuring a consistent point of coverage of Native American and Alaska Native sacred sites on national forest formula lands,” a Department of Agriculture spokesman said.
The firm has a strong relationship with the Interior Ministry and aims to review and update the inter-company memorandum of understanding on the coverage of sacred sites, the spokesman said. The firm also needs “tribes to have an adequate voice on land issues. “on the sacred places of India”.
Indigenous rights advocates recommend a variety of measures that can make coverage of cultural and sacred sites easier, or at least not as onerous as in previous years.
Early consultation between tribes and agencies is a strategy that can help protect sacred sites, O’Loughlin said.
“We want to delineate the consultation as a substantive right and manage it that way,” he said.
As some indigenous teams do in other countries, tribes can simply locate resources to assess and cultural heritage sites prior to proposed uses, such as mining and logging. This evidence would be kept confidential through the tribal government unless necessary, O’Loughlin said.
The Zuni tribal charter called for the transformation of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Protection Act, which the tribe said create structural barriers to tribal contribution and respect for tribal cultural values.
These and other such laws incorporate the concept of tribal culture as archaeological, which, according to the tribe, allows governments to “delegitimize non-archaeological claims about the role of culture in supporting claims of certain cultural affiliations and traditions and thus the land. “
Martinez said more Americans recognize that crops are a valuable protection.
“I think American society is still influenced by this archaic crucible ideology that was popularized a hundred years ago with Teddy Roosevelt’s political agenda,” he said. “This ideology was imposed on the Indians in the reservation system, adding the whole project of the boarding school, to assimilate it to the American melting pot. “
Cultural preservation will have to be noted as an important component of democracy and not just in the realm of historians and anthropologists, Martinez said.
“This is America’s timeline for its future, because the more diversity there is, adding indigenous diversity, I think the greater it is for a democracy like the United States, which claims to be a wide diversity of other people, and it’s about having other people from all over the world living here. “
Martinez hopes to teach other people to perceive that when they hear that an indigenous culture is threatened, they react in the same way they would if they heard that whales are in danger, that is, he said he wanted other people to “feel more. “outraged that those things in the first place. “
Cora Maxx-Phillips, a Navajo human rights activist, said the challenge goes far beyond how the legislation is interpreted. “When we get to the word ‘sacred,’ westernized society has no idea what it is,” he said. The secular connection with nature is something that will never be understood in the open air of indigenous cultures. “
But Maxx-Phillips also has a concept of how to resolve this misunderstanding. “I’m looking at how to start working on greater intercultural understanding,” he said.
“I think it will help us to revise to perceive our humanity. “
Follow journalist Debra Krol on Twitter: @debkrol.
Arizona Republic’s policy on indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and industry is supported by the Catena Foundation and the Water Funder Initiative.