A Terrible Deal for the American People

How the moral struggle at Oak Flat exposes our need for indigenous wisdom

Note: You can watch Bishop William J. Barber, II with Joy-Ann Reid on “The Joy Reid Show” tonight, August 25th, 7pm ET, live here on Substack.

"Today, President Trump said he wants to destroy our holy ground of Oak Flat so a foreign-owned corporation can send copper to China," Wendsler Nosie told the Arizona Republic last week. "Whether you’re Republican, Democrat, or neither, that is a terrible deal for the American people."

Donald Trump calls Nosie and others who want to save Oak Flat “un-American” for wanting to protect the holy ground where the San Carlos Apaches worshiped long before there was a United States of America. Trump posted this on social media last week after meeting with executives from the corporations that stand to profit from mining the copper from beneath Oak Flat.

Because San Carlos Apaches for generations have worshiped the Creator while drawing water at Oak Flat, it is holy ground—a place for prayer and sacred ceremony, not unlike the Temple Mount for Muslims, Christians and Jews. For Nosie, an elder in the San Carlos Apache tribe, the wisdom of his people and their relationship with the Creator is inextricably tied to this place.

I had a chance to talk with Dr. Nosie about this at the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy’s national conference last year.

Dr. Nosie knows that Oak Flat may not be here for his grandchildren. After years of unsuccessful negotiations and a corruption scandal that landed one Arizona Congressman in prison, Senator John McCain added a last minute rider to the 2014 defense spending bill, giving Resolution Copper rights to dig beneath Oak Flat and mine copper ore located thousands of feet below the surface. Resolution’s parent company, Rio Tinto, has already invested $1.3 billion dollars in the project, which aims to extract ore from the bowels of the earth, where temperatures are estimated to be 180 degrees Fahrenheit. The proposed extraction process would use as much water as a small city—6.5 billion gallons annually, which would be polluted with sulfuric acid to process the ore. In the end, Resolution acknowledges, a crater two miles wide and a thousand feet deep would replace the holy ground where Nosie’s ancestors have come to pray for thousands of years.

Still, their executives met with Trump last week to lobby once again for this mining project to move forward.

As Bishop Barber has been saying since his first visit to pray with Dr. Nosie at Oak Flat, the right of the Apache people to worship at Oak Flat is a moral issue that is inextricably tied up with the interlocking injustices impacting everyone in this nation.

In 2015, after the mining rights for Oak Flat were transferred to Resolution Copper, Nosie led a 44-mile walk from the Apache reservation where he lives to the National Park campground, where Oak Flat is located. “What God has given us as a people, man’s greed will bring to an end,” he told roughly 300 walkers, mostly Apache, who set up camp to occupy their holy land. Nosie’s granddaughter had come to Oak Flat for her own coming of age ceremony a few years earlier. After she ran her people’s sacred staff the last leg of the 44-mile journey, she joined her grandfather and the circle of San Carlos Apache who have pledged to resist the corporate-government alliance that is determined to destroy their holy land.

Because Dr. Nosie sees how his people’s struggle to protect their holy land at Oak Flat is connected to the struggles of other poor and oppressed people who’ve been harmed by greed, he traveled to Washington, DC in the spring of 2018 to participate in a re-launch of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. Standing with service workers who want a living wage and mothers who want access to healthcare, Nosie shared what his people have learned through years of struggle. “Our urgent fight today is for water,” he said. “Without water, there is no life.”

As I listened to Dr. Nosie then, I was especially struck by his insight into how we must learn to fight by standing together as one family. “What was family is now being replaced by a corporate mentality,” he said, articulating the same family values that drew so many pious Christians into the pro-corporate agenda of the Religious Right. Nosie looked at the diverse gathering of people who had gathered from every corner of the nation that occupies his native land and said, “Family cannot be broken.”

“Family values” and “religious liberty” are the values Trump and so many of his enablers have parroted to win the support many white Christians. They insist that they represent these American values. But Wendsler Nosie and the San Carlos Apache are witnesses that any true love of family and religion - any true love for this place we call the United States of America - compels us to resist the manipulation of faith to justify greed.

As Nosie has said, there is a prophesy among his people that a day will come when the people of this land will cry because of the greed of the settlers that has robbed the land and, in doing so, robbed them of God’s good gifts. I have heard that cry among this nation’s poor. I hear it in immigrant communities today - and in the occupied neighborhoods of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Mothers are crying for their disappeared spouses and children.

People around the world are crying because they cannot find food, medicine, or a safe place to rest.

Millions are crying, “Why?”

Donald Trump says Wendsler Nosie is un-American, but the opposite is true. The wisdom of his people is what America needs right now. “Family cannot be broken.” If we can hear the cry, then we still have an opportunity to heed the call to stand up to the greed, refuse the lies, and learn the wisdom of this land’s first chapter - a wisdom that resonates with the best of all of our religious traditions.

Now is the time.