Apache Stronghold Stops in New York City Before Making Its Way to DC

 

NEW YORK—The Apache Stronghold is taking its message to the steps of the U.S. Capitol today and tomorrow. The message is strong one. They are angry that about the land exchange that was tucked into last December’s $585 billion National Defense Authorization Act of 2015 that was passed by Congress.

The Act gives land at Apache Leap and Oak Flat in southeastern Arizona to Rio Tinto, foreign mining company, to mine copper without any environmental impact studies or without consultation with San Carlos Apache Tribe.

The San Carlos Apache Tribe maintains the mining by Rio Tinto will be on sacred ancestral lands where tribal members have historically performed ceremonies and buried their ancestors.

“Since the time of immemorial people have gone there. That’s part of our ancestral homeland, we’ve had dancers in that area forever-sunrise dancers-and coming of age ceremonies for our young girls that become women. They’ll seal that off. They’ll seal us off the acorn grounds, and the medicinal plants in the area, and our prayer areas,” Chairman Terry Rambler told the Huffington Post last December.

The group left their reservation in early July and made its way to Washington.

This past weekend, the group was in New York City to bring awareness to the travesty committed by Congress.

This is directly related to my last post!

Mitakuye Oyasin

The foundational metaphor of spatiality in Indian culture also begins to clarify the extent to which Indian notions of creation and Indian existence are deeply rooted in our attachment to the land and to specific territories in particular. Each nation has some understanding that they were placed into a relationship with a particular territory by spiritual forces outside of themselves and thus have an enduring responsibility for that territory just as the earth, especially the earth in that particular place, has a filial responsibility toward the people who live there. Likewise, the Two-Legged people in that place also have a spatially related responsibility toward all people who share that place with them, including animals, birds, plants, rocks, rivers, mountains and the like. With knowledge of such extensive kinship ties, including a kinship tie to the land itself, it should be less surprising that Indian peoples have always resisted colonial pressure to relocate them to different territories, to sell their territories to the invaders, or to allow the destruction of their lands for the sake of accessing natural resources. Conquest and removal from our lands, historically, and contemporary ecological destruction of our lands have been and continue to be culturally and genocidally destructive to Indian peoples as peoples (Kidwell, 45*).

Yesterday, July 16, 2015 a post appeared on my Facebook page credited to Occupy Democrats. Linked to the post is the complete text of an Op-Ed piece from the New York Times, dated May 29, 2015, written by Lydia Miller. The following link takes you to the complete text version of that article:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/opinion/selling-off-apache-holy-land.html?_r=0&referrer=

Following is the text from that post that accompanies pictures of Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake:

At the very last minute, Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake just snuck a provision into a must-pass military funding bill that gave away holy Apache land to an Australian-British mining company that plans to turn it into a 1,000 foot deep crater. It is the first time in American history that Congress has handed over a public, sacred Native American site to a foreign owned multinational corporation.

Is the motivation for this last minute provision to honor the best interest of all the people, or to honor the money that helps keep these two Senators in their elected positions? In my opinion that answer is fairly clear – and – it is not the first of those two options.

I am in the process of contacting both Senator McCain and Senator Flake as well as Congressman Raul Grijalva, Democrat representing Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District concerning this matter. I hope that other people will raise their voices in opposition to this and similar callous actions.

The following words are from the Op-Ed written by Lydia Miller, published in the New York Times:

The land grab was sneakily anti-democratic even by congressional standards. For more than a decade, the parcel containing Oak Flat has been coveted by Rio Tinto, Resolution’s parent company — which already mines on its own private land in the surrounding area — for the high-value ores beneath it.

The swap — which will trade 5,300 acres of private parcels owned by the company to the Forest Service and give 2,400 acres including Oak Flat to Resolution so that it can mine the land without oversight — had been attempted multiple times by Arizona members of Congress on behalf of the company. (Among those involved was Rick Renzi, a former Republican representative who was sent to federal prison in February for three years for corruption related to earlier versions of the land-transfer deal.) It always failed in Congress because of lack of support. But this time was different. This time, the giveaway language was slipped onto the defense bill by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona at the 11th hour. The tactic was successful only because, like most last-minute riders, it bypassed public scrutiny.

At this point in time, all I am able to say is mitakuye oyasin – please see my post from July 15, 2015.

* Kidwell, Clara Sue, Homer Noley, and George E. “Tink” Tinker. A Native American Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.

American Indians and other indigenous peoples have a long-standing confidence that they have much to teach Europeans and North Americans about the world and human relationships in the world.  They are confident in the spiritual foundations of their insights, confident that those foundations can become a source of healing and reconciliation for all Creation (48).

These words and the ones that follow are taken, with deep gratitude and respect, from A Native American Theology by Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George E. “Tink” Tinker (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).

The circle is a key symbol for self-understanding in these tribes, representing the whole of the universe and our part in it. We see ourselves as co-equal participants in the circle standing neither above nor below anything else in God’s Creation. There is no hierarchy in our cultural context, even of species, because the circle has no beginning nor ending. Hence all the createds participate together, each in their own way, to preserve the wholeness of the circle.

When a group of Indians forms a circle to pray, all know that the prayers have already begun with the representation of a circle. No words have yet been spoken and in some ceremonies no words need be spoken, but the intentional physicality of our formation has already expressed our prayer and deep concern for the wholeness of all of God’s creation. There is no need to hold hands because we know it is enough to stand in the circle already joined together, inextricably bound, through the earth which lies firm beneath our feet, the earth who is, after all, the true mother of each of us and of all Creation.

The Lakota and Dakota peoples have a phrase used in all their prayers that aptly illustrates the Native American sense of the centrality of creation. The phrase, mitakuye oyasin, functions somewhat like the word “amen” in European and American Christianity. As such, it is used to end every prayer, and often it is in itself a whole prayer, being the only phrase spoken. The usual translation offered is: “For all my relations.” Yet like most native symbols, mitakuye oyasin is polyvalent in its meaning. Certainly one is praying for one’s immediate family: aunts, cousins, children, grandparents, etc. “Relations” must also be understood as fellow tribal members or even all Indian people. At the same time, the phrase includes all the nations of Two-Leggeds in the world and, in the ever-expanding circle, all the nations other than Two-Leggeds – the Four Leggeds, the Wingeds and all the Living-Moving Things of the Earth.

A translation of mitakuye oyasin would better read: “For all the above me and below me and around me things.” That is, for all my relations. (50-51).

From this point forward, at least in coming days, each post will conclude with these words: mitakuye oyasin.