Since early February, some 300 have been camping at a site in Arizona known as Oak Flat. They're occupying the land because last December, Sen. John McCain slipped a rider into a Defense appropriations bill that, for the first time in American history, effectively sells public lands to a foreign mining corporation.
The campground lies at the core of an ancient Apache holy place, where coming-of-age ceremonies, especially for girls, have been performed for many generations, along with traditional acorn gathering. It belongs to the public, under the multiple-use mandate of the Forest Service, and has had special protections since 1955, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower decreed the area closed to mining — which, like cattle grazing, is otherwise common in national forests — because of its cultural and natural value. President Richard M. Nixon’s Interior Department in 1971 renewed this ban.
The Apache are occupying Oak Flat to protest this action — to them, a sacrilegious and craven sell-off of a place “where Apaches go to pray,” in the words of the San Carlos Apache tribal chairman, Terry Rambler. The site will doubtless be destroyed for any purpose other than mining; Resolution Copper Mining will hollow out a vast chamber that, when it caves in, will leave a two-mile-wide, 1,000-foot-deep pit. The company itself has likened the result of its planned mining at Oak Flat to that of a nearby meteor crater.
This sneaky, last-minute rider insertion was a craven move even by the generally low standards of Congress; McCain simultaneously rewarded his long-time campaign contributors while twisting a dagger into the heart of a First People tribe: the Society for American Archaeology has well-documented evidence of Apache use of the site since "well before recorded history", rendering McCain's cynical action especially heinous.
You can bet your booty that this wouldn't have even been considered had this been a holy site for anybody other than a bunch of Indians. Hey, they've been conquered for nearly two centuries. Who cares?
Well...me, for one. But I probably just don't get "the big picture". I can, however, smell it.