Senators McCain and Flake Screw Over Apaches' Holy Land Giveaway to mining company
But this is Indian religion. Clearly the Arizona congressional delegation isn’t afraid of a couple of million conquered natives.The truth is that for Mr. McCain, Mr. Flake and others who would allow this precious public land to be destroyed, it’s not only the Indians who are invisible. The rest of us are also ghosts, remnants of a quaint idea of democracy.
Via New York Times
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.
Despite
these protections, in December 2014, Congress promised to hand the title for
Oak Flat over to a private, Australian-British mining concern. A fine-print
rider trading away the Indian holy land was added at the last minute to the
must-pass military spending bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. By
doing this, Congress has handed over a sacred Native American site to a
foreign-owned company for what may be the first time in our nation’s history.
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.
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.
It’s
worth noting that Rio Tinto affiliates have been McCain campaign contributors,
and that Mr. Flake, before he made it to Congress, was a paid lobbyist for Rio
Tinto Rössing Uranium (a huge uranium mine in Namibia). Mr. McCain and others
assert that the mining project will be a boost to the local economy, though
it’s unclear how many of the 1,400 promised jobs would be local; a
Superior-area miners’ group, in fact, opposes the swap on the basis that it
won’t help the local people or economy. Rio Tinto, incidentally, has been
called out in the past for environmental devastation. Continue reading the main story
