Sacred space: federal agencies are giving a green light to development that threatens Native American religious freedom. (Report).

A fly that lives for two days gets more respect from the Bush Administration than the oldest-Native American sacred place or the living people who pray there. And the fly better watch out, because gold miners and tourists are more, highly valued than Indians or insects.

As the Interior Department is protecting the Delhi Sands fly from developers in its 1,200 acres of Southern California sand dune habitat, the same federal agency is letting water, mining, and farming development trump Indian religious freedom in the same state.

Nationwide, federal agencies are giving a green light to private and state development that will damage or destroy Native American sacred places.

This is consistent with the long history of federal land managers. From 1880 to 1936, the federal government outlawed Native religious ceremonies and access to sacred places, driving all Native religions underground and many to extinction. The off-reservation sacred places were declared public lands, and the majority of the known reservation sites were opened to tourists and developers.

It has taken a very long time to gain religious freedom protections of any kind. In 1967, I was part of a gathering at Bear Butte in South Dakota. At the time, I did not know that the subjects emphasized by the traditional spiritual leaders there would command my attention over the decades--achieving religious freedom, gaining respect in popular culture, protecting our sacred places, and freeing our dead people and living sacred beings from museums. (We did not use the word "repatriation" then, and it took more than 20 years to attain repatriation laws.)

Congress enacted a policy in 1978 to protect Indian religious freedom, but loggers, miners, and their federal cronies coerced an eleventh-hour statement from the act's sponsor that the law would not be the door to the courthouse for defending sacred places.

The Supreme Court agreed in 1988 in a case that pitted a Forest Service logging road in California against Native religious freedom. The ruling also states that the act requires protection of sacred sites from direct, as well as visual, audible, and aural impacts of development. Many federal officials have chosen to ignore that part of the decision, because they believe no one can make them do it.

Space for the Gods

Today, the Forest Service is threatening sacred places and traditional customs of a score of Indian nations with its proposed expansion of the Arizona Snowbowl at San Francisco Peaks in the Coconino National Forest.

One of the few sources of water for Indians in the desert, the San Francisco Peaks rise over 12,000 feet above Flagstaff, Arizona. The state of Arizona and business operators stand to make a pile of money from increased accommodations, facilities, trails, and snowmaking for skiers and hikers. This is atop the money they have already amassed over the past 20 years from recreation, tourism, and federal privileges of conducting private business in the forest system.

Indians and local non-Indian residents are concerned about the impact of expanded commercial and recreational activity on the water of the entire region, as well as the effects of reclaimed water from snowmaking, on the health of the people and land.

Thirteen Native nations have publicly declated the San Francisco Peaks as a holy mountain. The mountain has spiritual and cultural significance in the traditions of these and other nations. For some, it is a place of religious and commemorative pilgrimages and ceremonies. For others, it is sacred ground for cremated human remains and surrogate funerary objects.

When the first Snowbowl proposal was under consideration in 1979, Forest Service representatives met with Hopi elders in Washington, DC. The Hopi elders explained that the mountain is home to certain spiritual beings, Katsinas, who bring the rain and keep the social order.

The Hopis addressed the sacredness of the holy mountain, and the bureaucrats focused on how much space religious freedom required. As one official asked at the end of the consultation: "So, you say your gods walk around the mountaintop. How big are their feet?"

Mining Danger

Medicine Lake Caldera is another sacred place targeted by the Forest Service, together with the Bureau of Land Management. The Pit River and other tribes have used it since time immemorial for ceremonies and healing. It sits in the Modoc National Forest in northeast California on the cratered edge of the largest shield volcano in the United States.

Two years ago, the outgoing administration denied geothermal power development there because of its irreversible physical and cultural impact. In a November 2002 reversal, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management decided that the state-funded Calpine Corporation can build a network of power plant facilities, roads, cables and drills, dig deep into the earth, tap the hot water, convert it to electricity, and export it to Bonneville Power Administration for consumers in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

Pit River Chairman Gene C. Preston says the decision is a "very serious blow."

The Bureau of Land Management reversed another decision the prior administration made as it was leaving office. The agency found that Glamis Gold, Ltd., has valid claims to mine in the Quechan Indian Pass area of the California Desert.

The Quechan Indian Tribe, which is considering a lawsuit, says the proposed Glamis Imperial Mine is a "massive, open-pit, cyanide heap-leach gold mine on 1,600 acres...in the heart of an area now withdrawn from future mining claims to protect Native American religious and cultural values."

Also included in the proposed mining area are items subject to the graves protection and repatriation law, as well as what the Quechan Tribe describes as "prayer circles, ceremonial places, shrines, ceramic scatters, petroglyphs, and spirit breaks linked by ancient trails."

Holy Mountains

Beat Butte is a holy mountain in the traditions and histories of the Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho, Kiowa, Mandan, Hidarsa, Ankara, and other Native nations. For thousands of years, it has been an honored place where Native people pray, commemorate events and people, seek spiritual wisdom and guidance, renew cultural traditions and sacred objects, mark passages of life, and make pilgrimages.

The state has done nothing about the urban and rural development that is dramatically affecting Bear Butte, and no federal agencies show any sign of helping. Sprawl in the surrounding area has steadily depleted the water table to a dangerously low level, and the mountain springs that are necessary to the nourishment of essential medicine plants are rapidly disappearing. The soil on one side of the mountain is eroding from dry ground conditions and a massive fire that destroyed many trees.

The peace, tranquility, and safety of the Native people who pray at Bear Butte are threatened by high-volume tourism and will be further jeopardized, if a proposed rifle-shooting range is allowed to operate within gunshot or earshot of the mountain.

Mount Graham, an Apache sacred mountain, is the home of G'aan, or Mountain Spirits. When Indian dancing was criminalized, federal agents called these spiritual beings "devils" and myriad Apaches were imprisoned and murdered for being "devil dancers."

The Forest Service permitted the University of Arizona, the Vatican, and their development partners to launch a massive telescope project on top of Mount Graham. They and Arizona's congressional delegation all falsely claimed the mountain was not sacred to the Apaches and, in 1988, Congress approved the project by passing a rider to a one-year appropriations bill that waived all existing laws. When a federal judge found in 1995 that the project was violating cultural and environmental laws, the Arizona delegation pushed through another rider in 1996. In these 15 years, the Apaches have not been accorded the courtesy of a fair hearing in Congress.

There are many sacred places that are being desecrated, damaged, and destroyed right now. These are places of origin, ceremony, commemoration, and vision questing. Mostly, they are places where Native people go to pray and give thanks for the good day for all the world--activities for which Indian people once were imprisoned, starved, and worse by the federal government.

These sacred places went into the public domain and private hands when the federal government put Indians on reservations and made it a federal offense for Indians to worship in traditional ways or to travel to traditional places. In light of this sorry history, it is both arrogant and hypocritical for any lawyer to raise separation of church and state or establishment issues when addressing Native American religious freedom.

It is both lawflxl and righteous for the federal government to take actions to remove barriers that stand in the way of the free exercise of Native traditional religions and to rake remedial action to protect those sacred places that can be protected.

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogeel, president of The Morning Star Institute and a columnist for Indian Country Today, has helped Native Peoples recover more than one million acres of land, including sacred places.