Oak Flat

Chíʼchil Biłdagoteel — Oak Flat — is a stand of old Emory oaks and high desert on the Tonto National Forest east of the copper town of Superior, and to the Western Apache it is a direct corridor to the Creator. Girls become women here in the na'ii'ees, the Sunrise Ceremony, on ground where families have gathered acorns, medicine, and ceremony since long before there was a border to cross to reach it. Apache women have testified that without this specific place, the ceremony — and part of what makes them Apache — cannot happen at all.

Beneath the oaks lies one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits on earth, and that is the rest of the story. In December 2014 a provision was slipped into a must-pass military budget bill authorizing the federal government to hand Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, a venture of the foreign mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP. The company's method is block-cave mining, which collapses the ground from below; it would leave a crater roughly two miles across and a thousand feet deep where the sacred site now stands. The San Carlos Apache, whose reservation begins across the Salt River, have led the resistance alongside the grassroots group Apache Stronghold.

They have largely lost in court. The Supreme Court declined to hear Apache Stronghold's religious-freedom case in May 2025 — Justice Gorsuch calling the refusal a grave mistake in dissent — and after a year of injunctions and appeals the land passed to Resolution Copper on March 16, 2026, with drilling ramping up and the resistance vowing to fight on by other means. This is not settled history; it is unfolding now, and the facts on the ground may have moved again by the time you read this. What isn't in question is the shape of the thing: a living religion's holiest room, weighed on a federal ledger against forty billion pounds of copper, and found lighter.