Nestled in the Tonto National Forest is Oak Flat — home to one of the largest copper deposits on Earth. The ore could be worth a fortune to the mining companies planning to extract it.
But to many Apaches, Oak Flat’s value can’t be measured in dollars. They are connected to it — culturally and spiritually — and fighting to save it as well as the region’s rich Apache roots.
Chi’chil Biłdagoteel — the Apache name for Oak Flat — has been a gathering site for generations of Apaches. From coming-of-age and sunrise ceremonies to picking acorns underneath Emory oak trees, it’s also where some believe angels — called the Gaan — or mountain spirits reside among minerals beneath the surface.
San Carlos Apache Chairman Terry Rambler has deep ties to this land east of the Valley.
“My great-grandmother, she was from that area: Winkelman, Superior and Oak Flat,” Rambler told KJZZ. “My people, Aravaipa, in Apache, they’re called Tsé Binesti’é. That means Surrounded by Rocks clan. So when you’re in the area, you can just know why my ancestors were given that name.”
Rambler’s relatives resided in the rugged Pinal Mountains, and are among at least eight Apache clans and two Western Apache bands that lay claim to Oak Flat.
In all, about a dozen modern-day federally recognized tribes in the Southwest maintain cultural connections there, including the Hopi, Zuni and Four Southern Tribes: Tohono O’odham, Ak-Chin, Salt River Pima-Maricopa and Gila River.
Apaches past and present, arguably, prized it the most.
More than 60 Western Apache clans — some now extinct — and differing bands roamed the borderlands of the Southwest from modern-day Flagstaff to eastern New Mexico and even into Mexico.
Violence brewed between U.S. settlers, Mexicans and Apaches.
Even the Mexican state of Sonora began, in 1835, paying out bounties for Apache scalps: 100 pesos per male, 50 pesos per female and 25 pesos per each child under age 14.
Despite the 1848 Mexican-American War ending with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, tensions still escalated. Settlers encroached on Apache homelands, bringing ranching, mining, cattle, timber and railroad interests with them to the West.
The mass migration, in part, led to the Apache Wars, a series of armed conflicts spanning decades with the U.S. Army. Then, the Treaty of Santa Fe — an 1852 truce — was ratified and supposed to cease hostilities.
“Apaches broke it. Americans broke it. The military broke it. Mexicans broke it,” said Jeffrey Shepherd, history professor at The University of Texas at El Paso. “They didn’t care, they just ignored it. Then there were some bands of Apaches that said, ‘This treaty doesn’t cover us. We don’t want peace. We don’t want to let people through here. Why should we trust you?’”
Two years later, Mexico sold 29,670 square miles of soil to the U.S. for $10 million through the Gadsden Purchase — eventually leading to the formation of the Arizona and New Mexico territories — with the 1863 Arizona Organic Act amid the Civil War.
At the same time, the U.S. still had to deal with Apaches in the West.
“A lot of superintendents are saying, ‘Hey, we’re kind of thinking we should just give up the eastern half of the Arizona Territory to the Apaches,” said Marcus Macktima, a San Carlos Apache assistant history professor at Northern Arizona University, “because there’s no way we’ll ever be able to control them.’”
Warfare ensued for almost four decades, with the U.S. still trying to get rid of Apaches until 1886 when Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo surrendered near Skeleton Canyon — 30 miles northeast of modern-day Douglas, Arizona, near the New Mexico border.
Even then, renegade Apaches still raided northern Mexico until 1915.
“The reports from military say that these tribes are just kind of wandering around. They don’t really have a reason to be in these places,” Macktima explained. “That’s just not the case. The people knew what they were doing, and we had a cyclical nature to our culture, but in specific places at specific times, and Oak Flat was a part of that.”
They were forced out of Oak Flat in the 1870s.
In one horrific incident, 75 Apache warriors near Oak Flat plummeted to their deaths off a sheer cliff — later named Apache Leap – located just on the outskirts of present-day Superior.
Aravaipa Pinal Apaches, in particular, were persecuted.
Federal and territorial government officials sanctioned militarized citizen gangs to essentially track down and kill families.
More than 380 Apache deaths were documented in 35 encounters between 1859 and 1874, according to Simon Fraser University anthropology professor John Welch, a former historic preservation officer for the White Mountain Apache Tribe.
“The rifles defeated the bows and arrows, and so our people, including my great-grandmother, were herded like cattle from that area to Old San Carlos,” Rambler recalled. “They had the help of the U.S. soldiers and the PR campaign by the local papers, depicting us as savages and that we were in the way of Manifest Destiny.”
President Ulysses S. Grant established the San Carlos Apache Reservation in 1871.
“So you get this flurry of executive orders,” added Shepherd, “but it’s also tied with the just, just horribly violent clampdown on Apaches in the Southwest.”
This led to rounding up thousands of Apaches, including Geronimo, and marching them to Old San Carlos — nicknamed “Hell’s Forty Acres” — as prisoners of war under military occupation.
Sharpshooters surveyed the landscape for fleeing Apaches. As many as 4,000 Western Apaches, Mojave, Yavapai and Chiracahua Apaches were held captive under deplorable conditions by 1874.
Some even refer to it as a concentration camp — that became their new homeland.
At that time, the U.S. viewed Apaches as a monolith.
Yet, these communities are made up of complex kinship networks of bands and clans, like Tonto, Yavapai, Chiricahua and many more.
Today’s San Carlos tribal membership is essentially a melting pot of many Apache ancestors, including the White Mountain, Cibecue, Coyotero, Mimbres, Chiricahua, Pinal, Apache Peaks, Aravaipa, Tonto, Mogollon and Chilecon bands.
But back then, not all of them got along.
“Obviously, when you bring all of these different people together on the reservation, there’s going to be some ancient, cultural, historical clashes,” Macktima mentioned, “because there was no Apache nation. That didn’t exist. We wouldn’t have ever confined ourselves in that way at all.”
The San Carlos Apache Tribe only gained federal recognition less than a century ago, when the U.S. unified these distinct bands and clans through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.
Long before that, Apaches were nomadic and traveled to hunt, gather and farm seasonally. So when the U.S. temporarily restricted movement with reservations, that upended their entire way of life, while also severing their ties to Chi'chil Biłdagoteel until the U.S. released them.
“They’re really waging a military but also bureaucratic war on Apaches,” said Shepherd, “as a people, but also upon their land.”
Mineral wealth, in large part, was a motivator for resizing their reservation six times — between 1873 and 1912 — by the U.S. and even the tribe itself. The chance to discover old Spanish silver mines, especially, attracted expeditions to the Southwest.
“That’s driving people into Arizona,” said Macktima. “And of course, that means the extermination of Apache peoples in the region.”
Shepherd stressed that’s not hyperbole.
“Rounding people up, concentrating them on reservations, deporting them,” he elaborated, “and as that happens, we start to see the emergence of that federal land management regime take over the territory as public domain.”
In 1896, a tribal measure passed with 56% of the vote to reincorporate a 232,000-acre mineral strip – mostly containing coal — from off-reservation into the public domain in exchange for $12,433 annually — more than $470,000 when adjusted for inflation.
“In the late 19th century, they’re talking about minerals and getting rid of the [San Carlos] reservation to allow for prospecting, and they do that,” Macktima explained, “but the Apaches who agree are not from that reservation.”
Aravaipa Pinal Apaches primarily opposed that decision because it harmed their territorial farmlands, while Yavapais and White Mountain Apaches didn’t, with Macktima adding, “so all these different Apaches are coming in saying, ‘Hey, we should go ahead and give this up.’”
These ceded lands were supposed to be supervised by the U.S. government for mineral recovery with all revenues returning to the tribe. It wasn’t profitable, so the tribe sought to regain its territory. That mineral strip along the southern border of the reservation was eventually returned to the San Carlos Apache Tribe in 1969.
Unlike the mineral strip, Oak Flat has remained in the public domain since 1955, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower incorporated that site into the Tonto National Forest — where it remains protected to this day.
Macktima believes if the Apaches remained nomadic, “Oak Flat would still become a very prominent place for Apaches to travel to, and if the reservation didn’t exist, then you would still see a lot of that into the modern day.”
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Resolution Copper is betting on gaining access to a large and lucrative copper ore east of Phoenix. A lot of money has already been invested in the project – over $2 billion – and opponents say some of it has been used to buy influence. -
Resolution Copper wants to dig up a massive amount of copper ore beneath Oak Flat inside the Tonto National Forest. And by doing so, a site that some Apaches consider sacred may be destroyed. -
While Resolution Copper is taking a proactive approach to meet its tremendous water needs, their actions may still have a lasting and severe impact on the local hydrological landscape around Oak Flat. -
While they’re not mining yet, Resolution Copper is slowly digging its way toward the lucrative ore. In fact, the site is already home to the deepest single-lift mine shaft in North America, and KJZZ’s Gabriel Pietrorazio goes thousands of feet underground to see it for himself. -
Discovered in Arizona’s Copper Triangle, Oak Flat is home to one of the richest copper deposits in the world. But the battle to mine there — about 60 miles east of Phoenix — has been bogged down by decades of politics. -
Watch a KJZZ panel discussion about Oak Flat — an area sacred to generations of Apaches that may soon be home to one of the largest copper mines in the world.
