OAK FLAT, Ariz. (AP) — Azee Romero climbed barefoot on the wrinkled trunk of the massive Emory oak tree at the center of the Oak Flat Campground.
The 5-year-old in his black dinosaur t-shirt with hair tied under a backwards baseball cap scaled higher and higher until he found the perfect seat. There, cradled by the sturdy trunk, the boy flashed a gap-toothed smile and rested comfortably as if he’d just climbed onto the lap of a grandparent.
In fact, that centuries-old oak tree and the ground below it – the sacred, ancestral flats that stretch for miles east of Phoenix — are like kin to Azee’s family.
“My little guy, his umbilical cord is buried here,” said Azee’s mother, Lian Bighorse. She said the connection to Oak Flat is physical as well as spiritual.
The family is Chiricahua Apache and Oak Flat, or Chi’chil Bildagoteel, is a consecrated place used for prayer and ritual by them and many other Native Americans in the region. Elders say the land was blessed by Usen, their Creator, and inhabited by Ga’an, the mountain spirits or angels who provide spiritual succor and guidance to seekers.
But they fear for its future, seeing plans to carve a huge copper mine into the heart of Oak Flat as if it were a threat to their own flesh and blood — an obliteration of a piece of their spiritual heritage.
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The 6.7-square-mile (17.3 square-kilometer) Oak Flat is a verdant oasis in an arid landscape dotted with towering saguaro cacti, majestic rock spires and sweeping canyons.
Here, sage and other plants used for medicinal and ritual purposes sprout along streams and wetlands that provide sanctuary for birds and other animals. It’s where Native people gather acorns that drop from the oak trees before crushing them into an edible powder, and pick red sumac berries for a refreshing, scarlet drink that Bighorse described as “Native Kool-Aid.”
It is also here that Resolution Copper Mining, a joint subsidiary of British and Australian mining giants, Rio Tinto…
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