WASHINGTON – As long as anyone can remember, the Western Apache have used a site 60 miles east of Phoenix for a coming-of-age ritual.

But the sacred site known as Oak Flat sits atop $150 billion worth of copper. A mining conglomerate may soon begin turning it into a pit two miles wide.

As opponents of the mine keep losing in court, Vanessa Nosie is concerned that she won’t be able to teach her 4-year-old how to be an Apache woman like her three big sisters. “Our way of teaching is through oral stories, but these oral stories are connected to the land. Our teachings are connected to the land,” said Nosie, a member of the San Carlos Apache. “How do I teach her to become an Apache woman when that place is gone forever?”

The tribe suffered a major blow when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal May 27 from Apache Stronghold, a nonprofit group that has tried to block the transfer of federal land at Oak Flat to Resolution Copper.

The joint venture of global mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP has spent years seeking access to Oak Flat in the Tonto National Forest and the estimated 40 billion pounds of copper that lies beneath it.

On Friday, a federal judge in Phoenix denied requests from the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Center for Biological Diversity and other mining opponents to temporarily block the land transfer.

Instead, U.S. District Judge Dominic Lanza, appointed by President Donald Trump, ruled that the transfer must wait 60 days after a final environmental impact statement is published. The Trump administration had planned to execute the transfer within days of issuing that statement on June 16.

San Carlos Apache Chairman Terry Rambler welcomed the two-month reprieve, saying it gives the tribe more time to challenge the project.

Joe Davis, senior counsel at the Becket Fund – a public interest law firm specializing in religious freedom cases that represents Apache Stronghold – called the Supreme Court ruling “extremely disappointing.”

“This was a critically important case for Native American religious exercise and an existentially important case for the Apache in particular,” he said in a phone interview.

Nosie’s family is among those whose identity hangs in the balance.

Her daughter Shá’yú would follow in the footsteps of generations of Apache women by taking part in the rites of passage at a site known to the Apache as Chi’chil Bildagoteel. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is considered sacred by many members of the Apache and other Indigenous communities.

“She is at a different crossroads than her sisters, because if Oak Flat is destroyed, how will she know how to be an Apache?” Nosie said. “It is part of our identity and our spirituality, of what makes us who we are as Apache people.”

The fight over Oak Flat has been closely watched by other Indigenous and minority religious groups, and advocates fear the Supreme Court has left sacred sites dangerously vulnerable.

Apache Stronghold sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which says the government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” without a compelling interest that cannot be achieved otherwise.

Resolution Copper intends to pull copper ore from Oak Flat through a technique called block cave mining. Large sections of ore are undercut by drilling and blasting. That eventually causes the ore to collapse.

A 2021 Environmental Impact Statement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which includes the Forest Service, projected that after about six years of mining a crater 800 to 1,115 feet deep and roughly 1.8 miles wide will form.

Mining foes have lost repeatedly in court. The Apache Stronghold challenge reached the Supreme Court over a dozen times since 2021.

On March 1, 2024, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s denial of a preliminary injunction, ruling that the project would not “impose a substantial burden on religious exercise.”

The Becket Fund lawyer strongly disagrees.

“The 9th Circuit’s decision says that if a site is on federal land, then the government can totally destroy it, and religious freedom law just has nothing at all to say about it, and the government can do it for a good reason, a bad reason, or for no reason at all,” Davis said. “That’s an awful result, particularly for Native Americans, who are typically the ones worshiping at sacred sites on federal land.”

The huge copper deposit has been subject to debate for decades.

In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared the Oak Flat off-limits to mining along with nearly two dozen other sites.

Richard Nixon renewed the ban in 1971 but with an important distinction: the federal government could trade Oak Flat in the future to private interests that would not face the same restrictions.

In 2005, Arizona’s senators, Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl, filed a bill that would have authorized the land swap with Resolution Copper. The bill died.

In late 2014, McCain slipped a rider authorizing the land swap onto a must-pass defense bill. The rider permitted the government to trade 2,200 acres to Resolution Copper in exchange for 5,376 acres nearby.

In 2021, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, D-Tucson, then chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, tried to undo that move. A bill to permanently protect Oak Flat from mining drew more than 100 House sponsors – though Grijalva, who died in March, was the only Arizonan.

The bill passed through his committee but died without a floor vote.

Not all Apache view Oak Flat as sacred.

In a 2015 opinion piece in the Arizona Republic, a former tribal historian argued that Oak Flat was not traditionally deemed sacred. He noted the lack of outcry when the Magma Copper Company dug a mine shaft in 1970.

But Marcus Macktima, an assistant professor of history at Northern Arizona University and a member of the San Carlos Apache, does view the site as sacred. Mine supporters have exploited a misconception that Apaches are monolithic, he said.

“There have been people who have dissented from Apache Stronghold and the tribe, saying that the place is not sacred,” he said. “Those dissenting voices obviously do damage and that provides opportunities for colonial powers to come in and say, ‘Hey we got people here who are saying it is not sacred.’”

Resolution Copper has said that once fully operational, the mine will create about 1,500 jobs plus another 2,200 indirect jobs.

In Superior, four miles from Oak Flat, Mayor Mila Besich has been a vocal proponent of the mine. She called the Supreme Court’s decision a “huge relief to our community.”

“If the court had … ruled in favor (of the opponents) it would have really upended democracy into becoming a theocracy,” she said by phone.

Arizona lawmakers have tried to steer clear of the dispute.

Rep. Eli Crane, R-Oro Valley, whose district includes Oak Flat, declined to discuss the case when approached by Cronkite News last week at the Capitol.

“I think we’ve got to respect judicial opinions,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, said when asked about the Supreme Court’s refusal to block the land swap.

In February, Kelly and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced the Critical Minerals Consistency Act of 2025, which would add copper to the U.S. Geological Survey list of critical minerals, which would trigger tax breaks and speedier permitting.

“Copper and other critical minerals are essential to our energy security, manufacturing, and national defense, but federal bureaucracy has created confusion for producers,” Kelly said in a statement when he introduced the bill.

On March 20, Trump signed an executive order that would fast-track domestic mining projects.

On April 18, the White House announced that Oak Flat had been added to a priority list with eight other mining projects.

Opponents say copper extracted at Oak Flat will probably leave the United States, though, undermining national security justifications.

China refines far more copper than any other country: about 12,000 metric tons in 2024, compared to 890 metric tons in the U.S., according to the USGS.

Rio Tinto’s biggest shareholder is Aluminum Corporation of China, a state-owned company that is the world’s largest producer of aluminum and a leading producer of copper. Chinalco holds 14.6% of Rio Tinto shares.

Roughly 1.1 million tons of copper was mined in the United States last year and about 70% of it came from Arizona – the Copper State.

But the U.S. has limited refining capacity, with only two smelters that process ore.

One is in Arizona: the Freeport-McMoRan plant in Miami, on the outskirts of the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Another nearby smelter, the ASARCO plant in Hayden, has not been operational since 2020, when it closed following a labor strike.

Curt Shannon, interim director of the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition, one of the groups that has sought to block the Oak Flat mine, has made regular visits to Washington over the last decade hoping to persuade lawmakers to block the land transfer.

“They largely seem swayed by the copper companies’ position on things,” he said. “Mark Kelly in particular seems to think that we need the copper for this project for national defense purposes, even though the concentrate is likely to go to China for smelting.”

Kelly noted that copper is a commodity traded globally.

“I haven’t talked to the mining company about the plan on where they are going to sell the product,” he said. “Since we purchase a lot of copper here in the United States, we have got a huge demand. I would imagine it is probably sold in the United States, but I don’t know that for sure.”

Nosie said Apache Stronghold and the Becket Fund will keep fighting.

“We’re looking at every avenue that we can possibly take,” she said. “We’re going to fight this until our last breath.”

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.

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Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

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