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This story originally appeared in High Country News and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration to bolster reporting on climate history.
One fall evening four years ago, Ivan Bender, a Hualapai man in his fifties, took his fluffy brown and white Pomeranian, Sierra Mae, for a walk to check out the ranch he runs. Nestled in the Big Sandy River Valley in western Arizona, Ranch protects Ha ‘Kamwe’ – hot springs sacred to the Hualapai and now known in English as Cofer Hot Springs. As the shadows lengthened, Bender saw something surprising – men working on a nearby hill.
“I asked them what they were doing,†recalls Bender. “They told me they were drilling.” As it turned out, in addition to sacred sites such as hot springs, ceremonial sites and ancestral graves, the valley also harbors an enormous lithium deposit. Now exploration work by the Australian company Hawkstone Mining threatens these places and with them the religious practices of the Hualapai and other indigenous nations. But this threat is nothing new: Centuries of land expropriation, combined with judgments from federal courts denying the protection of holy places, have long destroyed the religious freedom of the indigenous peoples.
Caretaker Bender, Cholla Canyon Ranch, spans about 360 acres halfway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, flanked to the west by the lush Big Sandy River riverside corridor. The valley is part of an ancient salt route that connects tribes from north to central Utah with communities in Baja California and along the Pacific coast documented in the songs and oral traditions of many indigenous nations.
“There are stories about this land and what it represents to the Hualapai tribe,” said Bender. “For me it holds a really, really sacred valley of life in general.” According to Tribe Council member Richard Powskey, who heads the Hualapai Natural Resources Department, the Hualapai harvest indigenous plant material along the river corridor for everything from weighing boards to drums.
The mining company (USA Lithium Ltd., now acquired by Hawkstone Mining Ltd.) had not notified the Hualapai tribe that it was looking for lithium on nearby Bureau of Land Management properties. That evening, Bender was shocked to see the destruction. The company eventually dismantled a road network and drilled nearly 50 test wells at a depth of more than 100 meters in the sacred landscape.
This summer, Hawkstone plans to triple its exploration drilling and nearly orbit Canyon Ranch and the springs it protects. Over the next several years, Hawkstone is hoping to lay the groundwork in an open pit mine and dig a subterranean slurry to direct the ore approximately 50 miles to a facility in Kingman, Arizona, where sulfuric acid will be used to extract the lithium. Lithium, which is listed as a critical mineral, is critical to meeting the Biden government’s goal of replacing gas-guzzling vehicles with electric vehicles, and Big Sandy Valley is relatively close to the Tesla Nevada factory. In total, Hawkstone has mining rights to more than 5,000 acres of Arizona public land for this project. Still, tribes whose holy sites are endangered have almost no say in his decisions.
Public land from Bears Ears to Oak Flat contains myriad areas of cultural and religious significance. But when tribes went to court to protect these sites – and their own religious freedom – they have consistently lost. Courts have narrowly interpreted what is considered a religious burden on tribes to preserve the federal government’s ability to use public land as it sees fit.
The roots of this policy are centuries deep. In the groundbreaking case of Johnson v. M’Intosh of 1823, the Supreme Court ruled that tribal peoples cannot sell land to private owners in the United States because it does not belong to them. Instead, Christian colonizers were the rightful owners, based on the Spanish colonial “Doctrine of Discovery,” a racist and anti-indigenous policy that stated that non-Christian, non-European societies were inferior and that Christian European nations had a superior right to all land.
“Part of what justified the claim to the land was that (colonizers) would teach Christianity to the indigenous peoples,” said Michalyn Steele, an Indian legal expert at Brigham Young University and a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. “If they rejected Christianity, they essentially forfeited their rights to land and resources.”
By the late 1800s, the United States had banned indigenous religious practices, forcing the tribes to assimilate socially and politically and to embrace Christianity through agricultural, lifestyle, and religious practices.
More recently, courts have further weakened the protection of indigenous peoples’ religious freedom on public land. In the Lyng v. 1988 Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association’s Supreme Court ruled that forest services could widen a logging road in Northern California’s Six Rivers National Forest, though doing so would destroy a region essential to the religious beliefs of tribes like the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa. The Supreme Court argued that while the site could be completely destroyed, the destruction was not against the Constitution as it would not force tribal members to violate their religious beliefs or punish them for practicing their religion.
“Even assuming that the government’s actions here are practically destroying the ability of Indians to practice their religion, the constitution simply does not provide a principle that could justify upholding the legal rights of respondents,” wrote Judge Sandra Day O’Connor in the majority opinion.
The court ruled in part to avoid allowing the tribes extensive control over their ancestral lands through the exercise of their religious freedom. “Whatever rights the Indians may have for the use of the area … those rights do not deprive the government of their rights to use their land,” the ruling reads.
Although Congress partially protected this sacred region by adding it to the Siskiyou Wilderness Area, the Lyng ruling is still widespread across the Indian country today and has Stephanie Barclay, director of the Religious Liberty Institute at the University of Notre Dame and former trial attorney with the Becket Fund Religious Freedom, calls a “double standard” in dealing with indigenous holy sites.
Barclay compared the situation of tribes like the Hualapai, who rely on the federal government to gain access to holy sites, to that of Jewish prisoners on a kosher diet or Sikh members of the military, whose beliefs forbid them from entering to cut the hair. In all of these cases, religious freedoms are controlled by the government. But, Barclay said, tribal members don’t enjoy the same religious protection.
For me it holds a really, really sacred valley of life in general.
“If the government is not willing to give access to various indigenous peoples so that they can practice their religion in these holy places, it will not happen,” she said. But the Supreme Court has narrowly interpreted the religious protection of indigenous holy sites on public land, to the point of extensive destruction.
In a recent Harvard Law Review article, Steele and Barclay urge the federal government to protect indigenous religious practices as one of their confidentiality obligations and to be careful about the destruction of holy sites on public land.
As things stand, state and federal authorities can allow irreversible damage with little contribution from the indigenous communities concerned. In fact, there was virtually no communication between the BLM and the Hualapai tribe about the lithium impacts from Hawkstone in the Big Sandy River Valley. Although the BLM invited the Hualapai tribe to consult with the agency on Hawkstone’s exploration plans in June 2020, the agency later rejected the tribe’s request to be a coordinating agency for the project. It also turned down the suggestion that a tribal elder should go through the area to educate the agency about the cultural resources and history that mining could endanger.
The BLM announced that it had only found four cultural sites in the proposed drilling area. Of these, it said it would try to avoid one that was protected under the National Historic Preservation Act. Meanwhile, the agency said in its publicly available environmental assessment that it would “determine” the impact on religious concerns or traditional Native American values ​​and that it would consult with the Hualapai tribe, among others. At the time of this writing, BLM staff had not consented to an interview or responded to written questions from High Country News.
For his part, Hawkstone said in March, “All (native) titles are deleted and there are no other known historical or environmentally sensitive areas.” Hawkstone’s report ignores the fact that even if tribes do not have legal rights to their traditional land, these spaces still have religious and cultural significance.
When asked for comment, Doug Pitts, a US consultant at Hawkstone Mining, emailed HCN that, given the early stage of the project, “we believe the project is not worth discussing at this time”.
Even without a clear legal path forward, the Hualapai tribe have not given up protecting their religious practices from lithium exploration. It’s not alone: ​​In April, the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, which represents 21 nations including Hualapai, passed a resolution against lithium mining that the BLM’s environmental analysis described as “grossly inadequate”. The BLM recently agreed to extend the comment deadline to June 10th. However, Powskey pointed out that during the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline – which partially involved the destruction of burials – the response from authorities was violent and tribal nations, for a long time, the only ones who seemed to care. And in the end the pipeline was built.
Big Sandy isn’t the first battle the Hualapai have fought to protect sacred landscapes in this remote corner of Arizona, where wind turbines, gold mines, and other private interests have already destroyed culturally important places – and it won’t be the last. “You know there’s more to come,” said Powskey.
Meanwhile, the likelihood of further lithium exploration around the ranch upset Caretaker Bender. The double standards when dealing with indigenous holy places annoys him.
“They come here and desecrate your holy land,” he said. “Would you like me to go to Arlington Cemetery and build myself a sweat lodge and sweat on this land?†He asked, comparing the valley with another place that is considered sacred: “I would prefer it if you go somewhere else and leave the story alone. “
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