A Mountain Basin Argued Before the Ninth Circuit

Western Apache religion binds ceremonial life to named places on the land, places that carry narrative and moral force in Apache tradition and remain the subject of ceremonies still actively practiced by Western Apache communities in east central Arizona today. Ceremonial knowledge is held by practitioners and is not published, and this article does not describe what a ceremony involves or how it is conducted. What is public, and the subject of a major federal court fight, is the religious standing of one of those places: Chi'chil Bildagoteel, known in English as Oak Flat, an oak studded basin on the Tonto National Forest that is a site of ceremony, of acorn gathering and of burials for the San Carlos Apache and other Apache people.

Apache organizations sued the federal government to stop a land transfer that would allow a large scale copper mine to destroy the basin, a case that reached the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as Apache Stronghold versus United States, decided in 2024. The litigation has been argued entirely on the public record, in briefs and opinions anyone can read, while the Apache organizations bringing it have been explicit that their legal case does not depend on telling outsiders what happens at Oak Flat, and it has not. Western Apache religion remains a living tradition today, its ceremonial content closed exactly as it was before the lawsuit, its fight to keep a sacred place from being destroyed carried out in public.