Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Can I just say this? We can all agree that if this were land sacred to Christians, destroying it wouldn't even be a question, right? It just wouldn't happen.

"How hypocritical is it that conservatives are willing to defend the religious freedom of corporations, but we're all supposed to be okay with a mining company destroying a place that the Apache deem sacred?"

-- John Paul Brammer, 2014-12-11 (Blue Nation Review), regarding a shady land-swap deal to allow copper mining on a parcel of land two presidents declared off-limits to mining ... where a thousand-foot crater two miles wide (and 1.3 billion tons of tailings) will replace recreational, archaeological, and sacred sites.

"'Why is this place sacred?' said Wendsler Nosie Sr., a former chairman of the San Carlos Apache, in a recent interview with Cronkite News. 'No difference to Mount Sinai. How the holy spirit came to be.' If you don't want to take his word for it, the archaeological record at Oak Flat contains abundant evidence that the Apache have been here 'since well before recorded history,' according to congressional testimony by the Society for American Archaeology.

"If Oak Flat were a Christian holy site, or for that matter Jewish or Muslim, no senator who wished to remain in office would dare to sneak a backdoor deal for its destruction into a spending bill - no matter what mining-company profits or jobs might result. But this is Indian religion. Clearly the Arizona congressional delegation isn’t afraid of a couple of million conquered natives."

-- Lydia Millet, 2015-05-29 (New York Times)

"'Living at the site is like coming home,' Nosie said. 'The whole environment of this place brings spirituality and turns doubters into supporters. Call it 'occupation' if you will, but the right words are that we are coming home. The system and Resolution Copper may not know it, but this is a protracted struggle, and if we stay true to task, we will win. We've created a fire that cannot be extinguished, and while it becomes scary that we don't know what tomorrow will be like, we are not going to vacate this area.'" -- quoted by Lee Allen, 2015-05-21 (Indian Country)

"The record of Resolution's parent companies wasn't exactly stellar coming into this project. Environmental groups say Rio Tinto's Bingham Canyon copper mine outside Salt Lake City is a source of major environmental contamination that has resulted in water pollution and damage to fish and wildlife habitat. And that was before an April 2013 landslide in which 165 million tons of earth slipped, triggering 16 small earthquakes and burying more than 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel, oil, coolant and grease as well as a container holding thousands of pounds ofexplosives." -- Kevin Baxter, 2015-02-03 (Los Angeles Times)

[I'd heard about this story and went looking for a quotation to use, but then I couldn't decide which of these to pick, so y'all get a handful of related quotes today ... the 91st anniversary of the day Congress voted to recognize the peoples who were here first as citizens.]