The proposed mine site — which encompasses Teztan Biny (Fish Lake), Yanah Biny (Little Fish Lake) and the surrounding area, called Nabas — is traditional Tsilhqot’in territory where the people have hunted, trapped, fished, collected medicinal plants, and shared their knowledge and history from generation to generation through cultural gatherings and ceremonies.

The lakes are home to a genetically unique type of rainbow trout. They are also in the headwaters of the last major viable salmon run that comes up the Fraser River, and water in the area is pure enough that the people are able to drink directly the source — a testament to the protection the Tsilhqot’in have provided their traditional lands for generations. The area also provides important habitat for the threatened South Chilcotin grizzly bear.

For some 20 years, the Tsilhqot’in Nation has been fighting Taseko Mines Ltd.’s proposed open-pit mining project, which the Canadian environment minister rejected last year largely because the plan called for draining Teztan Biny and using it as a toxic tailings dump.

The government environmental report on which the decision was based concluded that “the project would result in significant adverse environmental effects on fish and fish habitat, on navigation, on the current use of lands and resources for traditional purposes by First Nations and on cultural heritage, and on certain potential or established Aboriginal rights [to hunt, trap and fish].” It particularly noted that the island in the middle of Teztan Biny, which would have been destroyed, is “a place of spiritual power and healing for the Tsilhqot’in.”

Three months after the government’s refusal, Taseko Mines submitted a revised plan, which proposes instead to build the tailings facility a little over a mile upstream from Teztan Biny. While the new proposal “saves” Teztan Biny, it would still surround the lake with a massive open-pit mine, destroy Yanah Biny and the Nabas region, endanger the trout spawning grounds, and threaten Tsilhqot’in member homes and graves.

Regardless of the proposed plan, according to a Tsilhqot’in media backgrounder, “the fact remains that the ore body lies immediately beside and under Teztan Biny and that the ore body is a toxic cocktail waiting to contaminate the region’s water.”

The Tsilhqot’in National Government called the new proposal a “repackaged version” of a past option that was already determined to be inferior to the most recently rejected plan, and members are frustrated that they must now endure another lengthy and costly review process.

Meanwhile, the mining company, to the dismay of First Nations members and conservationists, has already received exploration permits to begin building 15 miles of roads and dig dozens of test pits and drill holes in the proposed project area.

“The cumulative impacts from the proposed road building and drilling in this area of proven cultural and spiritual importance is a serious threat to our Aboriginal rights,” Chief Marilyn Baptiste of the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation said in a press release. “Any further destruction would be pointless as the federal government cannot possibly approve this proposal.”

What you can do

Please contact Elaine Feldman, Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency president, to voice your opposition to Taseko Mines’ revised proposal:

Elaine Feldman
President
Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency
Place Bell Canada 160 Elgin Street, 22nd Floor
Ottawa, Ontario  K1A 0H3 Canada
Email: elaine.feldman@ceaa-acee.gc.ca
Tel: 001-613-948-2671
Fax: 001-613-948-2208

If you send a letter via email, please CC the following people:
Peter Kent, Federal Minister of Environment (peter.kent@parl.gc.ca)
Premier Christy Clark, Province of British Columbia (premier@gov.bc.ca)
Tsilhqot’in Chiefs (mining@tsilhqotin.ca)

In June of this year, when a 2009 temporary mining ban was due to expire, Salazar issued a six-month extension, asking the BLM to issue a final environmental impact statement evaluating his proposed action. The bureau examined that and three other scenarios — ranging from withdrawing smaller parcels of land from new claims to doing nothing — ultimately favoring Salazar’s proposed action.

Over the past few years, as uranium prices rose, thousands of claims were filed under an 1872 mining law that allows free access to public lands. This renewed interest in uranium mining put Native American tribes, environmental-protection advocates and other stakeholders on alert, and prompted the government to propose the withdrawal of land from new claims.

Increased uranium mining around the Grand Canyon has the potential to threaten aquifers and drinking-water supplies, tribal interests, the tourism economy and the park’s status as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

BLM Director Bob Abbey said the 20-year withdrawal “would allow for cautious, continued development with strong oversight that could help us fill critical gaps in our knowledge about water quality and environmental impacts of uranium mining in the area.”

(Claims approved before July 2009 would not be affected by the ban. According to the final environmental impact statement, 11 mines could be operating in the area in the near future. Some observers are calling for more lasting protection, such as designating the public land surrounding the Grand Canyon as a national monument.)

Take action

After a 30-day review period, the federal government will issue a final decision. Please send a letter to President Obama by Nov. 25 voicing your support for protecting the Grand Canyon.

The Wixárika have sustained their millennia-old culture thanks to their resolve to maintain ancestral traditions, a key aspect of which is a 310-mile annual pilgrimage to Wirikuta, regarded as the birthplace of the sun and of peyote, the sacred cactus though which the Wixárika communicate with their ancestors and deities.

The 540-square-mile Wirikuta reserve — located in the Chihuahuan Desert, one of the world’s most biodiverse deserts — encompasses sacred sites and 86 miles of the pilgrimage route. It is unique in that it was explicitly designed to protect the area’s cultural heritage first, followed by its natural heritage. In 2001, the state government designated it as a sacred natural site under a landmark environmental protection law. And in 2004, the entire pilgrimage route was added to Mexico’s Tentative List for inclusion as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Yet despite these protections, the Wixárika’s sacred landscape faces significant threats. First Majestic Silver Corp. of Canada has been granted 22 mining concessions covering more than 23 square miles, 70 percent of which is within the reserve, while Minera Golondrina, an affiliate of another Canadian mining company, wants to build an open-pit gold mine. Toxic tailings, water pollution, ecosystem destruction, loss of wildlife, and depletion of the water table are among the potential impacts.

In addition, industrial tomato growers have razed miles of fragile desert ecosystem. Both agroindustry and mining threaten the habitat of the peyote cactus, essential to Wixárika spiritual practice.

Apart from the direct environmental impacts, Wixárika leaders say these projects endanger the integrity of the sacred landscape and their ability to practice their traditions. The UN’s special rapporteur on indigenous affairs is also investigating the Wixárika’s claim that their right to informed consent regarding the development of their traditional lands has been violated.

The Oct. 26-27 action in Mexico City, the latest effort in a battle that has been unfolding over the past year, included public marches and ceremonies, a press conference, and a meeting with officials of the federal environmental agency.

Wixárika leaders also entered the presidential complex to deliver a letter asking President Felipe Calderón to rescind the mining concessions, curb the agroindustrial megaprojects, and “implement an alternative plan that will generate jobs for local people while it converts Wirikuta on a protected natural area that is a world-renowned model of ecological conservation.” Wixárika are also calling on Calderón to uphold the 2008 Pact of Hauxa Manaká, in which the president and the governors of four Mexican states guaranteed the protection of the Wixárika culture and sacred sites.

What you can do

Support the Wirakuta Defense Front and visit their website for updates and more information about actions you can take.

Visit Cultural Survival’s Wirikuta campaign page for more information, a sample letter to send to Mexican officials, and other ways you can help.

As we begin editing 350 hours of footage from eight sacred landscapes around the world, it is clear that indigenous cultures have myriad kinds of sacred places, and many different relationships, responsibilities, ceremonies, songs, prayers and stories. To find common themes and to draw distinctions, we have interviewed four “big thinkers” — Satish Kumar, Oren Lyons, Winona LaDuke and Barry Lopez — and we are posting some of their comments as web clips. In a world of sound bites, I see a pattern: the really profound comments take two, three, four minutes to unfold.

Satish Kumar brings a Hindu, Buddhist and Jain perspective to the definition of “sacred place.” For Satish, a UK-based writer, pilgrim and editor of Resurgence magazine, all of the Earth is the home of a divine, life-giving force so vast, mysterious and expansive that it is incomprehensible. As Satish explains it, humans embrace the Ganges River as sacred because all water is sacred, so the Ganges is a local symbol of universal sacredness. Mount Kailash is the home of the divine, a living mountain, but still essentially a symbol that all mountains have spirit and give life, as part of the sacred web of life.

It is a worldview of relationship: “This was Mahatma Gandhi’s idea,” says Satish, “moving from ownership to relationship — seeing that land does not belong to us. We belong to the land. We are not the owners of the land. We are the friends of the land, like friends of the earth. The fundamental shift is in this consciousness that land does not belong to us, we belong to the land.”

In a challenge to the environmental movement, Satish says, “We have to have an ecological worldview and understand that we are part of this web of life. But sometimes in our Western, materialistic and intellectual tradition where rationalism has dominated our thinking, even ecology has become a materialistic discipline — a scientific, rational, description of our relationship with the Earth. When you are thinking in terms of Earth being an abode of the divine, you are going further than a materialistic or a rationalistic worldview of ecology, to what I call reverential ecology. What I would call even spiritual ecology. When you have reverential ecology you see trees, mountains, rivers, forests not just in the visible and material dimension, but you see that all these elements have spirit.”

We found Satish’s explanation of sacred places so compelling that we edited a three-minute piece incorporating some of our best b-roll images, asked Jon Herbst to compose a musical score, and we present it here as a teaser of things to come, to give our friends and supporters a taste of the film series we are shaping. Enjoy!

I asked Winona about the apologies that have been offered to Aboriginal people in Australia and to First Nations people in Canada. These were national events of deep emotion and fanfare, but what was the long-term effect on healing the deep wounds of history?

Winona is executive director of the Native-led organization Honor the Earth, and she said a couple provocative things that I wanted to offer by way of introduction to the beautiful story she tells of real redemption that came to the Pawnee people after they and their seeds and food sources were relocated to far-off lands. It’s a story of homecoming.

But in Canada and Australia, the government apologies rang empty as resource grabs and massive new mines extract tar sands, nickel, cobalt, zinc and gold. “I would argue that we remain unable to fully heal because saying you’re sorry has to mean something,” Winona says, “and it has to change your behavior. That’s what you would tell a five-year-old: ‘You can’t kick your sister again.’ It has to mean something. Well, opening up a new mine after you say you’re sorry is not changing your behavior. Running a bulldozer over a sacred site is not changing your behavior. Allowing egregious contamination in a community after apologizing is not changing your behavior.”

“On one level, you want to tell them that what they’re doing is so wrong — in its spiritual terms, in terms of their own relationship to Mother Earth, and in terms of their denial of people’s humanity. Another facet that I always want to say is: Your plan is bad. You cannot continue to build a society that is based on conquest. We have run out of places to conquer, places to put our flags, new places to mine, new places to dam. At a certain point, you have to bring your world into some sort of economy that is durable and you need to do it sooner rather than later because the more you compromise ecosystems and spiritual recharge areas, the harder it will be for us all, including you, to recover.”

Enjoy the short film clip and hear Winona tell a powerful story of redemption and healing.

“I would say that probably the biggest loss I see in humanity now is the loss of understanding of relationship. They don’t understand their relationship.”

“There are almost seven billion people in the world today. The whole Earth is being covered with smoke. We’ve affected the big systems to the point of melting the ice in the north. We’ve disrupted the patterns of the Earth and we’re going to suffer the consequences.”

“For Indian nations and indigenous people, the most important thing is relationship. We value relationship way beyond anything else, way beyond what you can have. Relationship — to be close, to be next to the tree, to be next to the water, to be next to the earth. Relationship’s really good. It’s really rich. How do you maintain this relationship? How do you keep it fresh? How do you work with it? Well, our people have done that through ceremonies.”

“Where we’ve lost our way, I think, as human species, we’ve lost the understanding of relationship and therefore lost respect. But pockets of indigenous people have hung onto that. So, your teachers are going to be indigenous people.”

“Business as usual is over. It’s not competition; it’s cooperation. You are going to have to fight for the commons. We have an intellect and we better start using it for the common good because that’s where we have to change. Our future’s in our hands, and we can handle it, if we work together.”

How did Oren first learn about his relationship to the Earth? Listen to his story…

The report presents the findings from more than 50 listening sessions conducted over the past year with tribal leaders, traditional practitioners, culture-keepers and unaffiliated native descendants across the country, with the aim of determining how the agency can better manage lands that include sacred sites. Forest Service employees were also surveyed.

Several key themes emerged from the listening sessions:

1. Partnering with tribes to manage sacred sites and maintaining effective communication is critical to their protection.
2. Land managers do not always take advantage of current laws and policies that could benefit the tribes.
3. Forest Service decision makers do not weigh sacred site issues equally with other interests, such as economic development and recreation.
4. Consistent on-the-ground application of available legal tools to recognize and protect sacred sites is needed.

The review team also found, among other things, that Forest Service managers would benefit from more explicit policy language regarding sacred site protection.

These findings form the basis for the report’s recommendations for procedural and policy changes, which are open for public comment until the end of October. Consultations with tribal members and other Native Americans with interest in sacred sites will continue during the public comment period.

Please take a moment to send a comment letter. You can download suggested comments here.

Public comments can be sent to:

U.S. Forest Service
Office of Tribal Relations
1400 Independence Ave., SW
Mailstop Code: 1160
Washington, DC 20250-1160

Comments also may be submitted by fax to (202) 205-1773 or e-mail to sacredsitescomment@fs.fed.us.

The Forest Service and the Office of Tribal Relations plan to submit a final report to Secretary Vilsack in November. Once the report is approved, an implementation plan will be developed.

“We hope this report will foster change in how Indian Tribes and the Forest Service interact on land management decisions for the good of all Americans,” the report states. “It is our hope that these recommendations lead to meaningful changes in the way Native American sacred sites are protected and accessed. Perhaps, just as important, they will lead to a better understanding of Native American values as American values.”

If you haven’t heard about Finding Sacred Ground yet, it’s essentially a mobile phone app much like a podcast tour you’d take at a museum, except we’re offering video, interactivity and augmented reality, along with an hour-long documentary and a Google Earth tour on the Internet as one package. It’s a true transmedia project, but unique because in this case technology serves as a bridge connecting you — the mobile-device user — to the land. The story is told through Native American voices, and by the end of it you should have a good idea why 24 of the surrounding tribes consider Devils Tower to be sacred.

I went out there to put heads together with the team, to gather our favorite GPS points and locations where a story will be triggered (and thanks to Hugh Hawthorne for getting us rolling with that). As always, we had a camera in tow and both Dorothy and Caryn shared their knowledge on tape as did Angela Wetz, the monument’s chief of resource management. We then traveled to see Duane Hollow Horne Bear at Sinte Gleska University, who shared Lakota star knowledge as it relates to the tower, and Donovin Sprague, who talked about family and community structure and what it was like for the surrounding tribes to live near the tower during specific seasons.

Caryn casually mentioned in a car ride that uranium production is likely to start just west of the tower. It has given a new urgency to this project. We might not save the world with this mobile phone app and its augmented reality assets, as we hinted at when we spoke at the augmented reality event in Santa Clara this past spring, but we do aspire to it. And what’s more, we hope to inspire a younger generation who grew up with portable tech to discover themselves and something worth protecting in this land.

According to a committee press release, the Yocha Dehe and Cortina tribes on July 19 established a cultural easement and settlement agreement with the City of Vallejo and the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, setting a legal precedent for granting Native peoples jurisdiction over their sacred sites and ancestral lands. The cultural easement would forever guarantee the tribes legal oversight in all activities at the site. In exchange, the tribe would agree to pay the city $100,000.

The deal allows for a scaled-back version of the waterfront park project to proceed. Terms include elimination of a formerly planned restroom facility and relocation of a “downsized” parking lot to an area tested to confirm that it contains no human remains or cultural remnants.

While the specifics of the deal leave some ambiguity about how GVRD’s park development project can and cannot proceed, Committee to Protect Glen Cove member Corrina Gould (Chochenyo/Karkin Ohlone) said she had faith that the tribes would take the necessary steps to protect ancestral remains from being disturbed.

“We appreciate and are humbled by the vast support that we have received in protecting our ancestors,” Gould said. “It is our responsibility to continue to do the work to make certain that all of our sacred places are protected.”

The 3,500-year old site continues to be spiritually important to California tribes. On April 14, local Native Americans and supporters began a 24-hour prayer vigil at Glen Cove to prevent the Greater Vallejo Recreation District from bulldozing and grading a large portion of the sacred site and constructing bathrooms and a parking lot.

The two city agencies will vote on the agreement later today. The Committee to Protect Glen Cove said a closing ceremony for the encampment will be held on July 30.

For background information, read our past news stories on the struggle to protect Glen Cove, as well as our sacred site report, Shellmounds of the Bay Area.

The temporary ban — enacted in July 2009 and due to expire next month — will now be in effect until December of this year, while the Bureau of Land Management completes a final environmental impact statement that evaluates the department’s “preferred alternative” of a 20-year ban on new mining in the full million-acre zone. Once that statement is published in the fall, Salazar said, he will be ready to make a final decision on the 20-year withdrawal.

Speaking from the South Rim of the canyon, Salazar emphasized the need for a management plan guided by “caution, wisdom and science,” in order to protect the World Heritage Site, drinking-water supplies, the tourism economy and tribal interests, noting that “many tribes in the area see their history and culture woven throughout the Grand Canyon’s landscape.”

Attempting to quell criticism that the withdrawal would deny access to uranium resources in the area, Salazar pointed out that it would apply only to new claims — the small number of existing claims would remain in effect and could continue to be developed. Referring to those claims, Salazar urged “cautious development with strong oversight.”

Salazar recalled the words President Theodore Roosevelt, spoken years ago at the same location: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”

Read this Feb. 25, 2010 Sacred Land News post to learn more about the moratorium, the existing mining claims and the potential environmental impacts.

Although the protest has delayed construction at the 15-acre site, the Greater Vallejo Recreation District is pressing on with plans to install a parking lot, trails and visitor facilities by the shell mound known as Songorea Te. Last week, the GVRD board of trustees voted unanimously to forbid the public from the site once work begins, which would give police greater latitude to remove protesters.

The Protect Glen Cove Committee reports that the encampment has been receiving visits of support from from Native American representatives from throughout the region as well as other interested groups. A lawyer specializing in Native American law recently volunteered his support and services, as have some archeologists.

What You Can Do

• If you live in the Bay Area, you can get a first-hand update from organizers and learn more about ways you can help at an informational event on Tuesday, May 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Station 40, 3030 B 16th St., San Francisco.
• Contact the Bay Trail project, a non-profit organization based in Oakland, that is administered by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) that was created to implement the Bay Trail, to ask them to divest their funding from the Greater Vallejo Recreation District (GVRD) park development project at Sogorea Te / Glen Cove.
• Visit the spiritual encampment, write city officials or donate to the cause — these and many other ways you can help are described on the Protect Glen Cove Committee’s How to Help page.
• Learn more about the issue by reading the About and Frequently Asked Questions pages on the Protect Glen Cove website. You can also learn more about the history of Native Californian shell mounds in our sacred site report.

Ohlone activist Corrina Gould told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Our ancestors deserve a place where they can rest forever. People everywhere understand that ancient cemeteries are sacred places. But in Vallejo, they want to put a bathroom on one.”

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Proponents of the pipeline point out the benefits of a stable supply of oil from a friendly neighbor in a time of rising fuel prices and Middle East instability. But the Times editorial argues that the environmental risks, for both Canada and the United States, are “enormous.”

In Alberta, the extraction of oil from the tar sands requires the stripmining of swaths of boreal forest, along with the burning of natural gas and consumption of large quantities of water to produce steam to a turn tar-like substance called bitumen into oil. The Times’ editors came to the same conclusion SLFP did when we filmed in Alberta last year: “Operations in Alberta have already created 65 square miles of toxic holding ponds, which kill migrating birds and pollute downstream watersheds, a serious matter for native communities.”

In the United States, the greatest threat is from pipeline leaks; the Times cites multiple recent spills from existing tar sands pipelines. The new pipeline would cross an important U.S. water reservoir, the Ogallala Aquifer, thus threatening “disastrous consequences” if a leak were to occur.

Two Nebraska senators are opposing the pipeline’s proposed route, but “political pressure to win swift approval has been building in Congress.” Because the pipeline would cross an international boundary, the State Department must approve its construction; that decision is expected later this year.

This controversial issue is one of those featured in Sacred Land Film Project’s upcoming film series Losing Sacred Ground.

Several hours later, my daughter rushed into the bedroom and exclaimed, “They just had an 8.9 earthquake in Japan!” — and in the days since we have all followed the unfolding disaster in Japan with horror and sadness.

This was not the first time that synchronicity has marked my interactions with Thomas Banyacya. In 1979, I sat at Thomas’s kitchen table in Kykotsmovi village and related to him the details of a new film that had just premiered, The China Syndrome, about a reporter exposing a cover-up of safety hazards during a nuclear power-plant accident. I told Thomas I thought the film was so powerful it would change the world.

The kitchen door opened and in came Steve Tullberg of the Indian Law Resource Center, who had just flown in from Washington, D.C. for an important meeting with Hopi elders. Steve asked, “Have you heard about Three Mile Island?” and we all shook our heads, no. He then related the very real story of the catastrophe at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station that was pretty much exactly the same as the one I had just told Thomas about the fictional film’s nuclear meltdown. Sitting there in the heart of Hopiland, we were all humbled once again by the power of prophecy.

Here is something Thomas Banyacya said in 1986: “Traditional Hopi elders have said a time would come when Native peoples must gather together and unite. Ancient Hopi teachings warn about a time of massive natural disasters such as catastrophic floods, fire and earthquakes which will come about as a result of people destroying the natural world. Now the world is witnessing violent earthquakes such as in Japan and Los Angeles. Machines are causing destruction, such as the nuclear plant meltdown in Russia. Many people in communities across the world are behaving in self-destructive ways. Now is the time when our traditional peoples must reunite to share original instructions, exchange traditional teachings, preserve our languages, and guide our children back to the sacred path of life.”

Hiroshima. Chernobyl. Fukushima. Thomas fervently believed that the Earth would respond to abuse if humans failed to change course. When will we listen?

Please visit the Get Involved page of our website to learn how you can take action on behalf of sacred lands.