Chi'chil Bildagoteel (Oak Flat)

Oak Flat was not sold, condemned or litigated away. It was attached.

Section 3003 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015, titled the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act, was added to a defence bill shortly before the vote and signed in December 2014. It directs the Forest Service to convey roughly 2,400 acres including Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, a Rio Tinto and BHP venture. The mine is a block-cave operation: ore is undercut and allowed to collapse, and the collapse propagates upward, so the expected result at the surface is a subsidence crater. The same measure had been introduced and had failed as a standalone bill repeatedly since 2005.

In 2016 the area was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Chi'chil Bildagoteel Historic District, a traditional cultural property. The United States therefore holds, on its own records, both that the place is religiously significant and that it is to be destroyed.

The substantial-burden question

Apache Stronghold sued in 2021 under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Treaty of Santa Fe of 1852. Sitting en banc in March 2024, the Ninth Circuit held that destroying the site would not impose a substantial burden on Apache religious exercise as that Act defines it. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on 27 May 2025. Related challenges brought by the San Carlos Apache Tribe and by a coalition including the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona continued into 2026, with a published Ninth Circuit opinion on 13 March 2026, amended on 8 April.

The reasoning follows a line running back through the San Francisco Peaks case and, before it, to the Supreme Court's 1988 decision on a logging road through sacred ground in northern California. A burden on religion, in this line of cases, means being coerced into violating a belief or penalised for holding one. Losing the place where the religion is practised is neither. No court in this sequence has doubted that the sites are sacred; the finding has consistently been that sacredness is not the kind of fact the statute operates on.

What happens at Oak Flat is not described here. The Apache organisations contesting the mine have made a point of the fact that their case does not require outsiders to be told, and there is no reason for a reference work to be the exception.

Oak Flat hosts a coming-of-age ceremony that cannot be relocated without changing what it is, which is the crux of the objection to mining underneath it.

A ceremony tied to this ground

Western Apache communities hold the Sunrise Ceremony, a multi-day coming-of-age rite for young women, at Oak Flat among other locations, along with gathering of acorns from the site's Emory oak groves and collection of medicinal plants used in ceremonial and everyday practice. Apache Stronghold, the group leading legal opposition to mining at the site, describes the ceremony's connection to this specific ground as central to its meaning, not incidental to it, a claim the dispute has turned on directly rather than being a detail to instruct outsiders in here.

What block caving would do

Resolution Copper, a joint venture involving Rio Tinto, plans to extract ore using block caving, a method that undermines rock at depth and lets the ground above collapse into the void created, which independent assessments project would eventually produce a crater roughly two miles across and hundreds of feet deep directly over the site.

Still in court

Apache Stronghold's challenge, arguing the mine violates religious freedom protections, has moved through federal appeals courts with mixed rulings, and the land exchange enabling the mine remains contested rather than fully resolved, meaning the ceremony's future at this specific location is an open legal question rather than a settled one.