A Copper Mine vs. Sacred Apache Land: The Story in Words and Images

Lauren Redniss's book Oak Flat was reviewed in the New York Times.

Naelyn Pike, a skateboard aficionado and teenage Apache activist, arrived in Washington in 2013 to testify before Congress. When she passed through the metal detector in the Capitol, the tin jingles on her traditional dress set off the alarm. She was speaking that day to a Senate subcommittee about the fate of Oak Flat, a vast plot of southeastern Arizona that is sacred to the San Carlos Apaches and lies above one of the largest known untapped veins of copper in the United States.

Since 2005, members of the San Carlos Apache tribe have been battling both a mining company and the federal government to keep the copper untouched. Not only would building the mine entail the collapse, or subsidence, of the tribe’s ceremonial land, but since the group’s spiritual identity is tied to that land, its members viewed the prospective demise of Oak Flat as a larger act of erasure and a violation of their religious freedom. In exchange for the land, Resolution Copper — the subsidiary formed by two foreign conglomerates in order to lobby Congress for access to the ore — has promised employment opportunities, an attractive gambit for a region that has long struggled economically.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of November. See the full list. ]

“Will there really be that many jobs?” Pike asked the Senate subcommittee that day. “For a long period of time?” Pike, whose great-grandfather Paul worked in an asbestos mine, is well versed in the boosterish projections made by extractive industries. She, like many members of her community, no longer believed in the trade-off between the economy and the environment, which has justified extraction in Arizona, as elsewhere, for centuries. (Mining in the state began with silver and gold, then shifted to copper and asbestos.) This arrangement has never paid off for her people, who have been left jobless at the end of boom-and-bust cycles, as wealth fled. Now, the survival of the San Carlos Apaches was at stake, Pike argued. “Please make me understand why you could do such horrid things to these holy precious lands.”

Pike’s personal and political coming-of-age unfolds throughout Oak Flat, the masterly new illustrated book by the artist and writer Lauren Redniss, in which she follows the continuing fight between the San Carlos Apaches and Resolution Copper. Copper, Redniss tells us, is as valuable as it is ubiquitous. It’s a component of smartphones and scalpels (owing to its antimicrobial properties and ability to cauterize wounds) and an essential element in renewable energy, used in both solar panels and wind turbines. This makes harvesting it particularly complex: What does it mean to ruin the earth for an element that might sustain it? Despite increasing demand, a vast majority of the world’s copper remains underground, and as Redniss learns, it may be able to remain there, since there’s arguably enough in circulation already to serve our needs.