I’ve seen a lot of things through a camera lens. But nothing like what I saw at Oak Flat.
Fifteen years ago, I was a college kid on a photo trip through Native land—Apache, Hopi, Navajo, Zuni. Real people. Real culture. Not museum pieces, not throwbacks. Living, breathing stories, passed down through ceremony, through memory, through ground you don’t mess with.
That night, in the desert near Apache Junction, I stood in the forest with a camera and watched a young Apache girl become a woman in front of a bonfire. Her silhouette moved with the dancers, kachinas warning of the dangers of the world. This girl was on night three of dancing. Earlier in the day she stood as a line of her people, believing her to be inhabiting the most sacred power of the universe, knealed at her feet to be healed. It is believed that a girl on this day of her life is powerful enough to cure disease, vanquish blindness, and with the melding of Christianity into their culture, not unlike a certain Christian savior. I desperately wanted to capture the beauty I was experiencing. Later, when I realized how beautifully it came out, It didn’t feel like mine to offer up, or in what context? I put it away. Perhaps, for this moment.
So, I’m sharing it now. Because the place where that photo was taken is about to be destroyed. Oak Flat—Chíchʼil Biłdagoteel—is sacred land, and Resolution Copper, a mining company backed by foreign interests and greenlit by our own government, wants to blow a two-mile-wide hole into it.
This isn’t progress. It’s desecration—genocide wrapped in a press release, pitched by people too arrogant to understand the culture they’re destroying.
My grandmother, my personal patron saint of the word as sword — would have seen through this in a heartbeat. She believed in family, in dignity, and in fighting like hell when something mattered. You can guarantee she would be up in arms now.
I don’t care if you’ve never heard of Oak Flat. You’ve heard of right and wrong. And this—this is wrong.
• Go to apache-stronghold.com. Listen to the people who live and breathe on this land.
• Blow up the phone lines of your elected officials. Demand the land transfer be stopped.
• Share this. Speak up. You don’t need permission to do the right thing.
We lose this fight, we don’t just lose land—we lose another piece of who we pretend to be.
