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At 11am this morning, our friend and brother Wensler Nosie will leave his home at Oak Flat in Arizona to begin a sacred walk to the federal courthouse in Phoenix, Arizona. Despite the fact that this holy place is where the San Carlos Apache worship the Creator, Nosie and others are petitioning the court because Chi’chil Biłdagoteel (the Western Apache name for Oak Flat) is scheduled for destruction. Rio Tinto, a company whose largest shareholder is a Chinese state-owned aluminum company, has already invested more than $2 billion in the project. Their proposed block caving mining process would extract ore from more than a mile below the surface, where temperatures are estimated to be nearly 180 degrees Fahrenheit. This extraction process would use as much water as a small city—6.5 billion gallons annually—and pollute it with sulfuric acid. Resolution Copper acknowledges that the high desert mesa at Oak Flat would be replaced with a crater 2 miles wide and a thousand feet deep.
Because Wensler’s people have worshiped the Creator for thousands of years while drawing water at Oak Flat, it is holy ground—a place for prayer and sacred ceremony, not unlike the Temple Mount for Muslims, Christians, and Jews. For Wensler, an elder in the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the wisdom of his people and their relationship with the Creator are inextricably tied to Oak Flat. But this struggle is not just about one place. “Our civilization is in trouble and it needs your attention,” he wrote to us. “We cannot lose our mother earth. If she is lost, there is not life.”
Brother Wensler has asked us to light sacred fires where we are and pray with him as he makes his walk to Phoenix this week. We invite you to join us.
Wensler understands how his people’s struggle to protect their spiritual center is connected to the struggles of other poor and oppressed people harmed by greed. Since 2018, when Nosie joined the national Poor People’s Campaign, he has been a leader in building a moral fusion movement that insists that all injustices are interconnected. When a sell off of public lands was proposed in last year’s Big Bad Deadly and Destructive Bill, we were encouraged to see a broad coalition of Americans come together to say, “No.” The same principle is at stake in the struggle that Wensler has led for the past decade – a fight for land that he rightly insists is spiritual.
It’s not just about one holy place; it’s about recognizing the moral implications of our duty to care for the land that sustains life.
At the heart of every struggle for justice there is something that unites us all—and we win when we stand together as one family. “What was family is now being replaced by a corporate mentality,” Wensler has said. In 2024, he joined us for a panel at the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy to help pastors prepare for the moral crisis of rising authoritarianism. “Family cannot be broken,” is a lesson Nosie insists we need to reclaim.
It’s why we’re glad to call Wensler our brother, and we light a candle with him as he begins his sacred journey today.
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