Review: Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West

Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West by Lauren Redniss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Oak Flat is a serene high-elevation mesa that sits above the southeastern Arizona desert, fifteen miles to the west of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. For the San Carlos tribe, Oak Flat is a holy place, an ancient burial ground and religious site where Apache girls celebrate the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sunrise Ceremony. In 1995, a massive untapped copper reserve was discovered nearby. A decade later, a law was passed transferring the area to a private company, whose planned copper mine will wipe Oak Flat off the map--sending its natural springs, petroglyph-covered rocks, and old-growth trees tumbling into a void...The book follows the fortunes of two families with profound connections to the contested site: the Nosies, an Apache family whose teenage daughter is an activist and leader in the Oak Flat fight, and the Gorhams, a mining family whose patriarch was a sheriff in the lawless early days of Arizona statehood."

I understand the print version of this to have stunning visuals; I enjoyed the audio with multiple narrators. I appreciated that the issues raised are more broadly shared with various indigenous groups but I also enjoyed learning more about Apache ceremony and this one family's experiences with it.

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