“PRESIDENT TRUMP SAID he wants to destroy our holy ground of Oak Flat so a foreign-owned corporation can send copper to China,” Wendsler Nosie Sr., representing the grassroots group Apache Stronghold, told the Arizona Republic this summer. “Whether you’re Republican, Democrat, or neither, that is a terrible deal for the American people,” he said.
Trump called Nosie, and others who want to save Oak Flat, “anti-American” for defending the holy ground where San Carlos Apaches and Indigenous people worshiped long before there was a United States of America. Trump posted his comments on social media one day after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the Trump administration from its plan to transfer the public lands of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of multinational mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP, and following a meeting between Trump and the CEOs of the parent companies.
Because Nosie’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 Nosie, 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.
Nosie knows that Chi’chil Biłdagoteel (the Western Apache name for Oak Flat) may not be here for his grandchildren. Rio Tinto (whose largest shareholder is a Chinese state-owned aluminum company) has already invested more than $2 billion in the project. The 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.
Nosie 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. Standing alongside service workers who want a living wage and mothers who want access to health care, Nosie has shared what his people learned through years of struggle. “Our urgent fight today is for water,” he said. “Without water, there is no life.”
We must resist the manipulation of faith to justify greed.
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,” Nosie has said, articulating the same family values that drew so many Christians into the pro-corporate agenda of the Religious Right. In 2024, Nosie joined 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 from our own sacred text.
“Family values” and “religious liberty” are tropes Trump and so many of his enablers have parroted to win allegiance from many white Christians. The shadow network of organizations that prime white Christians to believe this narrative is more than four decades in the making. These organizations are sponsored by the same corporate interests that are trying to cash in while Trump is in power. But Nosie and the San Carlos Apache Tribe are witnesses that any true love of family and religion—any true love for this place we call the United States—obligates us to resist the manipulation of faith to justify greed. How can you be for “God and country” when you destroy the holy ground where people fall on their knees to worship?
Nosie says that there is a prophesy among his people: A day will come when the people of this land will cry because of the greed of the settlers that has robbed the land and, in doing so, robbed them of God’s good gifts.
We are hearing that cry now among this nation’s poorest. Donald Trump says Nosie is “anti-American,” but the opposite is true. His people’s wisdom is what America needs right now.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is assistant director for partnerships at the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. A preacher, author, and community cultivator, he is a member of the national steering committee of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He is the author, most recently, of White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy with William J. Barber II.
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