Meet the Apache Activists Opening for Neil Young
Nizhoni Pike and her friends had the best seats in the house for the Neil Young concert in Jersey last week – better than front row.
In fact, they’ve had an incredible vantage point at several of the shows on Young’s Rebel Content Tour this summer.
“It’s been pretty awesome to be up on stage and look out and see so many people supporting us, yelling for us,” Pike tells Rolling Stone. “And we know some of his songs. We’ve been singing along!”
Pike is part of a cross-country caravan called the Apache Stronghold, made up of dozens of activists and supporters of the Arizona San Carlos Apache tribe who are calling out a mining industry land grab rammed through Congress last December – and who have made an unconventional opener for Young.
Starting at Red Rocks earlier this month, and in venues across the country since, the Apache have been linking up with Young on the road, sharing their stories and singing prayer songs to thousands of audience members.
The activists are trying to preserve a stretch of canyon land in Tonto National Forest called Oak Flat, an hour east of Phoenix, where young Apache women like Pike have celebrated coming-of-age ceremonies for generations. “I became a woman at Oak Flat, I had my sunrise dance there, so it’s like my heart is there,” she says.
Business interests see treasure in those hills, too; a company called Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of the Australian-British mining giant Rio Tinto, has long wanted to get at the massive copper deposits buried under Oak Flat. Last December the company got a step closer to its goal, when the two senators from Arizona, John McCain and Jeff Flake, slipped a last-minute rider into the National Defense Authorization Act authorizing a land swap long favored by the company. A recent New York Times op-ed described how, “by doing this, Congress has handed over a sacred Native American site to a foreign-owned company for what may be the first time in our nation’s history.”
What would induce Congress to do such a thing? The mining industry says thousands of jobs will be created by digging up Oak Flat, and Sen. McCain touted the deal’s value to national security, saying in a statement, “To maintain the strength of the most technologically-advanced military in the world, America’s armed forces need stable supplies of copper for their equipment, ammunition, and electronics.”
And then, of course, there’s the money. Sen. Flake is a former lobbyist for the mining industry, who’s received almost $200,000 from mining interests, including Rio Tinto, since his election, and Sen. McCain is one of the top Congressional recipients of campaign contributions from Rio Tinto, according to OpenSecrets.org.
But the senators and their friends in the mining industry may have underestimated their opposition, which is low on funds but high on morale and tenacity. For months now, Apache activists have been occupying Oak Flat campground, and more and more people across the country and the world have gotten behind their cause. As of this writing, more than 600,000 people have signed a petition at Avaaz calling on Congress to repeal the rider, and to apologize to the Apache for putting their cultural heritage up for sale. Rock climbers and outdoor enthusiasts who don’t want to see this corner of the West turned into a moonscape have been raising a ruckus as well.
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