Decades
of profit-first policy have privileged
corporate interests over Indigenous rights,
Friend — and it could happen again.
Chí’chil
Biłdagoteel Historic District of Arizona,
a high desert oasis sacred to multiple
Indigenous tribes and commonly known as
“Oak Flat,” is under extreme threat.
Rio Tinto, a UK-Australian mining company —
notorious for polluting Papua New Guinea,
causing an environmental disaster in Brazil
that left 19 dead, and blowing up Juukan
Gorge, a treasured 46,000-year-old
Aboriginal site in Australia — would destroy
the area by carving out a 1,115-foot deep,
1.8 mile-wide crater for strip mining.
A
coalition of Western Apache tribes and their
allies is taking their case to the Supreme
Court after the Ninth Circuit narrowly ruled
against them earlier this year. It’s the
necessary next step in this fight. Still,
we’ve seen the Court fail to protect Native
rights and the environment before — that’s
why we need to work every possible angle to
#SaveOakFlat.
As
the litigation continues, we’re piling the
pressure on Congress to pass Rep. Raúl
Grijalva's Save
Oak Flat from Foreign Mining Act.
This bill would reverse the land transfer
and permanently protect the area — and
building enough support to pass it in the
House is one more way to ensure Oak Flat
remains sacred and pristine for generations
to come.
Can you take two
seconds to act to uphold tribal
sovereignty and permanently protect this
sacred space? Urge your Rep. to support
and pass this legislation now.
You
might be asking: Why is Win Without War
working on this issue? What’s the connection
to national security? That’d also be a good
question for Senator John McCain. He
inserted a midnight rider on the land swap
in a 2015 must-pass defense funding bill —
the National Defense Authorization Act
(NDAA). That provision upended a prohibition
on mining in the region that President
Eisenhower put in place decades earlier.
Using
“defense” bills to shoehorn in policies that
make our communities and our planet less
safe is, unfortunately, a well-worn
tradition. House Republicans used the same
playbook again just last month, inserting
MAGA provisions on everything from abortion
access to building Confederate monuments in
this year’s NDAA.
These
attempts to undermine human rights and
social justice in the name of “national
security” remind us how intertwined our
collective fights are. Whether
it’s reproductive health, racial justice,
voting rights, environmental protection,
accountability, peace, or Indigenous
rights, the fights to protect our shared
humanity are one and the same.
That’s
why Win Without War joined the fight to save
Oak Flat, starting in 2020, when Trump
fast-tracked the land transfer that would
turn thousands of acres of land over to a
mining conglomerate with a devastating track
record. But others have been fighting this
fight, and others just like it, for
centuries.
For
too long, U.S. foreign policy has exploited
Indigenous people and their lands. It
happened when the United States waged an
all-out war on Native peoples across the
country. It happened when the government
instigated coups against Indigenous leaders
in Latin America. It’s still happening. Can
you help build our power to change this
broken status quo?
Time is running
out. Contact your Representative today and
demand they pass the Save
Oak Flat from Foreign Mining Act
now.
So
far, the pressure of tens of thousands of
activists (that’s YOU) and local Indigenous
partners has kept Rio Tinto’s mining project
on pause. We’ve gained precious time to
deepen our work to ensure that Oak Flat
remains sacred and pristine for future
generations.
With
the clock ticking, it’s time to work even
harder. Please sign our petition and send
your Representative an urgent message today.
Thank
you for working for peace,
The Win Without War team
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receiving this message because you signed a
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