SAN FRANCISCO – In a fitting finish for a year of persistent protest, activists here traveled south in December to support Arizona activists in a legal battle over the integrity of a sacred Arizona mountain.
The U.S. Forest Service and an Arizona ski resort were challenging a court decision that had blocked resort owners from expanding and making fake snow from treated sewage on the San Francisco Peaks, held sacred by 13 Native nations.
The decision was reheard Dec. 11 at the Pasadena Court of Appeals, a little over five hours south of San Francisco.
Across the state, similar battles over sacred sites and ancestral remains have been waged this year – some with success. And when devastating wildfires ravaged the reservations of several southern California tribes, and floods later affected some, tribes stepped in to offer support.
In Tulelake, just below the Oregon border, the Pit River Nation and supporters continued protesting the proposed use of a sacred site this year – this time by a major U.S. power company.
The Medicine Lake Highlands is where the Pit River believes the Creator rested while creating the world. The lush 200-square-mile stretch of the Modoc National Forest is also an untapped source of geothermal energy.
The San Jose-based Calpine Corp. has been trying to erect a 49.5-megawatt geothermal energy facility there. The plan was approved by the Bush administration, but the Pit River Nation and environmental groups have held off efforts in court.
When in April this year Calpine appealed a 2006 ruling by the U.S. Courts for the 9th Circuit that invalidated its two geothermal leases, the Pit River Nation and supporters held protests in San Francisco.
Both sides are awaiting a decision, expected sometime in 2008.
About four hours southeast of Tulelake, just inside the Nevada border, rock climbers challenged a Forest Service ban on recreational climbing at Cave Rock – a sacred site for the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California.
Washoe tribal members have fought for two decades to defend the sacred mountain in the Lake Tahoe area.
This year they joined with environmentalists to again defend the ban on rock climbers, who for years had scraped away at the mountain with climbing tools, said Debbie Santiago, a Washoe who lives in San Francisco.
A federal appeals court in August upheld the ban.
Judge J. Clifford Wallace wrote in the decision, ”The fact that Cave Rock is a sacred site to the Washoe does not diminish its importance as a national cultural resource,” comparing Cave Rock’s significance to that of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Two months later, in Berkeley, a coalition formed to protest a decision by the University of California – Berkeley to disband a museum department dedicated to upholding the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The NAGPRA department at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology – home to the second-largest collection of Native items in the country – was eliminated during a reorganization process that did not include the input of tribes.
The museum holds an estimated 13,000 human remains from Native tribes – more than 200,000 items total including ceremonial items and other sacred objects.
A coalition representing 400,000 tribal members, the Native American NAGPRA Coalition, promised further protest and even legal action if UC Berkeley refused to aid in the return of human remains.
In late November, their call received further support from the nation’s largest Native organization, the National Congress of American Indians, with more than 250 member tribes across the country.
On Nov. 28, the NCAI passed a resolution at its annual convention in Denver protesting the elimination of the NAGPRA department and the university’s claim that a majority of its collection cannot be linked to a modern tribe and cannot be repatriated.
The NCAI resolution stated the ”needs of scientists and scientific values” at the museum ”must be subordinate to the religious freedom and human rights of American Indians.”
Members of the NANC protest coalition argue the museum caters to the interests of researchers.
”The attitude of university officials toward sovereign Indian tribes has been dismissive, discriminatory and paternalistic,” said Ted Howard, a Shoshone-Paiute and NANC representative, in a release. ”Their primary concern has been to placate powerful scientists who are extremely hostile to NAGPRA and who want to keep our ancestors for the purposes of research.”
University officials maintain the university is compliance with federal law, and the museum’s reorganization process was an administrative decision that did not require the input of tribes.
Meanwhile, NANC’s protest has been gaining momentum.
”We will not stop until our ancestors are repatriated and returned to our Mother Earth,” Howard said.
A similar call was taken up by the group Indian People Organizing for Change and the Vallejo Intertribal Council in the East Bay, as they marched again for a week in November, beginning at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum and ending at the Emeryville Mall.
Activists have returned every year the day after Thanksgiving to urge shoppers not to buy goods atop a burial site belonging to the Muwekma Ohlone.
During the mall’s development, hundreds of bodies were unearthed and countless more remain under a layer of concrete beneath the expansive outdoor shopping center on Shellmound Street, named for the tall mounds of shells and bones that once dotted the horizon.
Less than a month later, a few organizers of that protest arranged a van to transport activists to support the San Francisco Peaks court battle in southern California – where four of 11 tribes are still reeling from the aftermath of a series of devastating wildfires in October.
The worst damage was on the non-gaming 700-member La Jolla reservation, where 94 percent of the land was burned, 55 of 170 houses were destroyed, and 180 tribal members remained homeless in December, according to the tribe’s Web site.
As the Federal Emergency Management Agency began to place mobile homes on reservations including La Jolla, The Sierra Club expressed concerns about formaldehyde levels. Serious health concerns have been raised regarding levels in the tens of thousands of trailers for Hurricane Katrina survivors.
FEMA has insisted the homes are safe.
The BIA received more than 800 applications for assistance from Indian households and has made $600,000 in emergency assistance available.
In mid-December, reservations including La Jolla were again hit – this time with floods.
”Under the best of circumstances, the rebuilding of the community will take years, perhaps decades,” the La Jolla said on their Web site.
