TONTO NATIONAL FOREST, Arizona — Vanessa Nosie worries the growing cracks in the sacred soil under her feet will one day morph into a crater as deep as the Eiffel Tower is high.
The sun-baked ground is a holy place for Nosie, a member of the nonprofit grassroots group Apache Stronghold, which includes members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. On a sweeping basin marked by Emory oak trees, members pray, collect acorns and hold coming-of-age ceremonies. Nearby, four painted wooden crosses jut out of the rocky ground, marking a space for prayer.
Nosie says the growing fissures on the land known as Oak Flat, or Chí’chil Biłdagoteel in Apache, are evidence that mining companies are pumping water from deep underground in preparation to build a massive copper mine.
Along with other members of Apache Stronghold, Nosie is asking the Supreme Court to block Resolution Copper, a joint venture between Rio Tinto and BHP, from digging up more than a billion tons of copper. If the mine moves forward, the land could subside, creating a depression more than 1,000 feet deep and almost 2 miles wide. The San Carlos Apache Tribe filed an amicus brief last week supporting Apache Stronghold’s petition.
“There’s already an immediate harm on our religion,” said Nosie, her 4-year-old daughter tugging at her pant leg. “We’re entwined with the earth.”

Apache Stronghold is pushing the court to intervene with the help of a formidable legal ally — the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which touts an undefeated record at the Supreme Court, winning eight cases in the last 12 years.
If Apache Stronghold can convince the justices to take up their case, the partnership may prove to be a fruitful one before a pro-business, conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Notable wins for Becket include its defense of Hobby Lobby’s right to block employee access to contraception coverage and its defense of a foster care service’s ability to refuse certification to same-sex couples.
Nearly all of Becket’s victories have been either unanimous or swayed at least one of the court’s liberal justices.
“This is the route environmentalists should be taking in trying to establish these strategic alliances,” said Robert Percival, director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland.
Apache Stronghold is asking the justices to block construction of the Resolution Copper mine, arguing the project would violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects their right to worship at the sacred site.
Hundreds of business, Indigenous and religious groups, as well as a group of bipartisan states and at least one Republican senator, are backing their plight, even though lower courts have rejected arguments that the mining project would violate the San Carlos Apache’s rights. Some members of the tribe have voiced support for the mine and emphasized that Oak Flat is not the only place where ceremonies can take place.
Becket hasn’t limited its practice to protecting the freedoms of Christian organizations. The group, which conducts its legal work free of charge, advocates for the free exercise of all faiths — “from Anglican to Zoroastrian,” as its website says. Its mission includes safeguarding the religious practices of Native American tribes.
Resolution Copper counters that ongoing dewatering is not affecting the Oak Flat campground, and that the company opted not to mine parts of the ore body to protect the surrounding area. The company also said the campground will remain open and accessible for decades.
“This case is about the government’s right to use national land to pursue national interests, a settled authority that the Supreme Court and other courts have consistently reaffirmed over decades,” said Vicky Peacey, president of Resolution Copper.
Four miles away from Oak Flat in the small town of Superior, Arizona, religious arguments fall flat among local officials who say the need for transition minerals is only growing and the deposit under Oak Flat could provide a quarter of the nation’s needs to ultimately decarbonize and fight climate change.
Sitting inside Superior’s town hall on a sunny day in early October, Mila Besich, the town’s mayor, said the small town of about 2,500 residents has been hit financially hard over the years after the last mine closed in the 1980s.
The town as undergone a decadeslong push to extract financial support and water and environmental protections through a lengthy environmental review the Trump administration issued in 2019, Besich said. The Biden administration halted the review process in 2021 to conduct deeper consultation with the San Carlos Apache Tribe, leaving the town in limbo, she said.
A total of 11 tribes are involved in consultation around the project, including San Carlos Apache.
When asked about the Becket Fund’s involvement, Besich and other town officials said the group is using Resolution Copper as a stepping stone to fuel a larger debate about religious freedom while ignoring the need to find a sustainable way to produce much-needed minerals.
“When you get the special interest groups involved ... there’s no rationale, there’s no argument that will change anybody’s mind,” said Todd Pryor, Superior’s town manager. “We’re tying the entire process up, and we can’t talk about finding an agreement.”
‘I’m fighting the United States’
Wendsler Nosie, head of Apache Stronghold, former chair of the San Carlos Apache and Vanessa’s father, said his fight isn’t with the town of Superior or Resolution Copper — that it’s much broader and based on spirituality.
“I’m after the United States for their negligence,” said Wendsler Nosie, shifting in his camping chair at the Oak Flat site, where he’s lived since 2019. “The land hasn’t been signed over yet.”
Nosie was born on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Gila County in 1959, where he said his grandparents had been brought as “prisoners of war,” according to a biography posted online. Growing up, Nosie said he witnessed racism, forced assimilation of tribal members, environmental degradation that mining brought to the Arizona landscape and eventual encroachment from foreign mining companies.
That accelerated in 2014, he said, when late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) helped attach a rider onto the must-pass defense spending bill. The provision, which stipulated that Oak Flat would be exchanged for private land owned by Resolution Copper, was ultimately signed into law by then-President Barack Obama.

Five years later, Nosie told the Forest Service that he was vacating the reservation and moving back to Oak Flat to live, denouncing the land transfer and beginning a yearslong journey to save the sacred site.
Today, the focus remains on the completion of an environmental impact statement for the mine. Once it’s released, the land exchange that accelerates Resolution Copper must happen within 60 days.
In 2019, the Forest Service under the Trump administration — mere days before Biden took office — issued a final environmental analysis of the Resolution Copper project ahead of schedule. Three years later, the Biden administration pulled the document to conduct deeper tribal consultation with the San Carlos Apache, and has since signaled in court that there’s no firm timeline for completing that work.
Lawyers for the administration have also argued in court that the land transfer is an act of Congress — not a Forest Service decision — and that the administration lacks the power to outright reject either the mine or the land exchange.
Tribal members say the project would destroy sacred land, petroglyphs and medicinal plants, and possibly destabilize a 400-foot-high escarpment called Apache Leap, which is named for Apache warriors who jumped off the cliff in the late 1800s to avoid capture by the U.S. Army.
Resolution Copper counters that the land swap would actually protect Apache Leap.
“At the request of and in consultation with Native American tribes and local communities, we worked with the government to set aside more than 800 acres of land and mineral claims to permanently protect Apache Leap as a Special Management Area, where no mining will be permitted, managed by the United States Forest Service," said Peacey with the company.
Critics of the project also question the mining companies’ track record. Four years ago, for example, Rio Tinto destroyed sacred Indigenous sites in Australia to access iron ore, prompting top executives to resign.
But Nosie said it ultimately comes back to a fight about spirituality, one that’s evolved from an Apache-focused fight to national and global plight.
“This fight here at Oak Flat is spiritual, it’s on our religious rights, of who we are and where God put us to be and where he put spirits” he said. “This is the fight that I’m fighting the United States with.”
‘A fighting chance’
Vanessa Nosie recalls the heaviness that weighed on her father after the most recent court decision, and telling him a sign from God would come. Then, Luke Goodrich, vice president and general counsel for Becket, visited the site and said he’d do the work for free.
Goodrich said of his 2021 visit to the Oak Flat: “It’s a powerful place.”
He’s been on the case ever since. He brings to the matter experience in defending tribes’ religious practices: In one of his first cases at Becket, back in 2008, he represented members of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in their fight against the federal government for destroying a sacred site in a highway widening project.
In 2022, Becket brought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but before the justices reached a decision on whether to grant their petition, the parties last year reached a landmark settlement in which the government agreed to replant a grove of native trees, fund reconstruction of a stone altar and recognize the site’s historic significance to the tribes.
“While the government can never entirely undo the damage it caused in this case, we hope this is the start of a new chapter — in which our nation’s promise of religious freedom will fully extend to Native American ceremonial, cultural and religious ways of life, as it should have all along,” Goodrich said at the time of the settlement last year.

If Becket and Apache Stronghold succeed in their fight against Resolution Copper, they’ll have the chance to stop the mine before it is built.
If the Supreme Court declines to take up the case, the tribe faces more daunting obstacles in halting the project.
The most outspoken critic of the mine on Capitol Hill, Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva, has said his next term will be his last. Grijalva was diagnosed with cancer early this year. The congressman has repeatedly championed legislation to reverse the land swap, the "Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act," H.R. 1351, but the measure has failed to advance.
Grijalva in an interview said Apache Stronghold faces a difficult task given the makeup of the Supreme Court. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t try,” he said. “In the face of the public, I think we have a fighting chance.”
Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor and senior fellow for climate policy at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, agreed that the tribe faces an uphill climb in getting the Supreme Court to take up its case, especially given the makeup of the bench. If the court does take the case up, he said it could have far-reaching consequences.
“If they did take it up, they're going to take another look at that question of … are there Indian religious rights on public lands? And if so, what are they, and with what consequence for this mine and for a hell of a lot of other activities across the country,” said Parenteau.
Supreme Court odds
Not all petitions become Supreme Court cases, but Goodrich said he believes Apache Stronghold has a fighting chance.
For starters, when the case was before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, judges of the powerful West Coast court took the rare step of granting an en banc rehearing, which means a larger slate of the court’s active members agreed to revisit an earlier decision made by a three-judge panel.
Eleven 9th Circuit judges reheard the case, and a slim six-member majority rejected the tribe’s request to block the mine.
Goodrich said the 9th Circuit majority’s decision doesn’t square with the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the earlier Hobby Lobby contraception coverage lawsuit. In the 2014 case, the high court ruled 5-4 that the plain text of the law bars action that places a “substantial burden” on religious exercise, and the majority rejected the federal government’s argument that the justices had to look at an even earlier set of cases for context on the meaning of the statute.
The majority in the 9th Circuit’s en banc ruling rejected the straightforward reading of the law that the justices have endorsed, Goodrich said.
And while there hasn’t been disagreement between the nation’s federal appeals courts — a phenomenon known as a “circuit split,” a factor the justices consider when deciding whether to grant petitions — on the question at the heart of the Apache Stronghold case, the fact that the 9th Circuit declined to block the mine is still significant enough to capture the Supreme Court’s attention, Goodrich said.
The appeals court’s jurisdiction extends across seven West Coast states, Hawaii and Alaska, covering vast swaths of the nation’s public lands.
“When the 9th Circuit gets it wrong,” Goodrich said, “you don’t wait around for a circuit split.”
But Department of Justice lawyers representing the Biden administration submitted a brief on Wednesday arguing that Apache Stronghold’s request should be dismissed, and that a lower court’s decision to reject the RFRA argument followed past precedent. The DOJ lawyers also argued that Congress mandated the transfer of Oak Flat with full awareness that some Native Americans consider the area to be sacred, noting that another sacred site — Apache Leap — will see more protection under the land swap.
“The Land Exchange Act reflects a legislative compromise between economic development and concerns about protecting sacred sites: Congress did not transfer to Resolution Copper another area, Apache Leap, that had been identified as sacred in committee hearings, and instead mandated that the area be withdrawn from mining and managed 'to allow for traditional uses of the area by Native American people.’,” the lawyers wrote. “The clear implication of those legislative choices is that Congress itself already determined that the transfer of Oak Flat “shall” occur despite sincerely held religious objections.”
Goodrich noted that Resolution Copper has intervened in the litigation and retained as its counsel Lisa Blatt, chair of Williams and Connolly’s Supreme Court practice, who has argued 50 cases before the justices. She boasts an 86 percent win rate in cases the court has decided.
“You don’t intervene in a case and hire Lisa Blatt if you don’t think there’s a pretty good chance of this going to the Supreme Court,” Goodrich said.
Still, there’s no guarantee the justices will take up the case. Of the thousands of petitions the court receives each year, the justices only add about 60 to 70 cases to their calendar each term.
But Goodrich said he isn’t hedging his bets.
“We expect to win, so that’s what we’re planning on right now.”