All over America for 500 years native people have struggled to protect their sacred places. Burial grounds where ancestors rest, sanctuaries for medicinal plants, landscapes of unusual natural power, sources of prophecy. Native Americans are still losing ground. Sacred ground. First Americans, the indigenous peoples who have lived and occupied this land for eons and eons of time are being deprived of a central principle in which the United States of America was established, that of religious freedom.
These people are true believers who want to engage in a religious practice. Problem is, this is federal land. This is my church.
I don't go down to you white people's church and go in there and raise hell. They have the right to come up here and worship. They have the right to do anything anybody else does on the public lands.
But so do we have the right to mine. The irony of the situation is that you can go on public land to ski, you can go on public lands to strip a mountain and leave a cyanide pool, but you cannot go on public lands to pray for the Earth and its continued fertility.