Dear Editor,

If there was ever an example of Native American and environmental disrespect, it is the Resolution Copper Company’s proposed Oak Flat USFS land swap sponsored by Representative Kirkpatrick and Senator McCain. The web reveals in spades the horrendous harms Resolution’s two foreign mining partners, Rio Tinto and BHP, have inflicted upon Native peoples and the environment worldwide.

After years of secrecy and attempts to evade U.S. human rights and environmental law, Resolution’s website recently admitted they will create a gigantic Arizona Meteor Crater-sized hole a mile across and deeper than the Empire State Building is high! Our sacred sites, Apache Leap, Gaan Canyon, Oak Flat’s acorns, etc., would be obliterated, dewatered or isolated. Resolution concedes their 7000-foot deep mine will suck dry the entire region’s water table. They will annually import as much Colorado River CAP water as a city of 175,000.

Kirkpatrick and McCain have worked feverishly in Congress to give Resolution exemptions from U.S. cultural, human rights, environmental, and historical protection law.

Rio Tinto and BHP concede their mine’s toxic wastes will be a gigantic mass the size of Picket Post Mountain. They say they will dump these poisons at BHP’s nearby Pinto Creek Mine. Twice BHP ruptured their waste levees (1993, 1997) spilling poisonous heavy metals into Pinto Creek which flows into Roosevelt Reservoir, Phoenix’s drinking water. By sheer good fortune BHP bulldozed emergency levees both times and saved Phoenix.

Sincerely,

Delores Jordan

Tribal Elder, San Carlos Apache