The heart of genuine sadness: astronomers, politicians, and federal employees desecrate the holiest mountain of the San Carlos Apache

Whole Earth, Winter, 1997 by Peter Warshall

In the early 1980s, the University of Arizona sought a special permit to construct seventeen telescopes on the Pinaleno Mountains. The Pinalenos are sometimes known for their highest peak, Mt. Graham; sometimes for the site of the present contested forest, Emerald Peak. The proposal ran head-on into concerns about the ecological value of the high elevations of this "sky island ecosystem," a mountain range isolated from others by desert in a manner similar to oceanic islands isolated by salt water. The project upset the San Carlos Apache medicine practitioners who emerged for the first time since internment to defend the sacred peaks and prevent further desecration. The Vatican and Max Planck (Germany) telescopes have been built. A third telescope site has been cleared and awaits full funding. The "Heart of Genuine Sadness" is a small piece of the much larger story.

IN A GROVE OF ELDER DOUGLAS FIRS, at about 8,500 feet, the ga'an dancers of the San Carlos Apache performed the songs and purifications that will help protect their people from illness and danger and consecrate the boundaries of Apache homeland. No dancer nor medicine person among them will ascend the next 1,500 feet. The peaks have been desecrated. Starting in 1990 and continuing today, the University of Arizona, the Vatican, and Germany's Max Planck Institute clearcut and bulldozed Emerald Peak for astronomical observatories. The wounded peaks -- for the Apaches consider the mountains alive and filled with powers greater than the human imagination -- can no longer serve as the medium to carry the prayers of the ga'an to heaven. The prayers have been drained of power and meaning. Just as light pollutes the sky for astronomers, the violence, barefaced cement, and steel structures in the destroyed forest have polluted the ceremonial sites.

Instead of the ga'an, Gary Holy Bull, a Sioux medicine man, agreed to try to perform a healing ceremony for the Apache on Emerald Peak., About fifteen of us filled out Coronado National Forest Service forms. In assigned vehicles, followed by a County sheriff and rangers, we drove to the well-secured astrophysical area, elevation: 10,228 feet. The excavated pit for the Vatican telescope, the cement walls of the German submillimeter telescope, and various pre-fab steel buildings sunk and sprouted among the ruts and patches of dirty snow. We were gathered in the exact center of the clearcut.

The pony-tailed forest ranger lectured us: "It's illegal and insensitive to bother or feed federally endangered Mt. Graham red squirrels. It will lower their chances of survival. We know that sounds funny. You are standing in the center of a clearcut of 1,000 old-growth spruce and fir which naturally supply seeds and shelter to the squirrels. But the Forest Service has performed many studies and the lost trees will have no significant impact."

We ushered ourselves beyond the orange plastic tape and into the snow. I was lost. The bear trail that I had followed to inventory squirrels as a University biologist had been bulldozed. The topography felt foreign. I flashed: so many Indians had felt this bodily dislocation. Elders glided in slow motion in the thin air over fragile snow crust. Coldness crept between my Patagonia and my skin. Chills of history, not weather. We stopped near a familiar granitic outcrop. Gary Holy Bull arranged the group with an opening to the west. Singing, he built the tiny ceremonial Sioux teepee of twigs, lighting the kindling. The smoke rose, hypnotic time-curls. Jerry Flute carried the pipe, offered the sage, the smoke of sweetness. Each of us inhaled and spread smoke with our hands over our chest and around the head. The anger and pain, the hardened mindset honed to resist power players, the endless tiresome energy spent reining in greed, the insanity and confusion of the world began to ebb away. A simple vivid heart of sadness emerged, a heart that these warriors-for-holy-places, each in their own way, had strong-boxed for survival.

The sadness emerged first in Henrietta Mann, a brilliant Cheyenne professor and activist. Shaky, she sat on the snow on my jacket, softly keening. The first tear dropped from a Navajo mother's chin to her moccasin and stained the hide; the next slid off and caused a tiny puff of steam as it met the snow. I can only guess at each person's thoughts/visions -- dead grandmothers, starvation winters, relatives fucked up by alcohol, brothers in the Armed Services. Here in this now-consecrated place, these spiritual warriors could find sanctuary, relax their guard, and let be the world as it is. Sobs, losses from cruelties. From a palpable recognition of human frailties -- of greed, ego, ignorance -- in a place both conducive and blessed, a sense of the sacred emerged.

Stable and still, amid soft song and judicious smoke, the mountain's presence intensified, brightened detail. Nothing out of the ordinary -- a glitter on an iced branch, the smoke's grayness entangling the pink of snow algae -- teased the mind's eye. Each detail reversed the chaos, persuading by its doubtless beauty, a gift believable, created by and magnanimously given, here on Emerald Peak, on the planet. The mountain had evoked memories and histories, now it evoked its own stories. As the Apaches say: the mountain stalked us with stories. Without Will imposing percepts or concepts, the mountain re-placed our attentions, our spirit. The hearts of sadness moved themselves to a trusting holy ground of beauty.