THE COPPER RUSH

Will the green economy wreck sacred Native lands?

- MADDIE OATMAN

Runners Naelyn and Nizhoni Pike

RACE AGAINST MINE

THE SUN HAS already dipped behind southeast Arizona's dusty blue Mescal Mountains, but for sisters Naelyn and Nizhoni Pike, huddled by a fire shooting sparks into the darkening desert, excitement lies ahead. In a few minutes, they will join a dozen runners on the first leg of a brisk 55-mile relay. Over the course of three days, they'll traverse this arid valley where their ancestors were once imprisoned, and climb through the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, which they call home, and into the Tonto National Forest, to a site they consider their most sacred, where Naelyn has said she feels "free to be Apache": Chi'chil Bildagoteel, an Apache name describing a place where acorns grow. The run is not a race, but rather a moving protest in support of this rugged and exquisite patch of high desert mesa commonly referred to as Oak Flat. The sisters are running because they hope it can help stop a mining company called Resolution Copper from wiping it off the map.

Preparations started months ago, but as Naelyn, 22, explains over the thumping drums of a blessing ceremony, "it's today where I feel like it really begins, the spirituality part of it."

Oak Flat sits on a copper deposit that miners say could meet a quarter of US needs.