The Apache Runners and Their Quest to Save a Holy Mountain

When the Vatican wanted to build an observatory on sacred land, tribal members protested by tapping into an ancient tradition: They started to run.

- By Annette McGivney

Mount Graham is a hulking mass of rock and forest rising from Arizona's desert floor more than a mile and a half into an infinite sky. The Western Apache call it Dził nchaa si'an, which roughly translates to "big mountain sitting there."

Apache deities known as gaan dwell on the 10,720-foot summit, overseeing territory that has been holy to the Apache for as long as they can remember.

In October 1990, despite repeated objections from local Apache tribes, the United States Forest Service-a federal agency that for many Apaches represents genocidal oppressors-started clearcutting an eight-acre site on Mount Graham's summit, destroying part of a pristine alpine forest that was a rare environmental relic from the last Ice Age. That's when San Carlos Apache tribal member Wendsler Nosie Sr. decided it was time to fight-and not just the Western way with meetings and lawsuits, but the Apache way.

He started to run.

Mount Graham had become a center of controversy in the 1980s when it caught the eye of the Vatican. As far back as the late 1700s, the Catholic Church had conducted astronomical research via telescope from an observatory at the Vatican to verify the holy calendar. In the 1930s, the facility was relocated outside Rome, but by the early 1980s, light pollution was impeding visibility. Jesuit astronomers dispatched by Pope John Paul II to observe the heavens decided that they wanted Dził nchaa si'an, with its dark skies and mild desert climate, to be their perch for a new telescope. Land couldn't be sacred, they said. Never mind the gaan.