(ANALYSIS) There are moments in our national life when a legal controversy reveals something deeper than a dispute over statutes or precedent. It exposes a fracture in our shared moral imagination — a failure to recognize what is sacred to communities whose ways of life do not mirror our own. The struggle for Oak Flat in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest is one of those moments.

On its surface, it is a religious freedom case: whether the federal government may hand over the spiritual heart of the Western Apache to a multinational mining company. But beneath that question lives an older, more revealing one: Can our public institutions see Indigenous communities as spiritual communities, with institutions both formed by and forming the land itself? Can the land be seen as dynamic, living, sacred places that birthed the practices and Indigenous wisdom living ways that have called the whole community of creation into a web of flourishing interdependence for generations?

And yet, while Apache Stronghold faces the refusal of federal institutions to protect the sacred conditions of their religious life, another story is unfolding across the Great Lakes. In northern Wisconsin, a Catholic religious community — listening to the land, to its own spiritual commitments, and to the people who first tended those waters — chose to return its Marywood property to the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. No lawsuit required it. No government compelled it. It was an act of reverence, repair, and responsibility.

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These two stories do not collapse into one. But together, they reveal the same truth: that land, people, and the sacred are bound in a shared flourishing, and that institutional religious freedom is not simply a shield against interference from government.

It is also the responsibility of religious institutions and spiritual communities themselves to act in ways that protect, restore, and honor the conditions in which another community’s sacred life can breathe, thrive, and continue.

When institutions forget this responsibility, as in Oak Flat, the womb that forms a people’s religious life is put at risk.

When institutions remember, as in Marywood, they help restore the very conditions in which another community’s sacred life can breathe again.

Oak Flat: A sacred center the courts refuse to see

For Western Apache communities, Oak Flat is not a symbol to be cataloged or a heritage site to be admired from a distance. It is a living place of encounter with the Creator — a ground where breath, water, stone, and memory carry a holiness that has shaped a people for as long as there has been a people to receive it.

Long before written record, these communities lived in a sacred reciprocity with this land, trusting that the land itself held them, formed them, and kept them in right relationship with the Sacred. In the Apache spiritual imagination, the Creator is never abstract or far away; the Creator is the One who animates the currents of air through the trees, the deep-running waters beneath the surface, the great rock faces that keep stories older than the nation that now claims authority over them.

Because of this sacred kinship, Apache identity — religious, cultural, familial — is inseparable from Oak Flat. It is here that ceremonies take place, which cannot be relocated or reimagined elsewhere without losing their very meaning. The Sunrise Ceremony that blesses a young woman’s passage into adulthood.

Sweat lodge prayers that restore the body and quiet the spirit. The gathering of medicines from soil, plant, animal, and stone — each taken with reverence, each understood in relation. And the honoring of sacred waters, not as resources to extract, but as living relatives deserving of care. This land is not an accessory to Apache spiritual life; it is part of the architecture of Apache faith, formation, and communal belonging.

The federal government itself once acknowledged this truth by placing Oak Flat on the National Register of Historic Places. Some observers have described its meaning as akin to the role of Mount Sinai within Jewish memory — a place where the sacred and the communal meet, where a people are formed, instructed, and sustained. For Apache communities, Oak Flat carries their past, roots their present, and anchors their future.

And yet, since the nineteenth century, the United States has approached this land not as sacred, but as something to be moved aside when extraction calls. In the 1870s, miners sought access to Oak Flat, and Western Apache communities were forcibly removed and confined to the San Carlos Reservation so that others could seize their homelands.

Decades later, President Eisenhower offered temporary federal protection, but the mining industry never ceased its pursuit. The vast copper deposits far below Oak Flat were treated as more worthy of preservation than the religious life of the people rooted above them.

This long effort culminated in 2014, when a last-minute rider was slipped into a must-pass defense bill, ordering the transfer of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper. According to Becket, the mining plan would transform this sacred ground into a two-mile-wide, 1,100-foot-deep crater — an obliteration so total that Apache ceremonies could never again take place on this land.

The company behind the project, Rio Tinto, has its own history of destroying sacred sites elsewhere, including Aboriginal dwellings nearly 50,000 years old in Australia. Its largest shareholder, Chinalco, is owned by the Chinese government. These are not institutions formed by the sacred responsibilities of land-based community; they are shaped by extraction, not relationship.

In the face of this threat, Western Apache religious leaders, elders, and trusted non-Native partners formed Apache Stronghold — an Indigenous-led movement committed to defending Oak Flat as the sacred center of their communal life. Their claim is both simple and profound: religious communities must be free to worship, form their members, and carry forward their way of life in the places where that life is rooted. Their claim is an institutional claim — grounded not in individual preference, but in the communal bonds, ceremonies, and obligations that hold a people together.

The public-interest law firm Becket took on the case because this case sits at the heart of institutional religious freedom and public justice. The question is not merely whether individual Apaches can practice their faith in some generalized sense, but whether the United States will protect the conditions that make their religious life possible — the land itself, the ceremonies tied to that land, and the intergenerational practices that depend on a specific place.

The case began in 2021, when Apache Stronghold sought to stop the transfer under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and an 1852 treaty in which the U.S. pledged to safeguard Apache land and well-being. The district court refused. The government briefly withdrew the environmental review that would have triggered the transfer, but the underlying threat to the sacred center remained.

In 2022, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the destruction of Oak Flat did not substantially burden Apache religious practice — a decision that reveals a profound misunderstanding of place-based faith. Five judges dissented, warning that the majority opinion permitted the government to eliminate the very conditions that sustain Apache religious life.

Apache Stronghold appealed to the Supreme Court, asking the Justices to consider what this case discloses about institutional religious freedom: that for many communities, Indigenous or otherwise, worship is not a portable activity but a lived reality tied to specific land, stories, and relationships.

In May 2025, the Supreme Court declined review. Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Thomas, wrote that the Court’s refusal “is a grievous mistake — one with consequences that threaten to reverberate for generations.”

He recognized what Apache Stronghold had insisted all along: that Oak Flat is, for the Western Apache, “a direct corridor to the Creator,” and that the ceremonies anchored in this land “cannot be replicated elsewhere.” Quoting a Ninth Circuit dissent, he underscored the undisputed fact that the government’s plan would “destroy the Apaches’ historical place of worship, preventing them from ever again engaging in religious exercise at Oak Flat.”

He then asked the nation to imagine, honestly, how our courts would respond if the government sought to destroy a historic cathedral on such tenuous reasoning. His dissent did not collapse the Apache tradition into a Christian one, but it illuminated the double standard at work when our legal imagination can recognize sacredness only when it resembles our own.

Gorsuch concluded: “Forced with the government’s plan to destroy an ancient site of tribal worship, we owe the Apaches no less. They may live far from Washington, D.C, and their history and religious practices may be unfamiliar to many. But that should make no difference.”

With the Supreme Court declining to intervene, unresolved issues now return to the federal district court in Arizona. Apache Stronghold continues to assert what should be obvious in any robust understanding of religious freedom: that communities must be able to worship, teach, and form their members in the places that carry the stories of their identity, their obligations, and their covenant with the holy.

Religious communities seek restorative firsts

The story of Oak Flat reveals what happens when the government refuses to see land as essential to the religious life of a people. Yet, alongside this ongoing struggle, there are communities choosing a different way — religious institutions using their own freedom to repair relationships, restore land, and honor the sacred trust between people and place. One such example emerged recently in northern Wisconsin.

On October 31, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (FSPA), a Wisconsin religious community, announced that it had finished the inaugural return of the Catholic-owned land back to the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, the original caretakers of the land.

The land re-matriation is “the first known return of Catholic-owned land to a tribal nation as an act of repair for colonization and residential boarding schools,” the news release said. The Catholic Sisters’ community utilized the land for its Marywood Franciscan Spirituality Center.

Sister Sue Ernster, FSPA President, shared: “The return of Marywood is both a conclusion and a beginning. We honor the decades of FSPA ministry, and we see this transition as a hopeful step toward healing and right relationship.” For the past nearly 60 years, the FSPA sisters have served as stewards for Marywood to be a space for “spiritual renewal, contemplation and holistic living.”

When it became clear that the spirituality center could no longer continue as it had been, the sisters moved into a season of quiet, honest discernment, listening for how the land itself might be carried forward in a way that stayed faithful to the heart of their community — a commitment to right relationship, to the radiant joy of Gospel living, and to a way of welcoming that refuses to leave anyone at the margins.

According to the press release, “Located on Trout Lake in Arbor Vitae, Wisconsin, Marywood rejoined the landbase of the Lac du Flambeau Tribe – serving as a site for Ojibwe culture and traditions, re-establishing vital lakeshore access and potentially providing housing for healthcare workers.”

The sisters sold the property at exactly the same price they paid for it from a private landowner in 1966: $30,000. The sisters said the sale price equaled slightly over 1% of the land’s value now.

The Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, based in northern Wisconsin, is an independent Tribal Nation. The Lac du Flambeau Band is part of the larger Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) community. Their historic areas of occupation cover the expanse of the Great Lakes region, spanning the current states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. According to the press release, the Anishinaabe peoples were “rooted in a deep spiritual and cultural connection to the land and waterways.”

Restoring Tribal lands is, in so many ways, restoring the conditions for a people to breathe again — to return to the places that have shaped their spirit, their governance, their relationship to the holy. When land is secured and protected, a community can begin to rebuild its own way of being in the world: Renewing cultural lifeways, tending to its institutions, creating work that has dignity, and strengthening the social fabric that holds families and nations steady across generations. This is not merely economic development; it is the quiet, essential work that allows a people to steward their future on the soil that remembers them.

According to John D. Johnson, Sr., Tribal President, “This return represents more than the restoration of land — it is the restoration of balance, dignity, and our sacred connection to the places our ancestors once walked. The Franciscan Sisters’ act of generosity and courage stands as an example of what true healing and partnership can look like. We are proud to welcome Marywood home to ensure it continues to serve future generations of the Lac du Flambeau people.”

Concurrently, Most Rev. James P. Powers, Bishop of the Diocese of Superior, said of the re-matriation, “a tangible act of justice and reconciliation that flows directly from the heart of our Catholic faith. Following in the spirit of Pope Francis’s own commitment toward repentance, we pray this action will help build on a future of mutual respect and trusted relationships with the Lac du Flambeau Tribe, acknowledging their connection to this land.”

The sisters carry a quiet hope that what has unfolded here might widen beyond this one community, offering a different imagination for others to consider. As Sister Sue Ernster shared, “We hope to model, especially for Catholic religious congregations, that it is possible to pursue alternatives to conventional land transitions.”

She went on to say that the land is now free “to live into its deeper purpose as a place of renewal,” and the sisters trust that this renewed tending of place will “plant seeds of cultural renewal for generations to come.”

President Johnson concluded, “The Lac du Flambeau Tribe extends heartfelt gratitude to the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration for their commitment to healing and justice. This land, known to our people for centuries, carries the songs, stories, and spirits of our ancestors.

As it returns to our care, we honor their memory by continuing to live in harmony with the waters, forests, and all living things that make this place sacred. The circle is being made whole once again.”

The return of Marywood invites us to listen again to the old stories carried by this land and the peoples who have tended it for generations.

In a moment when institutions seem to have lost the public’s trust — their animacy, their capacity to live and breathe and form a people — we need a fuller imagination. Luke Bretherton names this in “Christ and the Common Life”:

 “As creatures situated in various covenantal relations and in need of conversion, we are always already in relationship with others. Our personhood is the fruit of a social and wider ecological womb as much as a single physical one, that is, we come to be in and through others not unlike us, including nonhuman others.”

His words clarify what both Oak Flat and Marywood reveal: institutions themselves must learn to live as part of this wider ecological womb. They are not meant to be rigid or self-contained. They retain their historical and doctrinal DNA, yet remain rooted in vast mycelial networks of relationship — receiving nourishment through reciprocity with those within and beyond them. When they remember this, institutions become dynamic again: grounded yet porous, steady yet responsive, capable of forming and being formed without losing the truths entrusted to them.

The stories of Oak Flat and Marywood remind us that individuals, social institutions, and the natural world were never meant to exist apart. Each is held — and called — by the God who breathed creation into being, who entrusted us with structures to sustain life, and who invites us to keep shaping those structures toward God’s own moral imagination.

Our institutions, at their best, are not stagnant or self-protective. They are living communities of practice, formed by the Story of God, by the people who inhabit them, and by the land that has always been teaching us how to live.

And part of that Story is the gift of institutional pluralism itself. Since time immemorial, God has entrusted human beings with the freedom, creativity, and moral agency to understand God’s call in different ways — as individuals and as communities. Our varied spiritual traditions, moral convictions, and communal practices are not failures of unity but signs of the generative diversity built into creation.

Yet without the freedom to come together, to form and reform institutions that hold and express our shared spiritual understandings of how we ought to live, love, and pursue justice and peace, we lose our capacity to flourish — individually and together.

Because God grants every generation the spiritual freedom to steward its own institutions, we carry the responsibility to build them prayerfully: Turning them again toward justice, toward reciprocity, toward a way of life that bears goodness rather than decay. In this work of re-forming and being re-formed, we come a little closer to the world God intended, where people, place, and the Holy move together in sustaining grace.