When the Bighorn National Forest drew up a plan to
bring more visitors to the centuries-old Medicine Wheel, a Native
American sacred site in northern Wyoming, tribes organized to stop
it (HCN, 5/26/97). And they succeeded.
Eight
Plains tribes, known as the Medicine Wheel Coalition, worked with
government officials to write a Historic Preservation Plan, hailed
at the time as a model agreement “for the permanent protection of
American Indian Holy Lands located upon public domain lands.” In
1996, the plan closed a road and put new land-use rules on 18,000
acres of public land within sight of the Medicine
Wheel.
Now, Wyoming Sawmills has brought a
lawsuit in federal court in Cheyenne, Wyo., to overturn the
agreement. The suit is financed by the Denver-based Mountain States
Legal Foundation.
“You’re talking about
restricting use of many thousands of acres of land that would
otherwise be subject to multiple-use management,” says Ernie
Schmidt of Wyoming Sawmills. His lawyers say that the plan is
unconstitutional because it asks the agency to favor Native
American religion at the expense of logging and development. The
tribes say the agreement simply protects religious
freedoms.
“After many, many years, the government
is finally coming around to the position that native, traditional
religion is something that needs to be considered,” says Jerry
Flute of the Association on American Indian Affairs in South
Dakota, adding that the lawsuit threatens this
progress.
Locally, the management plan has
enjoyed support, but that appears to be wavering. Big Horn County
Commissioner Ray Peterson, who signed onto the plan for the county,
now says, “My fear has always been that the Forest Service is
giving the Native Americans a leg up – not just consulting them,
but letting them make some decisions on what happens up there.”
* Michael Milstein
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Lawsuit may take what’s holy.
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