Native Americans Fight to Preserve Sanctity of Sacred Lands : The West: U.S. land managers unsure how to reconcile religious and cultural rights with pressure for public recreation, mining and logging.

The meeting in Medicine Bear Lodge began with the burning of a braided strip of dried sweet grass. A tribal elder offered a barely audible prayer.

He asked for understanding among the conflicting interests, called together by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to express their views on the proposed expansion of a gold mine on the edge of the Ft. Belknap Indian Reservation in the Little Rocky Mountains.

The mine threatens the quality of reservation streams and ground water, argue members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes.

Equally important, they say, the range is sacred ground that shouldn’t be further defiled.

“Indian religious freedom is an environmental issue, no matter how you look at it,” said James Main Sr.

Such disputes pose a dilemma for federal land managers: how to reconcile native religious and cultural rights with pressure for public recreation, mining and logging.

“It’s very hard to continue to try to maintain that consistent objective position when it seems like nobody is ever pleased with what you do,” said Gene Miller, associate director of the BLM’s northern Montana area.

“The Native Americans are now capable of focusing on what they hold sacred; they become very vocal, and rightfully so. If there is a dilemma, it’s a dilemma for agencies such as BLM to be able to convey the reality of the rules and regulations that we must work under, and to make sure that everybody--tribes, industry, whoever--has the same information.”

A foundation for the tribal challenges is the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, a congressional resolution passed in 1978 as a “policy to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent freedom to believe, express and exercise the traditional religions.”

But the act has been more of a policy statement than a binding law.

In a 1988 case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that, even though the action would “virtually destroy the Indians’ ability to practice their religion,” the Constitution could not stop the Forest Service from building a logging road through a mountaintop area in Northern California containing holy places of three tribes.

Since that ruling, native groups have been crusading for congressional amendments to the act that would better define their rights.

At a hearing on proposed amendments last year before the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, Walter Echo Hawk of the Native American Rights Fund testified that the sentiments expressed in the act “are inadequate when basic human rights are at stake. It is time for Congress to put teeth into its policy, since the executive and judicial branches have failed or refused to implement it in the last 13 years.”

The list given to Congress of other sites considered sacred and threatened includes:

* The San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, where the Forest Service has allowed expansion of a ski lift into a Navajo and Hopi religious area.

* The Havasupai tribe’s Red Butte, near the Grand Canyon, threatened by uranium mining.

* Sioux sites in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where the Forest Service has allowed public access.

* Mt. Shasta, Calif., threatened by a Forest Service timber sale and ski lift in a religious area used by the Wintu, Pit River, Modoc and Karuk tribes.

* Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii, where geothermal development has been permitted in the home of the goddess Pele.

Many quarrels between Native Americans and government or industry in the Western United States are decades old. The one at Ft. Belknap began in 1895, when the federal government took 40,000 acres of gold-bearing land from the original reservation.

In the long-disputed Badger-Two Medicine area near Glacier National Park in Montana, traditionalists won a temporary victory April 30 when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt put a one-year hold on proposed oil and gas drilling. Blackfeet consider the pristine mountain valley a historic religious area.

“I think the decision is irresponsible,” said Janelle Fallan, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Assn. Babbitt’s move was motivated by “political pressure from environmentalists,” she said.

Not far from Glacier park, in the Sweet Grass Hills region of northwestern Montana and southern Alberta, Canada, Blackfeet and Chippewa-Cree scored another victory in April.

The hills contain caves and other sites that are sacred to some Plains Indians. The soil produces grass that is used in religious ceremonies. Antique ceremonial masks carved from seashells were found in a cave in the hills last year.

Under pressure from Native Americans, the BLM wrote an environmental impact statement before issuing what would have been an otherwise routine permit for gold exploration in the Sweet Grass Hills.

But the hills were given a reprieve from prospectors’ bulldozers and drills when the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an independent federal agency, ruled that the bureau had failed to meet federal statutory requirements by not consulting with the tribes.

The council ordered the BLM to restart its process, and this time to get more input from the tribes.

Another ceremonial site revered by area tribes as a kind of Stonehenge of the Rockies is the Medicine Wheel, an ancient stone circle high on a ridge in Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest.

Spurred by a surge of tourists and New Age visitors in the last few years, the Forest Service scheduled road improvements, a parking area and a visitor platform.

But the preservation council overrode those plans too, noting that the site is used for tribal ceremonies and that the Forest Service failed to adequately address Native American concerns.