Hopis Demand the Right to Raid Eagles’ Nests

Every spring for centuries, Hopis practicing their tribal religion have gathered fledgling golden eagles from nests perched on the red-hued cliffs of what is now northeastern Arizona.

Then officials at Wupatki National Monument blocked a Hopi eagle-gathering pilgrimage last year and once again thrust an American Indian tribe reluctant to discuss its traditional religion into a high-profile conflict with the federal government.

The Interior Department is considering the tribe’s request to resume gathering eaglets at Wupatki, northeast of Flagstaff and southwest of the tribe’s reservation. Some environmental groups are pressing the department to rule against the Hopis, saying they fear allowing eaglet gathering could open the door to widespread hunting in national parks.

As part of the Hopi ceremony, the eaglets are killed.

Interior Department lawyers have been considering the issue for nearly a year and hope to have a ruling before the end of this year, said Patricia Parker, the National Park Service’s Indian liaison. The case is the latest in a string of controversies pitting Indian cultural and religious rights against environmentalists who say protecting wildlife is more important.

“It’s not right to kill 50 animals for any purpose. We have evolved in the year 2000 beyond that,” said Cindy Graffam of Reno, Nev., an opponent of the Hopi request.

To the Hopi, what’s at stake is the survival of their religion-- which is older than the 12th century ruins their ancestors built at Wupatki, which became a national monument in 1924.

“The practice of eagle gathering is central to Hopi religion and cultural life,” tribal chairman Wayne Taylor Jr. said in a statement. “The Hopi regard the eagles as embodying the spirits of their ancestors.”

Environmentalists have cited the Hopi and other tribes’ reverence for the nearby San Francisco Peaks to oppose a pumice mining operation there. Some Indian leaders say the opposition to eaglet gathering--along with opposition to the Makah tribe’s whale hunts in Washington state--show hypocrisy and racism.

“There is still an anti-Indian bias about traditional native religions among a lot of people in environmental groups the same way there is generally,” said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne-Muskogee and director of the Morning Star Institute, an Indian rights group.

“You find a lot of environmentalists who are only too happy to appropriate the words of Chief Seattle, or take the thinking of other great people of native history about the environment. There are people who are only too happy to adopt those trappings as their own and continue to disregard the living people who are related to that legacy.”

Hopis have permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to gather 40 eaglets a year. The Hopi religious use is exempt from the 1962 federal law protecting golden eagles, which are not listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Wupatki monument Supt. Sam Henderson said he blocked the pilgrimage because federal law does not exempt Hopis or other Indians from a ban on killing or capturing any wildlife in the monument.

Eagle gathering critics say the Park Service cannot give the Hopi an exemption without giving all other tribes the same rights in other national parks and monuments.

“If the long-standing prohibitions of taking animals from parks can be waived for religious purposes of the Hopis, then how can you not waive it for the religious purposes of Navajos or Blackfeet or Quinault, or other tribes that claim they want to take wildlife from parks for traditional ceremonial, religious or even subsistence purposes?” said Frank Buono, a retired park service official.

Buono is a board member of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, one of the groups pressing the park service to deny the Hopi request.

Parker said the idea that allowing Hopis to gather eaglets would open national parks to widespread hunting is mistaken. The Hopi Tribe is the first to request the right to take eagles from park service property, she said.

“It was never about parks and hunting; it was about the sincere desire of the Hopi to conduct a religious ritual in a national park,” Parker said.

Buono said parks should be off-limits to any kind of hunting, religious or not. Calling opposition to Hopi eagle gathering racist is just “a guilt trip,” he said.

“The question is, do we redress the wrongs of the past by wronging the future?” Buono said. “I think it’s important for the Americans of the future of all races to be able to go to places and see wild animals that are not being pursued, hunted, trapped, captured or killed.

“If they want to capture eagles and sacrifice them for their religious purposes, fine, but don’t come into the parks and do it.”

Harjo, who helped write a White House report on Indian religious freedom in 1979, said federal law has plenty of exemptions for capturing or killing animals in parks for religious, scientific, safety or other purposes.

“Allowing an Indian religious taking, especially on lands that are only under federal ownership because they were stolen from Indians, that’s the least they could do,” Harjo said.

“Native people have been so accommodating of the government interest, oftentimes to our own detriment. It’s about time for the federal government to recognize our interests and start accommodating native people. That could never make up for all they’ve done to us. Here’s something they can do something about. The Hopis need eagles.”

On the Net:

Wupatki National Monument:

https://www.nps.gov/wupa

Hopi Tribe Cultural Preservation Office: https://www.nau.edu/~hcpo-p

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: https://www.peer.org