"Money or gold or whatever you are looking for is not the word for us as O'odham people" says Tohono O'odham elder Joseph Joaquin in the short documentary film Ours Is The Land. For the first time publicly, Joaquin and other O'odham tribal members movingly tell of their epic fight to maintain their cultural landscape in Ce:wi Duag or the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, Arizona against a foreign mining company that wants to build an open-pit copper mine there. The mine's waste would bury O'odham ancestral burial grounds, sacred seeps and springs, and render a rare ball court, a significant archaeological treasure, obsolete. Finally, the mine threatens an animal revered by the O'odham people, the US's only known wild jaguar, El Jefe whose home is in the footprint of the mine.

Director's Statement

Too often, the debate about this mine's construction, which is a highly politicized story where I live in Arizona, had devolved into merely a pro versus con argument. I wanted to be a medium for the voice of the Tohono O'odham people in their struggle and put a "human face" on the issue. To the O'odham people, Ce:wi Duag is a living monument and destroying it would be like destroying Arlington National Cemetery.

Category: Documentary.
Themes: Environment, Native American, Religion.

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