Skiing on a sacred mountain: Indigenous Americans stand against a resort’s expansion

The Arizona Snowbowl ski resort in Flagstaff occupies 777 acres on a mountain slope that Indigenous nations hold sacred. Photograph: Tomás Karmelo Amaya/The Guardian

Hopi farmer Bucky Preston talks to the clouds that form atop Arizona’s tallest mountain. And they talk back.

For 2,000 years, communication with the sky has been an important traditional farming method of the Hopi and their Puebloan ancestors. The clouds drift with Hopi prayers from the mountain they call Nuva’tukya’ovi – “place of snow on the very top” – to the tribe’s villages, providing life-giving rain and spiritual sustenance to the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America.