Kitt Peak: Sacred Mountain, Twenty-Two Telescopes

The mountain rises fifty-five miles southwest of Tucson, its summit at sixty-nine hundred feet catching the cold clear air that makes it one of the best places on earth to study the night sky. The Tohono O'odham call it Iolkam Du'ag, I'itoi's Garden, the garden of the Creator. In their cosmology, I'itoi, the Elder Brother, dwells in a cave on this mountain and from there shapes the world. The mountain is sacred ground.

In nineteen fifty-five, astronomers began searching the American Southwest for a site to build a national observatory. They needed dark skies, high altitude, low humidity, and proximity to a city with an international airport. Kitt Peak met every criterion. The problem, from the astronomers' perspective, was that it belonged to the Tohono O'odham Nation.

The negotiations that followed have been characterized differently by different participants. The astronomer Frank Edmondson later described obtaining tribal consent as a simple matter. The tribal record is more complicated. The Tohono O'odham council weighed the proposed lease before agreeing. After deliberation, the tribe agreed in nineteen fifty-eight to lease two hundred acres in perpetuity to the National Science Foundation. Sources differ on the exact payments, which were modest.

The Kitt Peak National Observatory was formally dedicated in March of nineteen sixty. Today it holds more than twenty optical telescopes and two radio telescopes, one of the largest concentrations of astronomical instruments in the northern hemisphere. The Tohono O'odham Nation has staff positions at the facility and participates in its governance. The lease, drafted in nineteen fifty-eight, has never been renegotiated. The mountain is still sacred. It is also still leased.