Western Shoshone Tribes Divided Over Land Dispute With Government

Western Shoshone Tribes Divided Over Land Dispute With Government
by JUDITH GRAHAM
Chicago Tribune
07 January 2004

CRESCENT VALLEY, Nev. - (KRT) - Two elderly Indian sisters haul hay, mend fences and round up cattle at their ranch in this remote Nevada valley. Between chores, they spearhead one of the most controversial land battles in the West.

It's a conflict that has pitted Western Shoshone Indians against the federal government for decades and deeply divided Western Shoshone tribes along the way.

"This is one of the headline struggles that raises the question, `Is there going to be justice for Indians in our time?'" said Vine Deloria Jr., one of the nation's leading American Indian scholars.

At its center are Mary and Carrie Dann, obstinate and blunt women whose deeply lined faces and callused hands speak of a life of hard work on this arid, high desert. Many people consider the sisters modern Indian heroes. Others consider them fanatics out of touch with reality.

The Danns are one of the forces behind a federal lawsuit filed last fall seeking recognition of the Western Shoshone's title to ancestral lands, including two-thirds of Nevada and some of the richest gold mines in the United States. Several Western Shoshone tribes support the suit.

The government is preparing its response, due this month.

"This land is ours; it's Western Shoshone land," said Carrie Dann on a recent morning in the sisters' run-down house, which is heated by a wood stove and surrounded by old pickup trucks and rusty farm equipment.

Government officials disagree, arguing that the Western Shoshones lost most of their territory during the settlement of the West and were awarded just compensation - now exceeding $140 million - from the federal Indian Claims Commission.

But for more than 20 years, the Western Shoshones have refused to take the money, in a protest against the Indian Claims Commission process and findings. The settlement sits in a government bank account accumulating interest.

Now, a bill sponsored by Nevada's congressional delegation, passed by the U.S. Senate and awaiting action in the House, would mandate distribution of the funds to the Western Shoshone. And arguments over whether to accept the settlement or continue fighting for the land are raging again in this swath of Indian country, reviving old disagreements and never-healed wounds.

"Our tribe has decided we want our money" said Diana Buckner, chairwoman of the Ely Shoshone tribe, speaking for one group of tribal members. "It's time. We're never going to get the land. Let's get what we can for our older folks."

Never, the Danns and their supporters respond. If the tribe forsakes hope and accepts the money, they say, the tribe will be acting as if it sold the land. And if the tribe gives up its land, the culture and way of life will disappear.

Historically, the Western Shoshone were not a united people with one chief who led all the tribes. Instead, they were a diverse set of extended family groups that stretched from Utah's Salt Lake Valley across most of eastern and central Nevada and down through Death Valley and California's Mojave Desert.

Even today, Western Shoshones are dispersed among various tribes and communities in Nevada including the Duckwater, South Fork and Yomba reservations, and in Indian colonies in Battle Mountain, Elko, Ely, Wells and Winnemucca, among other towns.

Because of their diversity, getting the Western Shoshones, currently numbering about 6,500, to agree on anything is difficult.

Disputes over who has authority to represent the tribes, still common today, date back to the 1863 federal Treaty of Ruby Valley, which gives settlers permission to build railroads and telegraphs across their territory, mine the land, establish communities, and travel without interference.

The Western Shoshones who signed the treaty were a small group that didn't represent the entire people, some tribal leaders insist.

Moreover, the Ruby Valley treaty says nothing about giving up the land. On the contrary, it explicitly recognizes the boundaries of the country claimed by the Western Shoshone, according to Thomas Luebben, an Albuquerque lawyer who represents the Yomba Reservation.

But that's not how the Indian Claims Commission saw it when that federally appointed body began meeting after World War II.

The Western Shoshones had lost title to their lands "by gradual encroachment by whites, settlers and others, and the acquisition, disposition or taking of their lands by the United States for its own use and benefits," the commission ruled in 1962.

James Anaya, professor at the University of Arizona law school and co-chairman of its Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program, calls the theory of gradual encroachment a "legal fiction" built on the premise that "if we take land it is ours by right." American law does not treat property rights in this dismissive fashion, except when it comes to American Indians, he says.

Without formally hearing arguments on land title, the Indian Claims Commission awarded the Western Shoshone $26 million in 1972 - an amount that valued about 24 million acres of the Indian's Nevada lands at 15 cents per acre. Gold mining operations on those lands have yielded an estimated $26 billion since the Western Shoshones signed their treaty with the government.

Outraged, the Western Shoshones refused to take the money that, with interest, now exceeds $140 million.

"I believe they (government officials) lied to our people," says Felix Ike, 58, a former chairman of the Te-Moak Tribe based in Elko, Nev., the largest of the Western Shoshone groups.

He says he was at meetings in the 1980s when federal officials came out to talk about the Indian Claims Commission settlement and told people "you're not selling your land. We're just going to give you compensation."

Fermina Stevens, general manager of the Elko Bandof the Te-Moak tribe, remembers her mother and her grandmother passing down the same story. "We were always told this money was for damage and trespass of the land, not for giving it up."

The government argues that it informed the tribes thoroughly about what was involved with the claims settlement process.

But a 2002 investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a group associated with the Organization of American States, concluded that the United States failed to provide the Western Shoshones due process and equal protection under the law in the land dispute.

It was the Dann sisters who took the Western Shoshones' case to the international body, part of an ongoing fight they've waged since 1974 when government officials showed up at their ranch one day and said they were trespassing on federal lands by grazing cattle without a permit.

"They never showed us the documents how they had taken our land," says Mary, who friends estimate is in her 80s, while guessing that Carrie is in her late 60s or early 70s. The sisters refuse to discuss their age.

The Danns protested all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1985 that because the Western Shoshone had received a monetary settlement from the government, they could no longer pursue land claims.

"Ridiculous," Carrie says in disgust, noting that the funds sit in a government bank account and the Western Shoshone have never taken one cent.

"The earth is our mother and we can't give up our mother. No way in hell," says this silver-haired woman wearing dirt-spattered jeans, taking a drag on her cigarette.

To this day, the sisters continue to have confrontations with the Bureau of Land Management, which seized and sold 232 cattle, about half the Danns' herd, a year and a half ago.

Many Western Shoshone once supported the Danns, but have grown to see them as intransigent old-timers pursuing a quest so far-fetched it amounts to folly.

Ike, the former Te-Moak tribe chairman, is among them. "After the Supreme Court ruled against the Danns, what hope was there? There was no stopping the federal government from doing what it wanted to do. They took the land away from us. It was over."

"(The Danns) cry Mother Earth is not for sale. But look around you - who occupies this place? Who runs the railroads and the mines, who operates the ranches? Not indigenous people. Mother Earth has been sold. That's the reality," Ike said.

Most Western Shoshone want the money the government is again offering from its proposed settlement - an estimated $20,000 per person, enough to buy a new car or help pay off a mortgage - says Ike, who helped organize a 2002 vote which found that tribal members supported the financial distribution by an 11-to-1 margin.

The proposed settlement represents the $26 million the Shoshone never accepted, which has swelled to $140 million with interest.

The Danns and others charge the vote was not held according to proper procedures, and have challenged organizers to allow to public recount of the ballots. That hasn't happened.

"We Shoshones are sick of this fight the Danns have been carrying on all this time," says Naomi Mason, 74, a Western Shoshone who lives in Owyhee, Nev., on the Idaho border. "It's painful because it goes on and on, like a death that you go on grieving. We need to put closure on it."

It's wrong to tie the money to the land issue, insists Amy Spanbauer, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., sponsor of the House bill. "There is no explicit ceding of land claims by accepting this distribution. The money is rightfully theirs and a majority of the Western Shoshone want it," she says.

All the bill would do, she adds, is give Congress' authorization to distribute the money awarded by the Indian Claims Commission in the 1970s. Congressional approval is required for such distributions.

The Western Shoshone should take the money and work with Congress to expand their land base, says a spokeswoman for Sen. Harry Reid, R-Nev. The senator's staff last month held meetings with several tribes in Nevada to discuss returning some federal lands to the Indians for housing and economic development. More than 80 percent of Nevada is owned by the government.

As it stands, the tribes have little land to speak of - fewer than 10,000 acres, according to some estimates, compared with the 62 million acres they once claimed as their homeland.

"The fear is once we take money, the (government) is going to say, `We've dealt with you, we don't owe you anything, we don't have any reason to expand your land base,'" says Stevens.

The suspicion is that government officials have economic reasons to want clear title to the contested Western Shoshone lands. With unknown amounts of gold still buried in the mountains of northern Nevada, where many tribal members live, and strong prospects for geothermal energy development in the area, there are potentially tens of billions of dollars to be made off the land.

Back at the ranch, the Dann sisters have been watching new lights appearing at night on Mount Tenabo rising above Crescent Valley. The mountain is the setting for many Western Shoshone creation stories, the sisters say.

It's also part of a proposed 100,000-acre sale of federal lands to Canadian gold mining company Placer Dome Inc. outlined earlier this year in a bill introduced by Gibbons. Enormous amounts of gold are believed to lie in Mount Tenabo, and a new mine has been proposed on that site. Congress has not yet acted on the bill.

"All they can see in this land is the value in dollars and cents. They don't see the beauty, the medicinal plants, the rights of the deer and eagle to this land, the spiritual life that is being taken out in the name of gold," says Carrie Dann, with a deep sigh.

"That's why I'm mad. … All my life, it's been a struggle to preserve this land for our people, and I'll never get tired, I'll never stop."

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