Cover Story

Mending broken promises: At an annual spring gathering in Northern Nevada, tales of destruction in the land of the Newe are tempered with actions of peace and friendship

By Heidi Walters

Saturday, April 27 - All day the cloud-filled sky drapes itself across upper Nevada in ground-swooping loops of gray and white, piling mountaintops and high passes with snow and slurrying dirt roads into sticky soup. Rain soaks some valleys and skirts around others with a promise, and across the freshly greened land the air flows crisp, drenched in the powerful mint of sagebrush like a blessing. Meadowlarks, seemingly let loose in large battalions across the northern half of the state, sing and sing and sing.

They're singing here in Crescent Valley - a land-vast and people-few valley in north-central Nevada above Austin - where the rain visited in the night but barely dampened the dusty ground. It's noon, and a temporal halo of sunshine hovers above the Western Shoshone Defense Project's 10th annual spring gathering on the Dann sisters' ranch. The gathering, which began yesterday, each year brings together Western Shoshone and non-Indian activists and supporters who update each other on their fight for indigenous rights around the world.

They focus specifically on the Western Shoshone's battles: to assert and preserve their right to live and hunt and work the land in their ancestral home, and to fend off massive dewatering and polluting mines, nuclear testing and waste, slash-and-burn treatment of their sacred pinyon and juniper forests, and other oppressions courtesy of the United States government.

The talks - held in a long, dark-green tent musty with waterproofing wax and rain - break for lunch, and the gatherers join hands in a circle to accept Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney's blessing of the food. Holding a bowl of food in one hand and a swatch of green sagebrush leaves in the other, he prays in English and in Newe (Western Shoshone). One meadowlark, who will perch all weekend near one of the wood-and-curtain outhouses out in the sage, punctuates the ceremony with its liquid calls. Then the line forms, elders first, to file through the cook shed.

Later, resting on a bench before the talks resume, elder and Western Shoshone National Council Chief Raymond Yowell, who lives and works on his family's ranch in the South Fork Indian Reservation near Elko, discusses the big news of the day with young Crescent Valley rancher Lance Paul. They've just read the front page of this morning's Elko Daily Free Press, and they're steamed. Seems the Bureau of Land Management is at it again, threatening to round up and haul away Western Shoshone sisters Mary and Carrie Dann's cattle and horses in Crescent Valley.

The first sentence of the article, datelined "Battle Mountain," reads: "The Dann sisters' cattle will be confiscated by the Bureau of Land Management if they do not come up with a plan to save the federal land where they are grazing." It says the land is overgrazed, a fact the Danns don't actually deny. But the article reeks, in its flat statements, of the arrogant assumptions that so often rankle Western Shoshones in their dealings with the government, particularly the assumption that the land in question is "federal." This land, they say, is Western Shoshone land.

"The BLM says there's 900 horses in the Buckhorn grazing unit," Yowell says to Paul, and adds a bit teasingly: "You have a plan?"

Paul snorts, looks disgusted. He cowboys for the Danns and is also Carrie Dann's son-in-law. His wife, Patricia, runs some cows in the valley, too. More likely, he says, there are about 600 horses on the range. Sure, it's still a lot of horses. But the BLM has put fences up along the fans, forcing all of the livestock to crowd down onto the lower range.

"And the federal government won't let us sell all of [the excess horses], either!" Paul says. "They don't want us to sell them and make that money, I guess." He pauses, then adds: "They're something else!"

The Danns' dispute with the BLM over grazing rights and fees has made national and international headlines for decades. The dispute was largely the impetus for the formation of the Western Shoshone Defense Project in 1991, and the first spring gathering in 1993. In 1974, the BLM sued the Danns for "trespass" on "public" land with their cattle, and the case wound its way up to the Supreme Court. The Danns stopped paying grazing fees, asserting their Shoshone title to the land, and their situation has rallied forces from around the world, including support from the United Nations. In 1992, when the BLM attempted to round up the Danns' cattle, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) held a six-day siege of the roads into the valley, Carrie Dann jumped into the cattle-loading chute with her cows and refused to leave until the BLM finally backed off, and Clifford Dann was arrested and jailed for trying to set himself on fire. Other Shoshone ranchers have also refused to pay grazing fees. And, just about every year, the BLM threatens to impound their livestock.

This time, though, the threat looks more serious, says Paul.

Christopher Sewall agrees. Sewall is a 32-year-old activist from Maine who has spent the last nine years living in Crescent Valley directing activist programs for the Western Shoshone Defense Project - and being mothered and bossed about by the Dann sisters and other Shoshone women elders, as he's prone to complain proudly and affectionately.

"The problem with the Danns is, they've been under trespass since 1973," Sewall says. "There are over a million dollars worth of fines levied against them. And for the last 10 years, they've lived under the threat of impoundment. They're old-school ranchers - they let the cows out in the springtime and move them in the fall. To change the management of the livestock takes an enormous amount of money and time. And so there's no incentive to change, because the BLM has kept them in a constant state of fear - of psychological terror. If the pressure was off, they would certainly reduce the number of horses and change the management of cows. But right now, Mary and Carrie are making a point."

Paul says the Danns offered to work with the BLM on a joint management plan. The BLM declined.

"You know what? I want a new grazing plan," Paul says. "I want a plan - this land is in need of some different grazing management. But we have to have some security to pull that off. The BLM, they just make demands and they don't listen. They don't communicate with us, except through the Daily Free Press - or registered mail. I bet if we sat down together, we could come up with common concerns. They do things here too [that damage the land]. They put up a giant drift fence, and it's going to cause trailing: The cattle will want to go through, so they will follow the fence. And their contractor [who put in the fence] was a total pig - they were defecating in the creek! They left household trash all over. So, they can cry around because we don't have a plan, but -"

He says the BLM doesn't really want that plan, anyway. "What they really want is for those Indian girls to not be out here," he says. "But why wouldn't they want American Indians to be here? They should be proud to have them here."

Yowell and Paul move on to other ills - like multinational mining corporations.

"That pit lake," says Paul about one nearby expanding operation, "when that thing fills up, it's going to evaporate half of our water. Not only are they pumping us dry now, they're going to leave us with half of our water for all time. And for what? So that for 10 years, for 15 years, they can send all that money back to Canada!"

"To the queen," adds Yowell.

Back inside the huge tent, where wind whips the door flaps and kids tornado the dusty ground with their play, the talk extends beyond grazing and impoundment. They compare the Western Shoshone struggle to other struggles in the world. In Palestine, in Guatemala, in Canada, in Peru, in the United States - everywhere, indigenous people are fighting for their rights against the dominant economic culture. Alberto Saldamando, general counsel for the International Indian Treaty Council of the United Nations, based in San Francisco, says what people need is food security.

"Everything is related," he says. "Everything comes back to the land, and the relationship to the land. ... We're talking about the survival of the indigenous peoples."

There is a report on how a delegation of Western Shoshone and supporters traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last summer to talk to members of the United Nation's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and also to a subcommittee on the protection of human rights. CERD, they reported, asked attending U.S. government representatives specific questions about the legal status of treaties with Indian nations, and about Congress' ability to unilaterally rescind treaties. According to those who were there, the U.S. reps' replies were embarrassingly uninformed and inadequate. CERD issued a report afterward expressing the same concern as Western Shoshones about land theft, mine expansions, nuclear waste and the United States' general stomping on indigenous rights.

Perhaps the most frightening threat to the Newe's land, water and life is mining. And the chief monster, all agree, is Newmont Mining Corporation, which now owns most of the gold mines in Nevada (among the top producing gold mines in the world). A booklet brought to the gathering by Diana Ruiz, of Project Underground (a Berkeley-based group), exposes Newmont's social and environmental impacts in Indonesia, Nevada, Peru and the Philippines.

Hydrologist Tom Myers of Great Basin Mine Watch says Newmont and other mining companies cause impacts to the surface and groundwater in most of Nevada that will last "way beyond seven generations."

"I'm here to talk about broken promises that the mining industry has been making for years," Myers says. "Just this past month, the Carlin Trend [not far from Crescent Valley], a 60-mile-long line of faults where they've built 40 mines - there, they just poured the 50 millionth ounce of gold. That's 15 billion dollars. And that's all gold that came out of Shoshone lands. The industry's been telling us for years, 'We're clean; we reclaim the land; we put things back; we don't pollute streams.' It's utter nonsense."

Myers says a recent report found that more than 40 streams in Nevada have been polluted with mercury, cyanide, arsenic and other poisons by past and present mining. "In the Owyhee River basin, in Mill Creek, the water runs orange every summer when the snow melts, from the Rio Tinto mine." And, he adds, "Over 50 percent of mines have leaked contaminants into the groundwater."

He says dewatering from massive open-pit mines will be drawing down streams and drying up springs - including the Newe's sacred Rock Creek Springs in northeast Nevada - across the state for centuries to come. But still the industry pushes ahead with its greed for gold, despite the fact the price of gold has dropped continuously while the environmental costs have risen exponentially with new mountain-leveling, tailings-pile expanding, poison-pit producing techniques.

"There are five new potential mines proposed for this valley alone," Myers says. Some of these mines, he says, like the Phoenix Project south of Battle Mountain, will leach acid for 20,000 years.

And, outrageously, one of the new mine proposals even threatens to destroy part of the very sacred Mount Tenabo, a beautiful, snow-capped mountain south of this valley that figures importantly in Newe creation stories.

These mines, as Newe elder Bernice Lalo of Battle Mountain likes to point out, not only destroy their sacred mountains, deplete and poison the water, diminish wildlife, pine trees and other food, fuel and medicinal sources, but they also chop down the high peaks that, unlike lower-elevation hills and valleys, capture snow and store it - a natural water source - throughout the year.

"We're saying 'no' to a mine on Mount Tenabo," Myers tells the gathering. "We're not anti-mining; we're against lousy mining. And it seems like all the mining around here is lousy ... so, maybe that makes us anti-mining. We need moral support - you're fighting a multimillion dollar industry and the government; the 1872 Mining Act makes the two indistinguishable."

It is the 1872 Mining Act that the BLM raises as its excuse for not saying 'no' to the mining industry, says Carrie Dann. And, anyone can come in and stake a claim on federal (or Newe) land.

Then Sewall recounts the essence of the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley - a treaty of "peace and friendship." In that treaty, the United States and the Western Shoshone nation agreed to end fighting and to share the resources. The treaty affirmed the Newe's title to their ancestral land, Newe Sogobia ("the people's earth mother"), which extends from the Snake River in Idaho, across most of Nevada, and into Southern California.

Nothing has ever legally rescinded that title. But a strange, twisted and corrupt evolution of events in the U.S. court system has muddied the issue and caused the United States to think of the Newe's land title as extinguished, by virtue of "gradual encroachment" by non-Indians and also by a nebulous and racist claims process that, to this day, has Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign trying to force a payment upon the reluctant traditionals among the Western Shoshone people. The Newe who oppose the bill - which would distribute millions of dollars set aside decades ago in "trust" for the Western Shoshone - fear it would signal a formal relinquishment of title to their ancestral land. Reid has called it a long overdue, necessary payment to right wrongs and lift up the "impoverished" Western Shoshone. But, Sewall points out, how could a one-time payment of $20,000 lift anyone out of poverty? The amount is roughly what any person who is at least one-quarter Western Shoshone (a requirement the Newe call discriminatory) would get, once it has been distributed to those eligible within the population of about 6,000 Western Shoshone.

Reid recently backed off on the bill, saying he realized that the way the vote for a claims payment took place looked dubious and should be recast. The Newe applaud his decision.

Meanwhile, although the United States never won the Newe land in a conquest or was granted it by deed or treaty, today the "official" land base - small reservations in valleys throughout Nevada - for the Western Shoshone amounts to about 0.1 percent of their ancestral land. And, as part of the peace and friendship treaty, the Newe were encouraged to become herdsmen rather than hunters and gatherers - which they have done. As for the rest of their land - well, the Newe couldn't have foreseen how much the United States would take or allow others to take from them.

"There was an agreement to share this land, in peace and friendship," Sewall says. "So now here we are, 140 years later, and the United States is completely unwilling to share even the smallest portion of this land. It really makes me sick."

The talks conclude for the day and people wander into the windy outdoors - where many of the elders and some others already have been all along, sitting in the warmth of their pickups and cars listening to the tent proceedings on Free Radio Newe Sogobia. The broadcast, which extends maybe 15 miles out, is made possible by micropower radio guru "Govinda," a white-bearded, oracle-eyed man who travels to protests, gatherings and small communities bringing the power of the people's voice with a bit of simple, inexpensive radio wizardry and some solar cells.

In a blue Ford Explorer sits Pauline Estevez at the wheel and her brother, Ed, smiling from the passenger side. They've come the 600-some miles from Death Valley, where they live on one of the Timbisha Shoshone reservations newly wrested from the park service after a political battle waged more than 70 years and won just as the 21st century began. People say the Timbisha's victory sets a hopeful precedent for the rest of the Newe family groups and tribes and an example of the desired nation-to-nation negotiations.

But still, the Timbisha have remaining issues.

"Down there, it's a bit of everything," Pauline Estevez says. For example, she says the Navy and the Coso geothermal power plant have dried up springs and ponds, caused some springs to get too hot, and killed the surrounding vegetation. And the Timbisha, like most in the Western Shoshone Nation, are hardly rolling in riches. Pauline Estevez welcomes the Timbisha land base (they had no land before) as a means to sustain her tribe, but she scoffs at the belief held by some non-Indians that the Western Shoshone are poor.

"No, no - never was poor," she says. "A lot of times my brother and I went hungry, but that doesn't mean I was poor. Poor means that you're without something inside - if you don't have that spirit within yourself, then you're poor. Being poor is a state of mind. I don't know how to describe it in English - Indian people don't have a word for 'poor.'"

Soon it is time for dinner. After the circle blessing, people sit around on chairs, stumps, logs and the ground, eating. Holding a plate in her lap, Lalo says, "This meat is good!" It is good - a pit-roasted Dann cow. It tastes wild and grassy. Sewall laughs, says, "It should - it was probably walking towards here not 48 hours ago."

Soon the land for dozens of miles all around vanishes with night and the nearby mountains loom darkly, having lost their glint of green with the last sun. A full moon rises behind the clotting clouds and never quite emerges.

Around a small fire near the cook shed, a couple of musicians from Northern California play guitar and sing of love and protest and the joy of life. When the rain dashes in, they retreat to the shed overhang and keep playing. Another fire, bigger, forms off in the darkness and people gather to circle dance as native drummers play and sing. There is much laughing, and now and then the drums whang out of tune from the weather.

Finally they set aside the drums and one man continues to sing the songs that set the circle into stamping spins of varied tempo.

Sunday, April 28 - Cloudy morning, wants to rain. Harney sings the sun up with song after song to the rocks, the trees, the berries, the animals, the sun, the wind, the night, the rain, the bear. Then everyone circles and again he blesses the food.

Today there are more talks, including serious discussions of the pending high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain and the waste-laden trains that could trundle right through this exquisite, though mine-ravaged, valley and on down through the rest of Newe Sogobia.

There is also more time to meet the rest of these gatherers, to find out what has drawn them thousands of miles into Nevada's - and the Newe's - heartland.

There is Chet Stevens, for instance, a Western Shoshone who grew up angry - distanced from his culture by parents who only wanted him to fit into white society and not be discriminated against like they were (they were sent to Stewart Indian School in Carson City and forced to speak English only); and distanced by white associates who label him as soon as they see his dark skin and braids.

"Whenever I go to a new job they always call me 'Chief,'" Stevens says. "I tell them my name is Chet. So, you have to deal with that all the time." And, because he doesn't speak Newe, the elders give him a hard time. But, following a young adulthood drowned in alcohol, he has emerged a peaceful, philosophical man who accepts who he is and now leads spiritual sweats.

"Everybody here has a purpose," he says. "And people are still coming back to the native way, and learning about nature. We all come from the same creator."

There is Johnnie Bobb, from the Yomba reservation down in the Reese River Valley, who is running the Newe "Walk on the Sacred Land" around the Test Site May 5-11. There are grant writer Lee Dazey and elder Lois Whitney, staff of the Defense Project, and Mary who has come down from Elko and Darlene from Oregon. There is Reinard Knutsen, impassioned director of the Shundahai Network, a coalition of groups fighting for Newe rights and trying to stop the nuclear industry in its irresponsible tracks.

There are other anti-nuclear activists like John Hadder of Citizen Alert and Jennifer Viereck of Healing Ourselves and Mother Earth. There's Ted Thomas from San Francisco, who is half Blackfoot and, like many here this weekend, joined the Danns' cattle fight 10 years ago when he heard about it while protesting nuclear testing. Thomas says he makes a habit of getting arrested for such causes, and has indeed spent some time in prison for hating nukes.

"I often joke that I've cost the federal government more money [being carted from jail to jail] than I've ever owed in taxes," Thomas says.

There's even self-described "new-age redneck" Roy Spangler.

There's Govinda, of course, who started micropower radio broadcasting in 1993, TUCRadio.org in 1997, and has been involved in radio programming that explains the impacts of globalization from NAFTA. He agrees that an essential question is, "Why are we here?"

"Community communication seems to be what I do," he says. "Our survival is dependent on unity and diversity. And: 'Don't compromise your ideals, but accommodate others.'"

There's also Greg Bennick, a professional juggler and punk rocker who happenstanced into the Western Shoshone fight nine years ago.

"When the Defense Project was doing outreach [in 1993], they were on tour with the band Inside Out," Bennick recalls. Bennick knew a roadie for the band Rage Against the Machine, who told him about the tour. A Rage member was in Inside Out, so Bennick went to check it out. "I bought a motorcycle, strapped my juggling props on the back, and drove to Salt Lake City."

The band asked him to join the tour, and he was drawn into the fight. After the tour, he spoke at colleges and schools, and from 1995 to 2000 he played in a punk band called Trial that sang about Western Shoshone issues.

"I've always been drawn to sharing information about truths that are commonly covered with layers of falsehood," Bennick says. "I felt the issue of the Shoshone land claim is exactly that."

At the end of this day, many people have driven down the long dirt road toward homes far away. The mockingbirds persist, however, and a few people remain to take down the tents and teepees and clean up. Sitting in a sunny spot behind the cook shed, out of the still-harrying wind, Carrie Dann talks about perceptions: that is, how non-Indians tend to make up what her people are, instead of letting her people speak for themselves.

"When I was in school, we learned that Indians were savages, that they killed innocent white people," she says. "I believe it was just the reverse from that. But the only Indians that ever made the news, as being good, were Pocahontas and Sacajawea - basically because they helped white people."

She says white people don't seem to get that her people aren't leaving the land, that they are part of the land and it is part of them - and that they don't tend to just flit off to new locations to live, or even for "vacations."

"I wouldn't know what to do on a vacation," she says. She likes to travel with purpose - to Geneva, for instance, to plead the Newe's case to the United Nations. "For me, a vacation is to go for a nice walk in the hills, to be alone." Or to do carpentry - she loves that, she says, even if the BLM has plagued her every time she's done an addition on the ranch.

So, does Carrie Dann want the white people to flit away for good? She won't say that, exactly. She wants the Newe's title to the land recognized for once and all, and for the Newe to be treated as the sovereign and equal nation it is.

"I think about what kind of world we can leave for future generations, with mining and Yucca Mountain and the Test Site," she says. "We are downwinders. Today, there are a lot of thyroid problems, a lot of cancer."

She wants the reservation lands expanded so that young people can continue to live there and work the land. And she wants her people to have an equal say in how the land and water is treated and used.

"My family has been in this valley since the memory of men," she says. "To us, the land is sacred and so is the water - very sacred. This creek up here, that Hand-Me-Down Springs - a lot of these were diverted by Western Shoshone to irrigate native foods. The creek still flows, but in the world of our people a long time ago, I don't think they understood how one man can own water. Today, that idea is cultural shock. It was the same way with the land. The land, I would say, probably owned us, not us own it. How can one person own life, which is the land and the water? You know what is on their coins? 'In God We Trust.' Money is their God. How can you value life in dollars and cents? I think it'd be all right for Indians to accept the money [from the old claim filing] - if it was not for the land, for the water, for the air, for the sun."