Today the United States government has officially attempted to complete the largest theft of land in United States history. In violation of United States law, including the Constitution, George W. Bush, signed into law HR 884, an attempted payoff of the Western Shoshone land. However, this bill does not change the fact that title of the land still exists with the Western Shoshone. Fraud is fraud, and no matter what the U.S. does to us we will never give up our struggle to protect our Sacred Newe Sogobia – the Earth Mother.

The United States government signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley with the Western Shoshone Nation in 1863. According to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, the treaty is the supreme law of the land. But the United States government does not view the treaty this way. If they do not want to follow their own laws, that the constitution is the supreme law of the land, then this country is not a democracy. A democracy would be following the laws of the land.

I have said this a thousand times, I am not taking money for this land. This land has no value, there is no price for it. In Western Shoshone culture, the earth is our mother. We can not sell it. Taking our land is a not only a cultural genocide, it is also a spiritual genocide. The United States is attempting to steal our religion and our cultural.

I ask the United States today to show me how they received title to the land. The sole legal theory stated by the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was that the Western Shoshone land title was extinguished through “gradual encroachment” by non-indigenous miners and settlers. However, such legal theory is no where found in American law. The only issue decided by the Supreme Court was whether the Western Shoshone had been paid, not who has title to the land. We have never had a court hear the issue of who has title to the land. The ICC was not a court. The United States did not give us the land, nor did they sell us the land. The land is ours. The United States can not show how they obtained title to the land.

The government continues to steal our cattle and horses. But I ask them, if they have clear title to the land, why do they come in the night like a thief to take my horses and cattle – why do they make sneak attacks – why do they attempt to take my livestock with no media attention? If the land title is clearly theirs – why do they act like thieves?

Why does the United States want this land? So they can sell it to large inter-national corporate interests, including mining companies, so they can test more nuclear weapons, so they can write the Indians off? The United States should not be allowed to steal the land so they can test more weapons that kill people. In fact, weapons that kill all life, including the plants and the animals. The United States also should not be allowed to steal the land so they can sell it to companies in order to obtain more gold and in the process ruin the water and kill the plant and animal life. This should not be allowed.

Today, the government has attempted to steal our mother earth – but this will not stop our fight to keep our land. We will not stand by to watch the United States steal our religion. We will not stand for the United States to commit spiritual genocide. For today what happens to us, tomorrow will happen to you. Although George W. Bush, Sen. Reid, and Rep. Gibbons believe that they can now sell this land to private interests, we will fight to stop it. This bill changes nothing. We are here to protect our mother earth. That is our responsibility. Our obligation will not be deterred by thieves.

Statement by Carrie Dann
on George W. Bush signing into “law” HR 884
July 7, 2004

For more on the signing of the bill see this news story:

http://www.elkodaily.com/articles/2004/07/07/news/local/news2.txt

The Earthworks Action Network reported, “In an open letter to the US Forest Service in the March 24th Washington Post, Tiffany & Co., one of the world’s best-known jewelers, publicly opposed the proposed Rock Creek Mine under a western Montana wilderness area, and called for long-overdue reforms of the 1872 Mining Law—a law that favors mining over other land uses and conservation.” You will find the letter by Tiffany’s and more on the issue, including the text of the 1872 Mining Law here.

The Western Shoshone land claims case is a contemporary, classic, textbook example of Manifest Destiny. While private and governmental forces work avidly to quiet all past, future and potential title to Western Shoshone lands, the reality of a case not proven, even if decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, continues to reveal a fundamental injustice.

Last week, the House Resources Committee held meetings and heard testimony on the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill, H.R. 884. If the bill passes committee vote, it will go to the floor for a full House vote. The bill, which has the strong support of the Nevada congressional delegation, would approve the direct distribution of federal funds to the Western Shoshone tribal members. It would force settlement of two long-standing land claims filed by the Te-Moak Bands of the Western Shoshone.

Attempts to force such a settlement to the ancient Shoshone land claim have been defeated before, but bills continue to be introduced and lobbied. This one is sponsored by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., as S. 618 in the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and by Representative Jim Gibbons in the House Committee on Resources.

The Interior Department contends, along with the Nevada congressmen and willing Shoshones, that the vast majority of the tribal members in question support the distribution. And, indeed, Felix Ike, chairman of the Te-Moak tribe testified that over 2,500 enrolled members or some 65 percent of the population of nearly 3,700 identified as having 1/4 or more Western Shoshone blood, voted for the distribution of the trust funds.

It is understandable that many Western Shoshones are tired of the decades-long claims process and would rather move on. A Supreme Court decision against the case is the ultimate step, they say. They would use the money for economic development, chairman Ike said, and while no one can dispute that such is needed, its per capita distribution is unlikely to achieve the intended results. Additionally, the Te-Moak Council asserts that Ike acted outside his constitutional authority by both holding an illegitimate referendum and in testifying before Congress without its consent. (The letter advising Congress on this matter and signed by a majority of the Te-Moak Council is published in this issue.) Many now wonder aloud, what’s in it for Ike?

Most impartial observers will see that the issue is not at all clear cut. There are several recognized Western Shoshone governments. The majority of these councils, as governments, do not agree with the settlement. There is no mistaking that many Western Shoshone, perhaps even a majority, do not agree with the settlement. These Western Shoshones contend that the land is theirs by inheritance and quite effectively challenge the federal government to prove just how and when their people or tribal nation ever relinquished it. As Raymond Yowell, chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, said at the House hearing, “By what law did the United States acquire the lands of the Western Shoshone?” We also wonder how any American Indian would agree to relinquish lands and resources worth billions, for the trivial compensation offered by the government.

The manner of the recent vote is controversial. Many challenge it for having been held in only one community, publicized only there by a single newspaper ad. Apparently, too, that first referendum ballot indicated, wrongly, that acceptance of the claim money would not affect Western Shoshone land rights. But it does.

The contention plays hardest on the ground, where several Western Shoshone ranchers have dug in and battled the Bureau of Land Management for over 20 years. The past year has seen the seizure, confiscation and forced selling of much of their cattle and horses, actions that wreaked financial havoc on the ranchers, including the elderly sisters, Mary and Carrie Dann. According to recent alerts, “Helicopters and ongoing Department of Interior surveillance (armed rangers) continue to harass community members and their livestock.” The concern of the Western Shoshone activists is that, with distribution of the settlement clearing Indian title, the federal government will “turn around and auction the lands and waters off to large corporations – mining, energy and military contractors.” (Western Shoshone Defense Project)

To complicate (or perhaps clarify) matters further, conflict of interest questions are trailing Nevada Senator Harry Reid like flies on cowpie. A recent Los Angeles Times article paints a portrait of a senator deeply influenced by lobbyists, mostly members of his own family, working for major interests, real estate and resource industries, in Nevada. Fair or not, the sense of something amiss pervades his methods. The whole of Nevada seems riddled with this problem. Once, the mere appearance of conflict of interest was cause for shame and consternation; these days, actual conflict of interest is often simply ignored, even accepted as normal by a fat-cat media ruled by a fat-cat corporate-congressional alliance.

The issue is deeply cultural and historical – the land is sacred to the Shoshone – but the issue is also fully economic. It is about tribal private property, clearly demarcated, being stolen. There are many natural resources to be extracted on and under Shoshone lands worth billions of dollars. The desert setting and low population density also makes it attractive to all manner of massive exploitation, including highly toxic gold mining and even more toxic nuclear weapons testing (add now potential nuclear waste storage).

The Western Shoshone opponents point to their 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, which recognizes Western Shoshone homelands. But the U.S. chose to ignore that promise and has managed the area as federal lands. It ushered in the wildcats while squeezing the Indian jurisdictions and disregarding treaty rights. For many years, prior to any court or congressional settlement, the federal and state governments treated Western Shoshone lands as “public” lands, always assuming that Indians would disappear. Increasingly, urban sprawl, mining, military testing have been managed under the assumption that the land had transferred title, that Western Shoshones had no say over it, or any claim whatsoever to the wealth emerging from their ancestral tribal properties and lands, wrested away from them with impunity by raw power and greed, to the great and growing benefit of non-Indian squatters.

Serious property and money is involved. Placer Dome, a gold mining enterprise now estimates that their recent “discovery” in Crescent Valley, home of the Dann sisters, will produce over $1 billion in gold. The Placer Dome operation is just one of numerous major gold mining operations on Western Shoshone lands. Dome’s President and CEO Jay Taylor praised his company’s foresight in a “strategy of gaining large land positions in known gold camps.” He is right there, but what of the Western Shoshones, who had already “gained and held” those large land positions?

Then there is Bechtel, Nev., which straddles governmental and private sectors. Bechtel constructed several of the large gold mines in the area. It manages the Nevada Test Site as well as the counter-terrorism facility that conducts nuclear, biological and chemical weapons construction and testing. Bechtel has the contract for high level nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain, a site sacred to the Western Shoshone. All this happens on Western Shoshone lands, a most valuable piece of real state and resource base that provides some two-thirds of all the gold produced in the U.S. Of course, no compensation accrues to the Native people whose lands and properties have been thus confiscated.

The Dann sisters’ case recently won a victory at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which found the Indian Claims Commission process that justifies the taking of their lands as “illegitimate.” We agree with this decision, and applaud any and all efforts to gain justice for the Western Shoshone Indian people. We urge the media to witness the cattle and horse raids, where good reporting and video documentation is entirely necessary. There has been enough stealing from Indians. From confiscated lands and properties that are worth so much, political and economic justice must prevail.

Whether accepted by none, or one, or all Western Shoshones, who have a right to a proper referendum process and a proper negotiation over their political and economic rights, the manner of this imposition remains an example of America at its worst.

I.
to see other destructions -
mountains of sediment in the desert
Joshua trees shooting withered roots along cyanide-bleached surfaces
in search of topsoil that eroded generations ago.

a need to bear
witness to something other than my own
invisible certainties.

I know what to expect from isotopes -
the irradiation of apples,
the push to keep surface crisp -
it’s a matter of economics. They say

radiation is what cured
my brother’s cancer. The strange
nature of fission – catalyst,
cure, food preservative.
Distinctions mutate.

2.
It takes us half the day to change
deserts. The beige of Eastern Washington
becomes the brown of Oregon,
Nevada’s gold.

We exhaust conversation near Winnemucca,
make do instead with country music
turned too low to distinguish between songs.

Outside the truck
the gutted center sunbathes.

Sagebrush everywhere,
not even the sky can stunt the magnitude.

Landscape swallow our truck,
digests us
breaks us down into its cells
until we lose ourselves
in the hum of dust and sun.

3.
Sand knows the secret of self-preservation
how to avoid the accumulation of atoms.

A naked persistence
overlooked long enough to anchor
slowly
in pockets of mineral and shade.

I will lie in wait for prophets,
distract them from the isotopic visions,
let the lizards exfoliate the surface of my skin.

Despite the excavation,
the weight of water in my veins,
I will spread
into the expanse of basalt until edges
no longer exist

by: Steven Newcomb / Indigenous Research Coordinator / D-Q University at Sycuan

In January, as reported in Indian Country Today, the Indigenous Law Institute issued a report on behalf of the Western Shoshone National Council, documenting that the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) never filed a final report with Congress in the Western Shoshone case, docket 326-K. Despite a final report being mandated by Congress in the 1946 Indian Claims Commission Act, the ICC was not able to file such a report in the Western Shoshone case because the case was still on appeal to the Court of Claims when the ICC went out of existence in September of 1978.

Since the ICC no longer exists, no final report will ever be submitted to Congress in the Western Shoshone case. This is extremely important because according to the Court of Claims, finality in any given case consists of three ingredients: 1. the ICC’s final report to Congress upon completion of the case; 2. the Congressional appropriation of the monies owed to the Indians in question; 3. the distribution to the Indians of the monies appropriated. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court both agreed with the Court of Claims: the ICC’s final report to Congress is legally mandated by the ICC Act.

Not long after completing our report, I forwarded a copy to the office of Mr. Robert Abbey, State Director, Bureau of Land Management in the State of Nevada. Mr. Abbey is the person who has headed up a number of actions against the Western Shoshone. Some of the actions he has personally overseen include last year’s confiscation (what the Western Shoshones call theft) of cattle belonging to Chief Raymond Yowell and Mr. Myron Tybo, the confiscation of cattle belonging to Mary and Carrie Dann, and, most recently, the forced removal of Western Shoshone horses from Western Shoshone lands adjacent to the Dann ranch.

Just the other day I had the opportunity to briefly interview Mr. Abbey by telephone about the Indigenous Law Institute Report. When I asked Mr. Abbey what he makes of our report, he responded, “I don’t make anything of it.” He said that our report had been sent on to the Solicitor’s Office in the Department of the Interior, but that he hadn’t heard anything back. When I asked him if he had specifically requested a legal opinion from the Solicitor’s office, Mr. Abbey said that he hadn’t. He also made it clear that he does not intend to request any opinion from the Solicitor’s office.

When I challenged Mr. Abbey about the main point of the ILI report, which is that finality has not been reached in the Western Shoshone case, Mr. Abbey told me, “I believe that finality has been reached in this case.” Given his admission that he would not be requesting a legal opinion from the Solicitor’s office, I asked him if his position on finality was based on his own personal opinion, or on solid legal advice. He said that it was his own personal opinion.

I then said, “Why don’t you request a finding from the Solicitor’s office so that you’ll know whether or not your opinion is correct?” He made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of doing so, but that I could request a legal opinion from the Solicitor’s office.

I then asked him how in the world he could believe that finality had been reached in the Western Shoshone case when the Court of Claims, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and even the Supreme Court were so clear on this point: an ICC final report to Congress is one of the three ingredients of finality. “How can finality have been reached when there is no final report to Congress?,” I asked. Mr. Abbey’s only response was, “Speak to our attorneys.”

On Feb. 25, Congressman Jim Gibbons of Nevada introduced H.R. 884, which if passed, would distribute some $138 million dollars to the Western Shoshone Indians, supposedly for lands that were taken from them by gradual encroachment. I recently put in a call to Congressman Gibbon’s office and spoke to Ms. Sandra Keil, his point person on the bill.

I explained to Ms. Keil that finality has not been reached in the Western Shoshone case, pursuant to the Indian Claims Commission Act, and that, therefore, there is no valid statutory basis for H.R. 884, or for any such bill that would distribute the monies sitting in Docket 326-K. Her response was fascinating: “That’s the beautiful thing about being a congressperson,” she said. “You can introduce a bill, and as long as it passes both houses of Congress, and is signed off on by the President, the bill supercedes everything that preceded it.”

What Ms. Keil fails to realize is that you cannot supercede the Indian Claims Commission Act and at the same time have the Act serve as the basis for the payment. In other words, if the ICC Act is the statutory basis for a monetary distribution in the first place, how can you supercede the ICC Act and still have it serve as the basis for a monetary distribution to the Western Shoshones?

It is unfortunate that the terms of the Indian Claims Commission Act, specifically the statutory requirement that the ICC file a final report with Congress, is of no interest to Congressman Gibbon’s staff person. Let’s hope Congressman Gibbons himself has more interest in following the letter of the law.

The United States claims to be a nation of laws. But in light of my conversations with Mr. Abbey and Congressman Gibbons’ staff person, what is this principle, other than an empty slogan? Clearly, if such conversations and decades of federal actions toward the Western Shoshone are any indication, the United States is a nation of laws only so long as the laws do not get in the way of what the United States wants to do.

Given the willingness of the federal government to utterly disregard the terms of the ICC Act, and the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley (which, according to the U.S. Constitution, is the supreme law of the land), it is evident that the U.S. wants to arbitrarily pick and choose which laws it is a nation of.

Steven Newcomb, Shawnee and Lenape, is director of the Indigenous Law Institute, and Indigenous Research Coordinator at D-Q University at Sycuan on the reservation of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation. He is a columnist for Indian Country Today.