The Western Shoshone

• Treaty of Rose Valley: Intended for safe passage, not land cession.

• Indian Claims Commission: Declared loss of 24 million acres due to "gradual encroachment."

• Legal Battle: Dann sisters vs. federal government over land ownership.

• Supreme Court Decision: Ruled Shoshone lost land after compensation.

• Environmental Impact: Gold mining and land degradation.

• Inconsistent Treaty Obligations: Need for Congress to respect indigenous treaty rights.

In 1863 the U.S. Government signed the Treaty of Rose Valley with the Western Shoshone.  The treaty was specifically for safe passage across Shoshone lands, some 60 million acres, and did not grant any lands to the Government.  In 1962 the Indian Claims Commission determined that the Western Shoshone people had involuntarily lost 24 million acres of their reservation due to “gradual encroachment.”  In 1979, the Secretary of the Interior acting under the findings of the Indian Claims Commissions, paid about $1.00 per acre for the 26 million acres supposedly lost and, unilaterally acting as trustee, began taking ownership of this Indian land.  Deeply affected were two sisters, Mary and Carrie Dann, who grazed hundreds of head of livestock across large portions of the vast Western Shoshone tribal lands.

Thus began a 30-year battle between the Dann sisters, the federal government, local land owners, and mining companies.  Beginning in 1979 the Dann sisters began being harassed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), ultimately resulting in the loss of cattle and horses in seizures.  In the 1985 Supreme Court decision United States v Dann the government determined that the Shoshone people had lost their land after having received compensation for it by the Commission.  By this time gold mining using a cyanide leaching process had decimated portions of what had been the tribe’s reservation.  It was no coincidence that in 1961 particulate gold had been discovered in the rocks on Shoshone land, and that in 1962 the Indian Claims Commission extinguished title.  With no intervention from Congress, the Shoshone lands had been reduced in square-acreage, the earth in these ancestral lands had been devastated, and the indigenous rights guaranteed to the Shoshone in treaty language had been abrogated by government bureaucrats. 

To thoroughly understand the situation of the Dann sisters, one must recognize that over the course of 150 years the Shoshone people have been systematically robbed of their ancestral homelands by Anglo-American settlers and the U.S. government, homelands they had occupied for many thousands of years.  Like the Nez Perce and other plateau peoples, initial treaties were revised, reducing the amount of land upon which they depended for sustenance, and encroaching settlers, devoid of humanity with regards Native Americans, squatted on and forever defiled their pristine environments.  But the original holdings never diminished in the eyes of the Dann sisters or the rest of the tribe, and the mystical nature of the land makes deeding and selling it a foreign proposition.

Unfortunately, America is the way it is, ‘de-civilized’ as one attorney fighting gun manufacturers today described it.  Native American people like the Dann sisters have received the ‘raw end of the stick’ in the most broadly defined sense of the phrase.  The laws from Congress that inform and instruct the BLM and Department of Interior in the case of the Dann’s do not comport with the treaty obligations that Americans have with indigenous people.  (USA Today, 2016)

We can look to American Indian law scholars for a bevy of information regarding the inconsistent handling of the courts of quasi-constitutional documents such as treaties.  The readings from Francis Paul Prucha are clear on this matter.  By 1868 treaties were an instrument for “civilizing Indians” (10) and a “catch-all for legislating the good life” (14).  And as was also noted, the duality of the courts in the cases Choctaw v Oklahoma and Montana v U.S. regarding land ownership was completely arbitrary, when in fact “any doubtful expression in [the treaties] should be resolved in the Indians’ favor” (395) was duly expressed and inherent in treaties as a matter of common and international law.  In Choctaw the Court ruled against Indian land title related to a riverbed, and in Montana it did an about-face in respecting hunting and fishing treaty rights in a similar land title case.

Prucha points out the “broken treaty” syndrome (17) and acknowledges that respected scholar Vin DeLoria, Jr. is right in claiming that the U.S. has never honored a single Indian treaty.  But he clearly understands the problem lies in the halls of Congress where the people have the most say in the United States.  It’s up to all of us to ask Congress to return and respect treaty rights to indigenous peoples.  The original treaty for the Shoshone reservation where the Dann’s grazed their livestock set aside 1.8M acres in 1868, which was reduced to 1.2M acres in a revision in 1872, and today encompasses only 546,500 acres.  These encroachments represent a failure of the executive and legislative branches of the government to exercise their broad authority to uphold the spirit of original treaty language. 

References

American Outrage. Dir. Beth Gage and George Gage. Perf. Mary Dann, Carrie Dann, Mary Steenburgen. Gage Films. YouTube, Inc., https://youtu.be/wfIF8knQK0c 9 Dec. 2014. Web. 23 Mar. 2016.

Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: U of California, 1994. Print.

USA Today. "Sandy Hook Families Get Hearing against Maker of Assault Rifle." TribLIVE.com. USA Today, 22 Feb. 2016. Web. 23 Mar. 2016.