Western Shoshones Lay Claim to 24 Million Acres : Indian Sisters Spur Land Rights Battle

BEOWAWE, Nev. — In the fall of 1973, an Indian woman on horseback was herding cattle in remote north-central Nevada when she was stopped by a federal agent who advised her that her animals were trespassing on government land.

“I told him he was wrong; the land was ours because the Western Shoshone have been here since time began,” said Mary Dann, who, along with her sister, Carrie, graze the Dann herds in the high deserts and rugged mountains 80 miles southwest of Elko.

In the years since, the sisters have ignored demands to pay grazing fees, as well as orders to appear before a Bureau of Land Management appeals board, and threats of eviction. They continue to ranch on tens of thousands of acres in an area so remote that the nearest telephone is 11 miles away by dirt road. It is 13 more miles to Beowawe, a mere speck of a village just off Interstate 80.

Folk Heroes

Meanwhile, Mary Dann’s confrontation 12 years ago led to a simple trespass suit that has mushroomed into an unresolved, complex legal battle between the government and the entire Western Shoshone “nation” over title to 24 million acres extending southwest from Great Salt Lake across Nevada to Death Valley in California.

Throughout the years, the Dann sisters’ stubborn resistance has made them folk heroes, not only to Indian activists but to feminists as well. Last year, they received the national Wonder Woman Foundation Award, along with astronaut Sally Ride, and they were profiled in Ms. magazine.

“I just wish they’d leave us alone,” Mary Dann said of the federal government and the media.

That is not likely to happen. Although the case has twice gone to the U.S. Supreme Court, the battle for title to these lands in Nevada is far from over, according to many legal experts, some of whom believe that the issues may ultimately have to be resolved by Congress.

Ironically, the Dann sisters were treated like tribal outcasts for years because of their unsettling way of opposing the white man’s attempts to take over tribal lands. Now they are hailed as heroines and the once badly divided Shoshone clans have unified around the Dann case in a tribal effort to save Newe Sogobia, their sacred Mother Earth.

They ‘Woke Us Up’

“The Danns were right (to fight). Their strength and their courage woke us up,” said a once skeptical Jerry Millett. Millett is the chief of the newly formed Western Shoshone National Council, which represents a tribal majority.

Historically, the Shoshones roamed in small family bands across the millions acres of harsh deserts and jagged mountains, each band independently governing itself as it followed the seasons, hunting and gathering food across areas that now include many Nevada cities, most of Nellis Air Force Base and all of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site.

Argonauts and settlers headed for California considered these Great Basin lands inhospitable and worthless. For a while, the Shoshones fought the whites, but in 1863 the various chiefs signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley.

That treaty, ratified by the U.S. Senate, allowed the whites to cross the land, build railroads, prospect for gold, even settle on ranches, but it never conveyed any land titles. The Shoshones were to be compensated for this land use, and a reservation acceptable to the Indians was to be established.

‘Our Earth Mother’

The Dann Band--ancestors of the sisters--roamed the lands that are now called Crescent Valley and the Cortez Mountains, an area of about 332,000 acres. “No one owns the land. We were born here and we just use the land; it is our Earth mother, a part of our religion,” Carrie Dann said in an interview.

In the early days of this century, the encroaching white settlements threatened to push the Indians off the land and the Danns and a few other “traditionals” began to demand that the government enforce the Treaty of Ruby Valley, but to no avail.

“Indians didn’t have any rights then, so my father homesteaded (160 acres) in the 1920s to protect our water rights and have a place for our ranch headquarters,” Carrie Dann said. Today, she and her sister pasture more than 300 cows and an equal number of horses on the surrounding ranges, according to the government.

The ranch headquarters is situated in the only stand of trees in the vast, desolate valley, an oasis visible for miles across the seemingly endless desert. Behind the rambling, run-down ranch houses, corrals and equipment sheds, the snow-covered mountains stand tall against the sky.

‘Traditional Ways’

On a recent wintry day, Carrie Dann sat at an old table in the kitchen talking as she chain-smoked and sipped coffee brewed in a giant pot on a wood stove. “My grandmother used to sit at this table telling us stories of the traditional ways of our people,” she said.

The Danns will not reveal their age--Carrie is in her 50s, Mary is about 10 years older--nor do they volunteer much about their private lives, although they are open and even eager to talk about their fight with the government.

As Carrie talked, Mary was getting out medicines, preparing to go out into the subzero cold to “doctor” a sick bull. The sisters do most of the work on the ranch. Sometimes a brother helps them repair machinery or bale hay and a niece often rides with Mary when she rounds up cattle.

There is no electricity on the ranch and time is measured by the passing seasons: In the winter, the cows calve; in the spring the herds are driven to the mountains; summer is a time to put up hay, and in the fall, the cattle are gathered and driven back down to the ranch with fat calves at their sides, ready for market.

Fiercely Independent

The Danns gather herbs and pine nuts, just as their ancestors did. They fish and hunt and their garden provides most of the produce they need to feed whatever members of the clan are staying at the ranch. Carrie Dann, divorced and the mother of two, made it clear that the Danns consider themselves self-sufficient and fiercely independent “traditional” Western Shoshones.

And she is quick to let visitors know that it is not unusual for women to do men’s work.

“Unlike Christians, we (Shoshones) see women in a strong role,” she said. “It is wrong to put women down. We can think and work, and we can fight the stupidity of men.”

It is that feisty attitude that kept the Danns isolated from many of the other Western Shoshone bands during the 40 years when male tribal leaders were attempting to resolve the land dispute with the government.

Hired an Attorney

Early in the 1930s, a group called the Temoak Bands, from the Battle Mountain area 100 miles northwest of the Danns’ land, hired an attorney to enforce the Treaty of Ruby Valley. But little could be done because all Indians were classed as a conquered people whose land titles were subservient to the demands of the U.S. government.

In 1946, Congress passed the Indian Claims Commission Act, designed to pay the Indians for lands already taken. The Temoak group filed a claim in 1951, but it has never been clear what the majority of the Western Shoshones wanted or expected.

Traditionalists like the Danns contend that only a few Indians were willing to exchange land for money. They say that most believed that they had a treaty right to “compensation” for the whites’ use of their lands and wanted to stop further encroachment.

However, Robert Barker, the Washington attorney approved by the Bureau of Indian affairs to represent the Temoak Bands before the Claims Commission, disagreed.

Title ‘Extinguished’

“The general view then (1951) was that title had been extinguished and that the Indians would never get it back,” he said in a telephone interview. “The only thing that was available was to go after money.

“The majority wanted to get what money they could, but from the start the Danns sang just one song. They did not want to go along with the claims for money.”

The Indian Claims Commission ruled in 1962 that all Western Shoshone land titles had been extinguished by the gradual encroachment of white settlers in the 19th Century. The Indians were awarded $26 million for their 24 million acres.

Shocked by the ruling and coming around to the Danns’ point of view, the Temoak Band fired attorney Barker. A newly formed group, calling itself the Western Shoshone Legal Defense and Education Assn., filed appeals in the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Supreme Court, contesting the Claims Commission’s decision and rejecting the money.

Indians Lose Rulings

The tribes’ appeals were denied and the firing of Barker was nullified. In 1979, the Indian Claims Commission deposited $26 million in an account for the Western Shoshones and awarded Barker his $2.6-million legal fee.

“By the time the Indians woke up to the fact that the government had never legally taken title to their lands and that they had an arguable right to that land, it was just too late for them to argue their case,” explained a top government official involved in the case who asked not to be identified.

The tribe’s legal battles began to overlap the Danns’ trespass case from the very outset in 1973, when white ranchers complained to the Bureau of Land Management that the Danns’ cattle were on federal lands alloted to the whites.

The Danns hired Salt Lake City lawyer John O’Connell to defend them against the trespass charges that were filed in U.S. District Court in Reno in 1974. And not long after that, the Western Shoshone tribal leaders, stymied in their own efforts to reverse the Claims Commission’s ruling, elected to join the Dann defense.

Rules They Trespassed

The Danns argued before U.S. District Judge Bruce R. Thompson that the tribe still owned the land and that the Indians individually had aboriginal title by right of occupancy. But Thompson ruled that the Dann sisters had been trespassing since 1979 when the Indian Claims Commission payment to the tribe had been made.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Thompson’s ruling and upheld the Indian position, finding that title had never been extinguished and that deposit of $26 million in an account for the tribe did not constitute payment.

The Danns cheered the victory. But then, last Feb. 20, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, reversed the 9th Circuit Court, ruling that the $26 million was an appropriate land payment, whether the Western Shoshones have accepted the money or not. The justices, however, did not rule on the Danns’ individual claims to the land, leaving that to the lower courts.

U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee said the decision “imparts an element of finality and stability to Indian land titles.”

‘A Landless Tribe’

But, Peter Taylor, counsel for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, argued, “The result renders them (the Western Shoshones) a landless tribe and that was not the intent of Congress when it set up the commission.”

However, most experts agree that the decision’s narrow focus failed to settle many of the issues raised by the Dann sisters’ case.

For the Western Shoshone “nation,” the “only recourse now is to Congress,” according to Reid Chambers, a former Department of the Interior solicitor who now represents major Indian groups.

Regardless of the outcome, the Dann sisters remain defiant.

“We won’t leave. They’ll have to throw us off,” Carrie said.