Tribe’s Claim on Death Valley Raises Questions for Park

From Grand Canyon to Death Valley, many of the nation’s most popular national parks were established on the traditional home lands of displaced Native Americans.

Now, the descendants of Death Valley’s original inhabitants are making a serious bid for unprecedented joint sovereignty over about 3 million acres in and around the national park, which is the largest in the lower 48 states.

Armed with a friendly act of Congress, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, which has fewer than 300 members and has no land of its own, is negotiating to create a reservation that would give the Shoshones complete control of about one-quarter of the park and shared management over a vast area of adjacent federal land, much of it wilderness.

If Congress approves the Shoshone proposal, the tribe’s members would have the right to build homes for themselves as well as hotel and restaurant facilities for park visitors. Park officials, however, are hoping to scale back the tribe’s plan.

The plan is an outgrowth of 1994 legislation promoting resettlement and joint management of federal lands once occupied by Native Americans. From California to Alaska, Native Americans hope the laws will lead to new economic opportunities and help revive dormant traditions and ceremonies, abandoned when native people were driven from ancestral lands.

For federal agencies, the prospect of co-management of public lands complicates an already difficult situation as they attempt to satisfy conflicting claims to public lands by environmentalists and natural resource industries.

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Tensions have already arisen in Alaska, where one native group wants to evict the Park Service from a small historical park, and other Native American groups are at odds with the government over stewardship of wildlife and archeological sites.

In Death Valley, Park Service officials haven’t exactly embraced the notion of a joint powers agreement with a tiny tribe, but they are moving slowly in that direction.

After more than half a century of bad blood between the Timbisha Shoshones and the Park Service, the federal government had to hire a facilitator to get both sides talking to each other when negotiations began earlier this year.

Death Valley Supt. Dick Martin said recently that he is “cautiously optimistic” the tribe will get a lot of what it wants. Still, there is apprehension that native sovereignty will lead to unsightly, unsuitable development within the park.

“We’re concerned about aesthetics, about water, which is scarce,” said one Park Service official who asked not to be identified. “We’re opposed to hunting [which the group wants to reintroduce]. And we’re just generally concerned about our ability to manage the park as the public would want us to.

“Once it becomes reservation land, the tribe can do pretty much whatever it wants.”

According to Martin, the Park Service is especially uneasy about the Shoshones’ request for 5,000 acres in the park’s Furnace Creek tourist hub, where the group would like to develop their own tourist enterprises.

A handful of tribal members live in rental housing on 40 acres of parkland in Furnace Creek, and the Park Service would like to limit tribal development to the present site.

Around Death Valley, tensions may be greatest between the Shoshones and local officials who contend that setting aside millions of acres of Inyo County land for a reservation will eliminate an important source of revenue.

County Supervisor Paul Payne referred to the plan as “a land grab” by a handful of people who lack the expertise to administer a chunk of real estate twice the size of Delaware.

“I’m all for them having a reservation,” Payne said. “I just have concerns about the amount of land they are requesting.”

With less than 2% of its land in private hands, Inyo County has a weak tax base and counts on payments known as in-lieu-of taxes from the federal government for its vast holdings. Reservation lands, however, are not subject to in-lieu levies.

Local officials also fear the consequences of tribal opposition to mining, grazing and other revenue-producing activities on federal land the Shoshones would co-manage outside the park.

Tribal representatives say the federal government is legally obligated to come to terms with them.

“We think it is clear Congress has recognized our right to have a reservation on these lands,” said tribal administrator Richard Boland.

Boland was referring to the 1994 legislation that elevated Death Valley from a national monument to a national park. That act orders federal officials within a year “to identify lands suitable for a reservation” for the Timbisha Shoshones in and around Death Valley.

Moreover, the group’s push for business opportunities in the park was prompted by another 1994 law designed to give Native Americans across the country a greater role in managing former tribal lands now in the hands of the government.

The Timbisha Shoshones’ lawyer insists that his clients want to come up with a plan for Death Valley that will be acceptable to everyone concerned. For example, Fred Marr said, the tribe “would be willing to consider waiving their right to have Indian gaming on park land,” Marr said.

On the subject of economic development, Boland said, “We would try to build in conformance with the environment, using natural materials, being energy efficient and making sure everything blended in with the land.”

But Boland admitted there are areas of disagreement, especially when it comes to taking care of wilderness.

“The government’s idea of conservation is to block off the land and allow no interaction,” he said. “We see the land as a living thing that benefits from traditional activities like hunting and harvesting.”

It was the banning of those activities and the requirement that the Timbisha Shoshones confine themselves to one corner of the park that caused most of them to leave after Death Valley was added to the park system in 1933, said Catherine Fowler, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada in Reno who has written extensively about the tribe.

“Hunting, campfires and long-term camping all were banned,” Fowler said. “The tribe was told they could no longer move back and forth between mountain and valley sites, as they had for thousands of years to gather food and avoid the temperature extremes,” Fowler said.

The tribe dispersed, kinfolk lost track of one another and the tribal rolls eventually reflected about a 50% decline in population, she said.

Park Service officials today agree that the Timbisha Shoshones were treated shabbily.

“They were forced into a very small area of the park,” said Pat Parker, an official of the Park Service’s Indian Liaison Department. “They were even charged for water. It was an affront to their sovereignty as a people.”

By passing laws that encourage resettlement and cooperative management of public lands by native peoples, Congress has indicated a desire to make some amends.

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But righting old wrongs is not always easy for a federal agency facing conflicting missions--managing public lands for the benefit of modern society and acquiescing to the requests of Native Americans to make use of the parks as their ancestors did.

Recently, one native association sought exclusive rights to manage Sitka National Historical Park, a place they had controlled before Russian occupation of Alaska in the 19th Century.

At another Alaskan park, where the Park Service permits hunting, a touchy dispute has arisen over how many animals can be killed each year.

“We set take limits based on what we think is best for the long-term survival of the animals,” said Sandy Faulkner, a Park Service historian based in Anchorage. But native groups want certain cultural issues factored into the equation.

She said one group that hunts caribou in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in southeastern Alaska asserts the cultural right of all young men to “take” a caribou as a traditional part of coming of age, Faulkner said.

“There are profoundly different ways of valuing natural resources,” Faulkner said, “and we are just beginning to learn about those differences.”

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Proposed Reservation

The proposed Timbisha Shoshone reservation includes about 3 million acres of land in scattered parcels in and around Death Valley National Park, including areas highlighted below.

Sites proposed for reservation:

Lida Summit

Scotty’s Junction

Mesquite Spring

Daylight Pass

Saline Valley

Hunter Mt.

Furnace Creek

Panamint Valley

Death Valley Junction