Death Valley Tribe Wins a Future With a Bit of History

When the strangers shimmered into view, wearing uniforms and guns, tribal elders feared the cavalry had come to run them off their land.

For centuries, only the Timbisha Shoshone pulled life from Death Valley. No one else wanted this 130-degree desert.

It was 1933. The outsiders were U.S. park rangers. The Timbisha cowered, certain they were about to be spit out and their land swallowed by white men thirsty for real estate.

They were half right. More than 2 million acres of their homeland were seized for something called a national park. But the tribe wasn’t expelled, as others had been. It just seemed that way.

When the rangers weren’t telling them to move, the borax miners driving 20-mule teams were shooing them to new sites.

Eventually they were shunted to a 40-acre sand bowl. Only 45 remain--most on welfare, a few holding low-level Park Service jobs--and the wind blows constantly through their collection of ramshackle trailers. “It’s been a long history of harassment,” says tribal chairwoman Pauline Esteves, who was 10 in 1933 and still remembers the rangers’ coming.

But now, perhaps times have finally changed for the Timbisha, the last tribe living in a national park without land rights. In February, its leaders reached a precedent-setting agreement with the U.S. Park Service that grants thousands of acres to the tribe, as well as considerable say over how it is used.

It also highlights a possible end to the rancorous, sometimes violent relationship between the Park Service and American Indians.

If approved by Congress, the agreement may provide a solution for quarrels between other tribes and the Park Service over land rights and control of sacred ancestral sites.

“I think this could serve as a template,” said Don Barry, assistant U.S. Interior secretary for parks and wildlife, who participated in the negotiations.

An agreement was eventually reached, Barry said, because “everyone left past problems and wounds at the door.” He said he knows of no other recent case of the Park Service willingly yielding land.

Consensus did not come easily. It emerged after two years of on-again, off-again bargaining sessions mandated by 1994’s California Desert Protection Act.

It required tribal members and the Interior Department to identify permanent and suitable land for the Timbisha.

Another recent Park Service dispute involved the Florida Everglades and its indigenous Micosukee tribe, which controlled 333 acres in the national park and wanted to build housing on it.

After a long battle, the Micosukees prevailed, with the proviso that they wouldn’t interfere with estuaries flowing into the environmentally prized Everglades.

The Micosukee, the Timbisha and a half-dozen other tribes live within national park boundaries. All but the Timbisha had reservation grants.

“It was not a healthy situation for the tribe,” said Pat Parker, head of the Park Service’s American Indian Liaison Office, created in 1995 to mend fences with both groups.

“In the Everglades,” Parker said, “Congress specifically said the creation of the park is not going to affect the Indians. In Death Valley, it was simply silent on it.”

Under the agreement, the Timbisha would receive 300 acres at Furnace Creek, the park’s main tourist center, which receives thousands of visitors, mostly in the cooler winter months.

Using private investment and Housing and Urban Development funds, the tribe wants to build homes, a government center, a gift shop, a medical clinic and a motel with cheaper rates than Furnace Creek’s current low of $99 per night.

The tribe also would get more than 7,000 acres outside the park from the Bureau of Land Management. The Timbisha Tribal Council is considering building restaurants and motels on the land, located in California and Nevada, especially along the lonely desert stretches of Nevada’s north-south U.S. 95.

Casinos, so lucrative for many reservations, are not part of the deal--for now. The tribe agreed not to open gambling facilities inside the park. As for the other land, tribal spokeswoman Barbara Durham is noncommittal.

The Timbisha also would get a share in managing a 300,000-acre cultural and land-preservation area bearing their name inside the Death Valley National Park.

National parks existed before the Park Service was formed in 1916, and government relations with Indians already had a long history of fear and violence.

In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant created Yellowstone National Park, the country’s first. Shortly thereafter, Supt. Philetus Norris banished all American Indians, including the Lakota, Shoshone, Crow, Nez Perce and Blackfeet tribes.

In varying forms, the directive spanned decades.

In the 1960s, the government tried, but failed, to evict the Havasupai from Grand Canyon Village. By the 1970s, “tribes began one of the most powerful social movements in modern history,” said Charles Wilkinson, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund who helped negotiate the Timbisha agreement.

In the last 20 years, “the Park Service has been brought up to believe that these are all peoples’ land,” Wilkinson said. “The tribes have been brought up to believe that this used to be their land, but isn’t anymore.

“The Timbisha were such a dispossessed people.”

But by the 1990s, the Timbisha had gained some political savvy. They hired a lawyer. They formed an alliance with other park tribes. “They upped the ante,” Wilkinson said.

But the tribe, chairwoman Esteves said, is interested in more than land and money.

About 300 Timbisha are scattered across the country, driven from their homeland by poverty.

“We want all the Timbisha people to come forward again on their own land,” Esteves said. “They’ve had this feeling that they have no identity. A lot of them have said they will come back if this agreement goes through. We want tribal members to build these places and to run them.”

The Timbisha find the name Death Valley insulting.

Forty-niners named it when several perished seeking a shortcut to Gold Rush country.

“Where we live is not dead, it is alive,” said Durham, who was born here, as was her mother.

That life often escapes the untrained eye. Vast stretches of sand extend to the Panamint Mountains, bearing names such as Deadman’s Pass, Hells Gate, Chloride Cliff and Badwater, a white salt flat that lies 282 feet below sea level and marks the lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere.

The Timbisha hunted bighorn sheep, created reservoirs from underground creeks and planted gardens. “This has always been our home,” Durham said.

For 66 years, Esteves has watched her tribe dwindle as tourists tramped across land she and other Timbisha believed was theirs.

But she does not forget what her mother said when a young Esteves asked, “Aren’t we supposed to go too?”

“No. We stay. You don’t leave your homeland.”

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‘It’s been a long history of harassment.’

Pauline Esteves, Timbisha Shoshone tribal chairwoman, right, who was 10 in 1933, when the rangers came.