Cash vs. an Allegiance to Heritage

At an isolated subdivision here, boxy government housing perches on a scrub brush hillside, wood stoves provide the only heat and televisions seem to drone all day--a sad refrain for a people who have lost their place.

At least a third of the Shoshone Indians on this reservation don’t have jobs. Those who do usually struggle to make a living on a tiny sliver of their once vast homeland.

So it’s hard to say what is more surprising: that people here have $116 million in the bank, or that some of them don’t want the money.

But “money in the bank” takes on an entirely different cast when the bank is the U.S. Treasury and when withdrawal could end a tribe’s claim to land that it has longed for since white settlers began to push the native people aside more than 150 years ago.

After decades of impasse, a resolution may be at hand this year to distribute the fortune, payment for 23.6 million acres taken from the western bands of the Shoshone tribe more than a century ago. Tribal members have persuaded at least one of Nevada’s U.S. senators, Harry Reid, to introduce legislation in coming weeks that could disburse $20,000 to every Shoshone man, woman and child.

In the eyes of the government, payment would end the tribe’s claims to its historic homeland.

Some of the Shoshones’ top leaders are fighting fiercely to leave the money untouched in a Department of Interior account. They want to stand fast with the remaining handful of American Indian tribes that defiantly hold out for a return of aboriginal lands.

The ferocity of the disagreement is a reminder that, even in a new century, America and its native people still struggle with the great, unresolved “Indian question.”

“You can’t just snap your fingers and resurrect an entire culture,” said Michael Lieder, an attorney and authority on native claims against the government. “We have been fighting that issue and we will keep on fighting it.”

Average Check Less Than $1,000

The U.S. Congress and President Harry S. Truman hoped for a cleaner, more expedient resolution when, in 1946, they established the Indian Claims Commission. The panel and a court that followed it heard more than 600 cases and paid out nearly $1.5 billion.

But that meant that the average Native American often received a check for less than $1,000--money that went for decidedly mixed uses, said Lieder, coauthor of the book “Wild Justice” on the claims commission’s work.

Some tribal members spent their money on new cars or other goods that have long since landed on the junk heap. But others pooled their resources and invested in economic development.

Several Apache tribes received payments totaling $32 million in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the money went to help establish logging, beef cattle and tourism operations, including a ski resort, on the Mescalero Reservation in south-central New Mexico.

Today, the largest single unsettled case involves the Sioux. The tribe’s eight nations have $538 million in claims money held in trust by the Interior Department. Despite the tribe’s size and far-flung nature, it has remained the most steadfast in opposing distribution of the money.

The Sioux people’s disdain for the U.S. government has been legend--dating to the massacre of at least 150 men, women and children by the 7th Cavalry in 1890. Nearly three decades ago, activists laid siege to the scene of the massacre--Wounded Knee, South Dakota--in one of the most powerful displays of budding Native American militancy.

Activists today consider attempts to put a dollar value on the Sioux’s hallowed Black Hills nothing less than sacrilegious. In an interview, one tribal leader declined even to say how large the trust fund has become.

“Some people perceive that if you even talk about the money, you are thinking about trying to take it,” said Louis DuBray, vice chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux. “It’s very touchy.”

With that history as a backdrop, the Western Shoshone feud quietly churns through the dozen remote reservations and urban Indian “colonies” of northern Nevada, where most of the tribe’s 5,062 enrolled members live. A grass-roots group backing the cash payments threatens to remove from office the tribal leaders who have blocked distribution. Blood relatives have stopped speaking to each other about the issue.

Opposing camps frame the debate as a struggle between traditional values and a devotion to the land on the one hand, and pragmatism and pursuit of economic development on the other.

Most Shoshones say they are not a demonstrative people. But when Nancy Stewart told friends that a newspaper reporter was coming to her home in the western Nevada farm town of Fallon, nearly 30 tribal members quickly assembled to have their say.

Marie Ellison, 85, had heard about the “Indian money” most of her adult life. She grew up in a time before indoor plumbing and giggled like a little girl at the thought of $20,000: “Oh goodness, I would probably go on a buying spree. . . . I would buy me a good bed and a mattress.”

One single mother said she would use the money to pay off debts and perhaps open a sandwich shop. A 28-year-old said she would pay her tuition for nursing school.

Stewart and her principal ally, Larry Piffero of Elko, are leading the charge to claim the money. Despairing of elected tribal councils that mostly continue to oppose the payments, the unlikely duo has formed an independent committee to petition the government.

Stewart, an ebullient retired schoolteacher, and Piffero, a gruff, chain-smoking floral designer, conducted a straw poll two years ago that seemed to show overwhelming support among tribal members for a cash settlement. Though some have called the vote a sham, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Nevada’s U.S. lawmakers contend that it signaled a fundamental shift among the Shoshones. The result: 1,230 for the payment and 53 against.

“The Shoshone people are tired of being caught in between and waiting to get their money,” said Stewart, whose dark hair falls almost to her waist. “They have been waiting too many years.”

Fueled by the vote, Stewart’s committee has proposed legislation that would distribute the vast bulk of the money to the 5,000 people with at least one-quarter Western Shoshone blood.

Stewart’s allies acknowledge that the U.S. government’s settlement is a paltry sum, considering the land lost.

It was not until 1979 that claims by the Western Shoshone, who once ranged from the Snake River in Idaho to Joshua Tree in California, were “settled” for $26.1 million. The commission valued a portion of that vast territory--the size of New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Delaware combined--at just 15 cents an acre. But the Shoshones’ repeated attempts to overturn the settlement were rejected, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now the pro-payment group contends that it is unrealistic to hold out for anything more.

“It’s been all the way to the Supreme Court and it’s a lost battle,” said Francine Tohannie, who teaches Shoshone song and dance. “No matter what we do, we are not going to get all that land back.”

The claims committee’s proposed legislation calls for $1.3 million of the money to be set aside in a perpetual education fund and the rest to go to tribal members. Their draft bill says that individual Shoshones can still sue for land, mineral or water rights.

“We live in America. Democracy prevails, even though these are sovereign nations,” said Reid, the Senate’s minority whip. “There is an overwhelming majority now that is for the distribution of this money, so that is what I am going to do.”

Tribal Leader Demands Land

Two hundred fifty miles east of Fallon on Interstate 80, Elwood Mose sits in a casino coffee shop in Elko and shakes his head when asked about tribal members who want to cash in.

“Most of that money is going to end up in the pit over here,” Mose says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward a row of blackjack tables. “Or it’s going to be spent down the street here, to buy two-thirds of a pickup truck. That’s all it’s going to get you.”

Mose, 48, is the chairman of the largest single Western Shoshone political entity--the Te-Moak Bands Council, which represents 2,514 tribal members in Elko, Battle Mountain and Wells and on the South Fork Reservation.

Tall and quick-witted, Mose has already told his opponents he will give his all to block the payments, even if it means losing office in next October’s elections. “We have laid it out bluntly to the people in Sen. Reid’s office: ‘If you want a fight, we can give you a fight.’ ”

Mose said only a settlement that grants the Shoshone more land than they already possess will secure the future of far-flung bands spread over a dozen colonies and reservations in northern Nevada. Although much of the land is bleak desert or scrub, tribal members say they could develop it for grazing, hunting or other purposes.

The government contends that it is not obligated to give back any land, but Mose can cite several recent such deals, most recently the deeding of 131 square miles in northeastern Utah to the Ute tribe.

“We want something that won’t just be frittered away,” said Mose. “At the base, what we are looking at is values. Are you trying to live by the traditional values or not?”

Mose plans to release a counter-proposal sometime this year that would include land acquisitions, a tribal trust fund for housing, economic development and other projects and some cash to individual tribal members.

Tribal members such as Marla Stanton Woods of the South Fork Reservation are even more militant about rejecting a payoff.

“There is no price you can put on the land. It is part of us,” said Woods, 35, whose great-great-grandfather was one of the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1863, making peace with the U.S. government.

Woods, her husband, Ronnie, and their four children “don’t have much.” They all pack into one of the modest government homes that dot Indian land.

But Woods argues vehemently against the settlement any time it comes up at a community meeting or family gathering. She says the 137-year-old, two-page treaty only gave whites access to millions of acres in Nevada and California; it never passed on ownership.

That argument has proved popular, not only with Mose’s allies, but with a constituency that extends to environmental groups and human rights organizations. Among the untested political cudgels the group is wielding: an appeal to an international human rights tribunal.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights agreed in October, for the first time in its history, to review a case involving an aboriginal group in the U.S. The matter centers on two aging Shoshone sisters who have run cattle and horses for decades on federal land in Crescent Valley, Nev., refusing to pay grazing fees and trespassing fines that now total $1.2 million.

“They call it public lands, but in reality it’s all Western Shoshone land,” said one of the sisters, leathery-skinned rancher Carrie Dann outside a trailer where Mose and others have been planning strategy.

The matter could come to a full hearing before the Washington-based rights panel by this spring. The Danns hope that shaming the U.S. in the international human rights arena will give the Shoshones more leverage in land negotiations.

For now, Mose is more concerned about politics closer to home. He says the Shoshones asking for the money to be paid out are bypassing tribal governments recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Ever since the Ruby Valley treaty, the Indians have been asked to embrace democratic government, Mose notes. He is angry that the 1998 straw vote--conducted outside those formal tribal structures--is being recognized by Bureau of Indian Affairs officials.

The vote was further tainted, the Te-Moak chairman contends, because it presented voters with only a cash option, leaving no box to indicate support for a land settlement.

Mose declines to call another vote to clarify his people’s desires. That might pressure him into supporting a position he doesn’t believe in. “I share the same fears that Red Cloud did negotiating for the Sioux: I don’t want to be boxed in,” Mose said, referring to an Oglala Sioux chief who fought fiercely to get concessions from the federal government in the 1860s. The Shakespeare-quoting chairman infuriates some of his members with such statements. To them, he spends too much time working on behalf of the Danns and a few cattlemen. The critics see the whole group as part of a cabal of left-wing politicos and “hippies”--all of them out of touch with the needs of the average Shoshone.

“I went to this meeting, and they were all talking about ‘save the Mother Earth’ and ‘bless the Father Sky,’ ” said Melinda Jackson, 28, who added that she would use her claims money to pay for nursing school. “But I didn’t hear anybody talking about real people, not some Pocahontas image. . . . We have real problems we want resolved.”

Those holding out for a return of native land see opponents champing at the bit for cash, like 19th century “hangers-around-the-fort,” who prospered by kowtowing to white men.

“A lot of tribes have sold out, but those leaders were not thinking of the future,” said Woods, the treaty signer’s descendant. “What we do today will affect seven generations in the future.”

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Land Deal Dispute

Small bands of Shoshone Indians once ranged across a vast territory that stretched from the Snake River in Idaho to the vicinity of the present-day Joshua Tree National Monument in California. In 1979, the government agreed to pay the tribe $26.1 million for a portion of the land--as little as 15 cents per acre. When the Shoshones shunned the money, it was placed in the U.S. Treasury, where it has grown to $116 million.