The late Mary Dann and her sister Carrie have long represented the historic battle to regain control of land and resource righs to aboriginal Shoshone lands. NFIC File Photo

by Ken Ritter

Las Vegas, Nevada (AP)

The way Allen Moss sees it, most of the riches of Nevada – from the Las Vegas Strip to the state’s gold mines – belong to an American Indian tribe.

Keep Las Vegas, he said. But the Western Shoshone leader wants to reclaim ancestral lands stretching from California through Nevada and Utah to Idaho.

Time after time, in lawsuit after losing lawsuit, the Western Shoshone National Council and its members have been turned aside as they try to use a 19th-century treaty to win back what they say has been improperly taken by the U.S. government.

“Las Vegas is on Shoshone land. The gold mines, that’s all Shoshone,” said Moss, Reno-area representative to the eight-member tribal council in Nevada. “People don’t understand how much money, how many resources are coming out of Shoshone country.”

The tribe never used lines on a map until the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, which the Shoshone say gave them up to 93,750 square miles of ancestral lands. Las Vegas would tuck into a notch on those lines.

Tribal members insist the treaty, ratified by Congress in 1866, grants the Shoshone, not the federal Bureau of Land Management or other agencies, royalties and final say over water, mineral and property rights in an area the size of the state of Maine.

The hot, harsh desert area bears small bounties of pine nuts and medicinal herbs. The rugged hills have yielded $20 billion worth of gold over the years – third behind Russia and South Africa in world gold production, a lawyer for the tribe said.

Moss estimates the number of Shoshone at between 5,000 and 8,000 – descendants of people who lived in lands from the Snake River Valley in Idaho to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah, across most of eastern and central Nevada, and in Death Valley and the Mojave Desert in California.

To reclaim the lands and win some legal footing, the tribe has taken its case to fence lines, to courts, international tribunals and the public.

It sued to block the nation’s nuclear waste from being stored in Nevada. It succeeded in postponing government plans to explode a bomb that would send the first mushroom cloud in decades over the desert. And the tribe went all the way to Switzerland to ask the United Nations to intervene in the land rights dispute.

The tribe keeps losing on most fronts, but also keeps appealing – and some cases have notched a place in Western lore.

Tribal elder Carrie Dann and her late sister Mary became famous for defying the government while losing a quarter-century battle to graze cattle on federal lands next to their Crescent Valley ranch without authorization.

The Supreme Court ruled against the tribe in another case in 1979, saying the Treaty of Ruby Valley gave the U.S. trusteeship over the tribal lands.

A Sept. 20 Court of Claims ruling in Washington, D.C., took the government position that the treaty was “merely one of friendship and that it conveyed no treaty rights.”

Lawyer Bob Hager, who has been handling Western Shoshone cases for free since 1983, maintains the tribe is losing on technicalities. He said the tribal claim finally got traction – and attention – with the U.N. Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination last year in Geneva.

The panel cited concern about the privatization of Western Shoshone ancestral lands for mining and energy developers and cited federal efforts to open a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

“The thrust of our argument is that there has been no fair adjudication of claims,” said Hager, of Reno. “The Organization of American States in 2002 and the U.N. panel last year reached the same conclusion, that the Western Shoshone were denied due process and equal protection.”

Cynthia Magnuson, a U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman in Washington, said the government would not comment on the lawsuits or on the ruling by the U.N. panel. She noted that arguments in the Court of Claims appeal were due this month.

“Generally, while things are pending, we do our talking in court,” Magnuson said.

The government has offered tribal members money, arguing it isn’t realistic to expect the U.S. to give back lands acquired through “gradual encroachment” and now dotted with cities, crisscrossed by interstate highways and railroads, and used for mining, ranching and recreation.

A law signed by President Bush in 2004 approved distribution to tribal members of more than $145 million, including some $26 million the federal Indian Claims Commission awarded in 1979 based on the 1872 value of 24 million acres.

Some Shohones have said they would take the cash, but others balked. Moss, who loads preprinted newspaper advertisements for a living, said the distribution money won’t be touched because to take it would concede the government’s position.

“Our land is not for sale,” he said. The money continues to collect interest.

Hager said he intends to appeal federal court dismissal of a lawsuit in Nevada challenging the distribution plan. Tribal chief Raymond Yowell claims Congress erred in approving the distribution, because lawmakers were told the federal land claims had been decided and the Western Shoshone had agreed to the amount.

Another case pending in federal court in Reno seeks to void the 19th century transfer by the U.S. to the Union Pacific Railroad Co. and seven other large landholders of land, minerals and water in a so-called “checkerboard” pattern.

The Western Shoshone also are appealing a federal court ruling last year that the court lacked jurisdiction and that too much time had passed since a landmark 1951 ruling to decide the tribe’s treaty rights claim. The 1951 case, filed with the Indian Claims Commission, cut the size of the Western Shoshone aboriginal land claim from 60 million to 24 million acres.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dann case in 1985 that the tribe lost title to the land when the $26 million was deposited as payment – even though the money was never collected.

Hager said a court decision whether the Western Shoshone could invoke aboriginal rights to block a planned non-nuclear “Divine Strake” weapons explosion at the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas could prove pivotal to the tribal claim.

Moss isn’t sure his sons, now 25 and 21, will take up the decades-long fight.

“They can’t believe how long the battle has taken,” said Moss, 52. “They were taught in school this is a land of laws. I sit here saying, ‘This is how the laws have been manipulated and twisted.”’

“The Indians look at the ground as being sacred, including the water,” he said. “The whole thing boils down to, ‘How many times can you break the law or twist the law in your favor?’ That’s what the government has done.”