KVIG Informative

In 1875, the federal government cut a Nevada Indian reservation from roughly 2 million acres down to 1,000 — one of the steepest land losses in the state’s history. A century and a half later, the same reservation is home to a battery storage system built where a coal plant once stood, and Congress is now weighing whether to hand back tens of thousands more acres it took away.

President Ulysses S. Grant set aside land in southeastern Nevada for what became the Moapa River Reservation on March 12, 1873, according to the order’s text preserved in Charles J. Kappler’s compiled volumes of Indian Affairs laws and treaties. Grant revised those boundaries less than a year later, canceling the original order and issuing a new one on Feb. 12, 1874, that redrew the reservation using the Colorado River and specific lines of longitude and latitude as its markers. At its creation, the reservation covered more than 2 million acres of southeastern Nevada, according to a historical account entered into the Congressional Record in 2014.

That land didn’t stay intact for long. Congress reduced the reservation to just 1,000 acres in 1875, according to the same congressional record and to the Moapa Band of Paiutes’ own published history of the tribe. The tribe’s history describes the decades that followed as a period of neglect and corruption among the federal agents assigned to oversee what remained of the reservation.

The tribe organized a formal government in 1941, adopting a constitution and bylaws that created a Business Council to lead the reservation, according to the tribe’s history. A decade later, in 1951, the federal Indian Claims Commission recognized a claim the tribe brought over land taken from it during the 1860s. The resulting judgment established a permanent capital fund the tribe has drawn on for economic development ever since, the tribe’s history states.

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Congress reversed course on the reservation’s size in 1980. President Jimmy Carter signed Senate Bill 1135 into law on Dec. 5, 1980 — enacted as Public Law 96-491 — placing roughly 70,500 acres of Nevada public land into trust for the Moapa Band, according to Carter’s own signing statement. Combined with the reservation’s remaining acreage, the tribe’s trust land totaled 71,954 acres by 2012, according to a U.S. Department of the Interior announcement that year, a fraction of the reservation’s original footprint but more than 70 times what had remained after 1875.

By then, the reservation had spent decades next door to one of the larger coal-fired power plants in the Southwest. NV Energy built the Reid Gardner Generating Station near Moapa in four phases between 1965 and 1983, eventually reaching 557 megawatts of capacity, according to a fact sheet published by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. The plant operated as a zero-liquid-discharge facility, relying on evaporation ponds for wastewater that leaked dissolved salts into groundwater before the state required protective lining to be installed between 2001 and 2008. Nevada regulators placed the site under a formal cleanup order in February 2008.

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The state agency has since overseen the removal of more than 2 million cubic yards of contaminated pond solids and soil from the site between 2010 and 2017, along with roughly 10,000 cubic yards of petroleum-contaminated soil excavated in 2015 and 2016, according to its fact sheet. NV Energy shut down three of the plant’s four units on Dec. 31, 2014, and retired the fourth on March 11, 2017, the agency’s records show.

The land didn’t sit idle afterward — some of it hadn’t waited for the plant to close at all. The U.S. Department of the Interior approved a 350-megawatt solar project on roughly 2,000 acres of Moapa trust land in June 2012, the first utility-scale solar project ever approved for development on tribal land, according to the department’s announcement at the time. First Solar began commercial operation of the resulting 250-megawatt Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project in March 2017, according to the company’s own announcement. The Interior Department approved a second solar project on the reservation, a 100-megawatt facility on roughly 900 acres, in September 2016, according to a separate department announcement.

The former coal plant site itself has since been repurposed too. NV Energy and Energy Vault brought a 220-megawatt, 440-megawatt-hour battery storage system online on the Reid Gardner grounds on April 25, 2024, according to the companies’ joint announcement. The system stores excess wind and solar power generated elsewhere on the grid and dispatches it during peak demand — built on the same acreage where coal once burned beside a reservation the federal government had tried to shrink into irrelevance.

The federal government isn’t finished redrawing this reservation’s boundaries. Nevada Rep. Susie Lee and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto reintroduced legislation in March 2025 — the Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, H.R. 2134 and its Senate companion, S. 1005 — that would place approximately 45,146 more acres into trust for the Moapa Band, according to the bill’s text and a summary published by Lee’s office. The bill remained pending in Congress as of this article’s publication. A century and a half after Washington shrank this reservation down to 1,000 acres, how much of Nevada belongs to the Moapa Band is still being decided by the same institution that took it away.