KVIG Informative

The Las Vegas Paiute Colony began as 10 acres in downtown Las Vegas, deeded to the tribe by rancher Helen J. Stewart in 1911. In 1983, Congress added a second, far larger parcel eighteen miles northwest of the Colony, creating what the tribe’s own government calls the Snow Mountain Reservation. Forty-two years later, Congress is weighing whether to redraw the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe’s boundaries again — this time by thousands of acres more, through two separate bills now pending on Capitol Hill.

Helen J. Stewart, owner of the pre-railroad Las Vegas Rancho, deeded 10 acres of spring-fed land in what is now downtown Las Vegas to the tribe on Dec. 30, 1911, according to the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe’s own government website and a history of the tribe in Barry M. Pritzker’s “A Native American Encyclopedia,” published by Oxford University Press. A school opened on the property in the fall of 1912, according to the tribe’s website. The tribe’s government calls this original 10-acre parcel the Las Vegas Paiute Colony.

The Colony was the tribe’s only land base for more than seven decades. In 1983, Congress added a second and much larger parcel through a separate act: an area the tribe’s website describes as lying between the eastern slopes of Mount Charleston and the western Sheep Range, roughly 18 miles northwest of the Colony. The tribe’s own government website puts that 1983 addition at approximately 4,000 acres; Pritzker’s encyclopedia entry on the tribe puts the same parcel at 3,800 acres. The tribe’s government designates this second parcel the Snow Mountain Reservation, a name distinct from the Colony that continues to describe only the original downtown site.

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The tribe’s government website lists its current total land base at roughly 3,850 acres across the two parcels combined, overseen by a seven-person tribal council. As of a 1992 count cited in Pritzker’s encyclopedia, the tribe had 71 enrolled members, 52 of whom lived on the reservation.

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., introduced H.R. 6917 in the 119th Congress, a bill officially titled “To take certain land into trust for the benefit of the Las Vegas Tribe of Paiute Indians,” according to the bill’s own listing on Congress.gov. The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources, the listing shows.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., has separately proposed adding 3,156 acres to the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe’s land holdings as part of her Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, according to her own Senate office’s account of the legislation. The same bill would place 45,146 acres in trust for the Moapa Band of Paiutes, a separate tribe, the senator’s office says.

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Both bills would add land through the same basic mechanism Congress used in 1983 to create the Snow Mountain Reservation: an act of the federal legislature redrawing a tribal land base that has not otherwise changed in more than four decades. Whether either measure clears Congress will decide if the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe’s reservation is redrawn for the first time since Ronald Reagan’s first term — or whether the boundaries fixed in 1983 remain, on paper, exactly where lawmakers left them.