KVIG Informative

The United States has never purchased the ground it has used for nuclear weapons testing and, for decades, has studied as a nuclear waste dump in the desert northwest of Las Vegas. It only promised the Western Shoshone peace. That unresolved treaty question is still being cited today in Nevada’s fight against burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

The United States and several bands of Western Shoshone Indians signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1863, according to the case record in Dann v. United States, a petition filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Western Shoshone sisters Mary and Carrie Dann. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in 1866, and the federal government proclaimed it in effect on Oct. 21, 1869, the same record states. The treaty’s own terms addressed ending hostilities between the two sides and did not cede Western Shoshone land to the United States, according to the same case record.

More than a century later, the Indian Claims Commission issued a final judgment on the Western Shoshone land claim in August 1977, according to the same case record. Rather than returning any land, the commission ordered compensation deposited into a trust account where it would earn interest until a distribution plan could be agreed upon, the same record states. No distribution plan has been developed, because the Western Shoshone claimants never agreed to one, according to the same source.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1985, in United States v. Dann, that the government’s act of establishing that trust account counted as full payment and discharged the government’s obligations in the dispute, according to the same case record. The ruling favored the federal government’s position that Western Shoshone aboriginal title to the land had been extinguished by that payment, the same record states.

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The federal government withdrew roughly 1,360 square miles of that same desert for weapons testing on Dec. 18, 1950, in what it originally called the Nevada Proving Grounds and now calls the Nevada National Security Site, according to the site’s own tour materials published by the U.S. Department of Energy. The site sits about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the same materials state.

Yucca Mountain, the site the federal government has studied for decades as a permanent nuclear waste repository, lies within that same stretch of Nevada desert the Treaty of Ruby Valley covered and the Indian Claims Commission later adjudicated. Western Shoshone Nation spokesperson Mary Lou Anderson told a Las Vegas forum on the repository that her nation considers Yucca Mountain sacred ground and views the waste-storage proposal as another breach of the 1863 treaty, according to a published account of the forum circulated by the office of U.S. Rep. Dina Titus. Anderson told the same forum that the area remains Western Shoshone hunting ground, even as the animals there are dying off, according to the same account.

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Congress is still weighing legislation written in response to that dispute. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto introduced the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act on Jan. 15, 2025, with Sen. Jacky Rosen, according to the bill’s own text published by Congress. The measure would require the U.S. Department of Energy to obtain a written, signed agreement from every affected Indian tribe before spending federal nuclear waste funds on repository activities, treating tribal governments the same as state governors and local governments in that approval process, the same text states.

More than a century and a half after the Treaty of Ruby Valley promised peace instead of a land sale, Congress is still negotiating, bill by bill, over who gets to say yes to what happens on that same ground. The treaty never settled that question. A vote in Washington still might.