KVIG Informative

The federal government decided the Western Shoshone no longer owned 24 million acres of Nevada the moment it deposited money into a trust account the tribe never asked for and refused to touch. Four decades later, the organization the women who fought that ruling founded is making the same argument against the lithium mines now spreading across that same ground.

The Treaty of Ruby Valley, signed in 1863, promised the Western Shoshone peace and let the United States build roads, a telegraph line and railroads and dig for minerals on their territory — it did not cede the land itself, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’s 2002 account of the case’s procedural history, Report No. 53/02 in Case 11.140, Mary and Carrie Dann v. United States.

Congress created the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 to settle tribal land claims against the government. In 1951 the Temoak Band filed a claim on the Western Shoshone’s behalf, and in a 1962 decision the commission cited as Shoshone Tribe v. United States, 11 I.C.C. 387, it found the Western Shoshone had held aboriginal title to 24,396,403 acres across Nevada — title the commission said was extinguished not by any treaty cession but by the gradual encroachment of non-Indian settlement, according to the same IACHR report. In 1966 the parties stipulated July 1, 1872, as the date that encroachment was complete.

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The commission completed the compensation phase in 1977, setting the award at $26,154,600, according to the Court of Claims’s own accounting of the figure as recounted in the IACHR report. The Court of Claims affirmed that award, and on Dec. 6, 1979, its clerk certified it to the General Accounting Office, which automatically appropriated the money into an interest-bearing Treasury trust account under 31 U.S.C. § 724a, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in United States v. Dann, 470 U.S. 39 (1985).

Carrie Dann, born Dec. 9, 1933, grew up on a ranch near Beowawe in Eureka County that the federal government had granted her father, Dewey Dann, in lieu of creating a reservation for Shoshone families in the area, according to a biography published by the Nevada Women’s History Project. She and her older sister, Mary, ran cattle on that family allotment in Crescent Valley and, in the 1970s, stopped paying federal grazing fees, arguing the Treaty of Ruby Valley meant the land was still Western Shoshone and that no federal permit was required, the same biography states.

The United States sued the Danns for trespass in 1974, alleging their cattle grazed without the permits required under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. The Danns tried to intervene directly in the Indian Claims Commission proceeding to contest the extinguishment finding; that attempt was rejected, and the rejection was upheld on appeal, according to the IACHR report. A federal district court ruled against the sisters, and in 1983 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that aboriginal title had not been extinguished.

The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit on Feb. 20, 1985. Writing for the court, Justice William Brennan held that “payment” under Section 22(a) of the Indian Claims Commission Act occurred the moment the money was placed in the Treasury trust account for the tribe — regardless of whether any Western Shoshone individual or government ever withdrew a dollar of it, citing the court’s own 1942 precedent in Seminole Nation v. United States. Many Western Shoshone accepted individual shares of roughly $22,000 once later legislation made per capita payments available, according to the Nevada Women’s History Project biography. Carrie and Mary Dann never accepted any of it.

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The Western Shoshone took the dispute to international forums the United States does not treat as binding. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in Report No. 53/02 on Case 11.140, adopted Dec. 27, 2002, concluded that Washington had failed to ensure the Danns’ property rights under conditions of equality because the 1962 extinguishment finding rested on stipulations between lawyers rather than a judicial weighing of evidence, and because the Danns had not been effectively represented in that proceeding. It recommended the United States provide an effective remedy and review how it determines indigenous land rights; the federal government rejected the findings and took no further action.

In 2006 the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination went further. In decision CERD/C/USA/DEC/1, adopted at its 68th session, the committee said it was concerned that the United States considered Western Shoshone legal rights extinguished even though Western Shoshone people continued to use and occupy the land, and it asked Washington to freeze plans to privatize the territory for extractive and energy development, halt grazing fees, trespass notices and livestock impoundments against Western Shoshone ranchers, and open dialogue toward a solution the Western Shoshone could accept.

Congress never answered the title question. The Western Shoshone Claims Distribution Act of 2004, signed July 7, 2004, as Public Law 108-270, instructed the Secretary of the Interior to pay the Docket 326-K judgment fund per capita to every Western Shoshone descendant with at least one-quarter Western Shoshone blood on a judgment roll, and to place a separate judgment fund into a new Western Shoshone Educational Trust Fund whose principal cannot be spent, only its interest, under a seven-member committee appointed by the Te-Moak, Duckwater, Yomba and Ely Shoshone tribes, the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe’s Western Shoshone committee, the Fallon Band and the Interior Secretary. The law distributed money. It did not decide whether the Western Shoshone had ever actually given up the land.

Carrie Dann died at her home on Jan. 1, 2021, at 87, having never accepted a dollar of a settlement her sister Mary had also refused before Mary’s death in 2005, according to the Nevada Women’s History Project. The organization the sisters founded, the Western Shoshone Defense Project, is now led by Fermina Stevens, a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone from Elko, who told Amnesty International this year that the Treaty of Ruby Valley gave Washington only narrow rights on Western Shoshone land — to explore for minerals, not to take it — as her organization fights newly proposed lithium mines inside the same territory the Indian Claims Commission declared extinguished 63 years ago. The money the Supreme Court said closed the matter in 1985 is still sitting in a federal trust account, drawing interest, because the people it was meant to settle with have spent four decades refusing to call the account a sale.