KVIG Informative

The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe spent most of the 20th century losing access to the desert land it had used for generations. The water rights Congress finally attached to two small Nevada parcels in 2000 were written to survive almost anything — even the kind of groundwater fights now reshaping rural Nevada.

The Timbisha Shoshone lived between the mountains and the floor of Death Valley, moving with the seasons, before homesteaders, ranchers and mining interests began encroaching in the 1850s, with the dislocation accelerating in the 1870s and 1880s, according to a 1999 U.S. Senate committee report on the tribe’s homeland legislation. The Pacific Coast Borax Company directed the tribe to relocate four times around present-day Furnace Creek during the 1920s and 1930s, the report states.

The federal government created Death Valley National Monument in 1933 without making any provision for the tribe’s land tenure, according to the Senate report. A 1936 agreement between the National Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the tribe’s current village at Furnace Creek, but the tribe lost its hunting and land-management rights in the 1940s, and electricity didn’t reach the valley until the early 1970s, the report states.

The federal government recognized the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe in 1983 but gave it no land base, according to the Senate report. Without land, the tribe could not access federal housing or most community development programs, and many members moved away to other Indian communities. By the time the Senate examined the tribe’s situation, about 50 members lived at Furnace Creek in seven adobe homes and eleven mobile homes, unemployment ran near 40% among its 285 enrolled members, and more than 80% of tribal households fell below the poverty threshold, the report states.

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The tribe’s ancestral homeland extends into western Nevada. Families lived at Scotty’s Junction in Nye County and hunted bighorn sheep and deer there until the 1940s, according to the Senate report. The tribe has used the Lida area of Esmeralda County continuously since at least the early 19th century; the report identifies at least five traditional villages there, along with burial grounds and the birthplaces of ancestors, and states that members still hunt, gather pinyon nuts and hold ceremonies there.

Congress passed the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act in 2000, placing roughly 2,800 acres at Scotty’s Junction and roughly 3,000 acres at Lida into trust for the tribe, according to the enacted law. The act also authorized the Interior secretary to buy an additional 2,340-acre parcel, Lida Ranch, from a willing seller and place it in trust as well, the law states. The Bureau of Land Management had already classified both Nevada parcels as suitable for disposal before the law redirected them to the tribe, according to the Senate report.

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The 2000 law gave the Scotty’s Junction and Lida parcels water rights dated to the day of enactment — junior to existing claims, but explicitly barred from relinquishment, forfeiture or abandonment, according to the law’s text. That protection looks different today than it did in 2000: rural Nevada’s groundwater basins, including the counties holding the tribe’s land, are now the subject of fights over mining and development that didn’t exist when Congress wrote the law. For a tribe that spent most of a century with no land base at all, a water right that cannot be taken away is not a technicality.