Las Vegas water pipeline battle is life-or-death fight for Shoshone sacred site

Benjamin Spillman | Reno Gazette-Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Here's why native people are fighting to save these sacred, Nevada trees There's a stand of trees in Nevada's Spring Valley that are sacred to native people. They're worried a water pipeline to Las Vegas would destroy them.

For most drivers on U.S. Highway 50 in northeastern Nevada, the Spring Valley is a blur of open road, trees and windmills between Ely and Great Basin National Park.

For Rupert Steele, it’s a place to slow down and sing the songs Shoshone people have passed person-to-person across generations since time immemorial.

Steele, chairman of the Confederate Tribes of the Goshute Reservation, sings to communicate with ancestors who died before him and descendants not yet born.

He sings in the Spring Valley because that’s where the soil nurtures an unusual stand of trees, known as Bahsahwahbee in Shoshone and the swamp cedars by non-native speakers.

The trees are where Shoshone people gather to celebrate and pray.

It’s also where they go to remember hundreds of ancestors who died in a series of 19th century massacres.

“I always sing songs for my people,” Steele said during a recent visit to the valley. “When a relative passes away, their remains go back to Mother Earth … those songs will come up in the water. That’s why water is life.”

But under a proposal by Southern Nevada Water Authority, the water in the desolate, sacred ground of Spring Valley would be connected by 250 miles of pipeline to Las Vegas, where it would fuel continued development and serve as an alternative to the dwindling supply from the Colorado River.

It would also, according to Shoshone people and scientists who have studied the plan, deprive the trees of water and sever the timeless connection between the living and dead.

“I feel like if they actually run water through that pipeline, then everything is gone,” said Delaine Spilsbury, an elder and member of the Ely Shoshone tribe.

For the Ely and Duckwater Shoshone in Nevada and Goshute in Utah, demonstrating the significance of the swamp cedars in their culture is central to their legal efforts to fight the pipeline.

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In 2017, the tribes won recognition of the site from the National Park Service as a Traditional Cultural Property.

The listing on the National Register alone won’t stop development of a pipeline or anything else. But it highlights the significance of the swamp cedars at a national level, which reinforces what the tribes have been saying about it for years.

“It calls greater attention to what it means to the tribes,” said Paul Echo Hawk, an attorney for the tribes. “It took a lot of work to get this recognized like it should be.”

Bahsahwahbee: Celebration and tragedy

It’s easy to see why native people saw the swamp cedars as a place for ritual and refuge.

“They had everything here to survive … a good place to have ceremonies, to have a good time,” Steele said, describing how his ancestors would have experienced the trees.

An abundance of springs and shallow water table attracted golden eagles, pronghorn antelope, mule deer and elk and nurtured the swamp cedars and thick stands of bunchgrass and flowers, later decimated by non-native livestock grazing.

The surrounding Snake and Schell Creek mountain ranges offered protection and places to go for expansive views for keeping watch or just getting closer to the sky.

The trees themselves, Rocky Mountain juniper, are an anomaly. Typically, the species grows on mountainsides. But in Spring Valley, they’re growing on the valley floor where they provide shelter from the wind and sun.

It made for an inviting environment for native people throughout the region to gather, pray, celebrate and intermingle.

“It is the same place tribes went to several times a year, year after year for thousands and thousands of years,” said Monte Sanford, a researcher who compiled the Traditional Cultural Property application.

Sanford said the fact the site was a place of peace and spirituality before it became a memorial to massacre victims magnifies the importance of protecting it.

That the pipeline plan remains on the table despite tribal objections shows how broader society disregards native culture in general and the Shoshone of Nevada and Utah specifically, Sanford said.

Subjecting Bahsahwahbee to damage, he said, would be comparable to sacrificing the Vatican and Arlington Cemetery.

"People would never even consider doing it because it would be so sacrilegious," Sanford said. "But when it comes to Indian tribes, people are looking out at the landscape and they don’t see anything.

"There is not a temple there. Because of that people don’t recognize it as anything more than empty land," he said.

A killing field

As non-native people moved into the region during the 19th century, mining, livestock grazing, settlement and transportation networks pushed the Shoshone away from their traditional resources, often with military force.

By the 1850s, there were reports of mass starvation among native people in the Great Basin, as plants and game were depleted.

“That caused friction,” said Greg Seymour, an archaeologist who works extensively in the Great Basin. “The military had to enforce the rules, the new set of rules.”

And in the Spring Valley, according to the history cited in the Traditional Cultural Property application, tension turned into violence.

The document lays out three distinct massacres in the region in 1859, 1863 and 1897.

The earliest incident was a military attack that killed as many as 525 to 700 native people, which would place it among the deadliest massacres in U.S. history.

Another military massacre in 1863 killed dozens more. The third massacre, in 1897 after the military had left, is thought to have been committed by local vigilantes.

Despite the historic scope of the cruelty against the Shoshone people, their story has gone largely unnoticed beyond native communities and academics.

“We were surprised at the lack of recognition this area had given the size of the massacres that occurred there,” Echo Hawk said.

“Almost no one knows anything about it,” said Seymour. “We would not be talking about this if not for threats to the site.”

The 1859 massacre occurred outside the boundaries of the modern Traditional Cultural Property, but the Shoshone view the swamp cedars as a memorial site for all three.

“It’s sad we don’t include these in any of our history teachings to tell the truth about what really happened to the American Indians,” Steele said.

Much of what people know about the massacres came from interviews with native people who passed the knowledge through oral history in their own communities.

The connection between the site as a traditional gathering place and a memorial underscores the cultural and spiritual importance, Sanford said.

“They went there to massacre people because they could kill a lot of people in one place,” Sanford said. “That makes it especially sorrowful, wounding.”

The fact that descendants of the 1897 massacre victims remain in the area also contributes to the significance. Dozens of native people were said to have been murdered and mutilated, but two little girls survived. Spilsbury, the Ely Shoshone elder, learned about it because one of the surviving girls was her grandmother.

The trees are “the only real tie we have with the past because everything else is gone,” Spilsbury said.

Steele, who prays and leaves offerings of food and water before entering the area, describes the site as a tangible, living connection to the dead.

“These trees are grown here in the water, fertilized by … the decomposition of their bodies,” he said.

The pipeline fight

Officials from Southern Nevada Water Authority declined an interview request for this article.

In a written statement, the agency stated it “respects and values,” the tribes’ concerns and that the project would “not impact the tribes.”

That’s not how the tribes see it.

Tribal people say the federal government has neglected its responsibility to advocate for the tribes’ interest. And they say Southern Nevada Water Authority is dismissive of their spiritual beliefs and cultural practices.

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During a 2011 hearing before the Division of Water Resources, a Southern Nevada Water Authority attorney compared the tribes’ spiritual beliefs to children’s beliefs in the boogey-man.

“We had a couple of elders who were in tears, some got up and left,” Echo Hawk said. “It was really disappointing to hear SNWA’s attorney present it that way.”

The water authority later admitted the line of questioning was inappropriate.

More recently, a water authority spokesman said the agency has, “no intention of challenging any of the Tribes’ statements or evidence,” regarding the native history or significance of the trees.

Nevada state court weighs in

As for the pipeline issue itself, it’s dragging into its third decade on state and federal paths.

On the federal side, efforts to gain approval for the right-of-way across public land have stalled in the Bureau of Land Management. Although pipeline opponents say a potential public lands bill in Congress could include an end-run around the process.

The water rights applications are being fought within state government and courts. The state engineer, Nevada's top water official, had approved applications in 2007, 2009 and 2012. In 2013, Nevada’s Seventh District Judicial Court directed the department to address issues with the previous approvals.

Most recently, the state engineer denied SNWA applications for water rights in the region, including some in Spring Valley because they would threaten swamp cedar areas of critical environmental concern.

Echo Hawk said he thinks the tribes' efforts to document the significance of the swamp cedars made an impression on the state engineer.

But the denials and other issues will be the subject of the appeal hearings Nov. 12 and 13 in Ely and the entire case will likely end up in front of the Nevada Supreme Court.

Steele and others fighting for greater protections for the trees say they won’t rest until the pipeline threat is gone for good.

“American Indians, we’re very resilient. We’ve lived through very hard times. We survived,” Steele said. “But taking our water away? I’m not sure we can survive that.”

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Benjamin Spillman covers the outdoors and environment in Northern Nevada, from backcountry skiing in the Sierra to the latest from Lake Tahoe's ecosystem. Support his work by subscribing to RGJ.com right here.