Western Shoshone

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Former tribal area of ​​the Western Shoshone and present-day reservations in Utah and Nevada

The Western Shoshone , also Western Shoshone (English Western Shoshone , own designation: Newe - "people", read: Nih-wih ) are an Indian - tribe of the Shoshone . They speak a uto-Aztec language in the dialect of the Shoshone- Comanche .

The traditional territory of the Western Shoshone includes the central and western part of the US state Idaho , northwestern Utah , central and northeastern Nevada, and the Panamint Valley, the Panamint Mountains and the Death Valley in California .

The Western Shoshone are part of the cultural area of the Great Basin . In addition to the Western Shoshone, there were those

Groups of the Western Shoshone

  • Koso (also known as Panamint or Timbisha-Shoshone , now reside in the Panamint Valley and Death Valley (Furnace Creek Reservation) and once wandered between the Panamint Mountains, Owens Lake and Amargosa River)
  • Tukuaduka (English Sheepeater , "sheep-eaters", the term for groups of the Western Shoshone living in Idaho)
  • Toi Ticutta (English Cattail Eaters , "eater of the broad-leaved cattail ", whose "rhizomes" are starchy and edible after boiling, usually called Gosiute , the name for the groups living in Nevada and Utah)
  • Te-Moak (officially Te-Moak Tribe around Elko (Nevada) , in 1938 four groups living in Nevada joined together under the leadership of Chief Frank Te-Moak )
    • Battle Mountain Band (live on the northwestern edge of the small town of Battle Mountain in a "colony" near the border that separated the tribal areas of the Shoshone and Northern Paiute ; the Shoshone called this region Tonomudza )
    • Elko Band (settled near the town of Elko to find work building the railroad there)
    • South Fork Band (live on the upper reaches of the Reese River)
    • Wells Band (own name: Kuiyudika. "Eaters of the Kuiyu plant", an edible desert plant, live in the desert plateaus in northeastern Nevada)
      • Doyogadzu Newenee (end-of-the-mountain people)
      • Waiha-Muta Newenee (fire-burning-on ridge people)
  • Yomba in Nye County , Nevada

Demographics

The US Census put the number of Western Shoshone at 1,800 in 1910 and 2,000 20 years later. In 1937 the Bureau of Indian Affairs named 1201, a much smaller number. Today (as of 2005) the number is given as between 5 and 10,000, depending on the counting method.

Way of life and culture

The Western Shoshone differed from the Northern and Eastern Shoshone in that they did not own horses and therefore did not participate in bison hunting in the Great Plains . Therefore they are often referred to generally as Shoshoko or Walker Shoshone , "walking Shoshone". Together with the neighboring Bannock and Paiute , they were often contemptuously referred to by the Europeans as diggers ("graves"), as they searched the ground for edible roots , grasses , seeds and animals with a grave stick . Unlike their relatives, the Western Shoshone did not develop a horse-based nomadic plains culture . The western Shoshone mostly lived in simple bush huts covered with willow, bark mats or animal skins, the so-called wickiups ; When traveling, they usually erected simple wind screens (Spanish: ramada ) , if the season and the weather allowed it .

history

Probably the trapper and fur trader Jedediah Smith was the first white man to encounter the Western Shoshone in 1825 while hunting in the western Rocky Mountains (in present-day Utah). In 1847 the Mormons settled in Nevada and came into contact with the Western Shoshone, who lived the southernmost. The Western Shoshone saw themselves threatened by the influx of white settlers and increasingly attacked the Pony Express or other white facilities. For protection, the whites built Fort Ruby in the Ruby Valley in 1862 . In the same year an army unit massacred a large number of the Western Shoshone.

In 1863 the chiefs of the Western Shoshone in Fort Ruby, represented by some army officers, signed a "Treaty for Peace and Friendship" with the USA, which was approved by the US Congress in 1866 and in 1869 by President Ulysses as an international treaty between two sovereign nations S. Grant was finally enacted.

In 1869 the railway line across the continent was completed. It also passed through the Western Shoshone area. Completion of the railway line marked the end of their lives in freedom for the Western Shoshone. In 1877 they were assigned the Duck Valley Reservation ; but all Western Shoshone never went there. Some instead moved to the Paiute on reservations in western Nevada. Most, however, stayed in their traditional hunting grounds. Over time they largely gave up their previous way of life, especially under massive pressure to adapt by the whites (hunting bans; ban on speaking their own language, etc.) and increasingly worked on ranches or in mines.

Contemporary life

Today, the Western Shoshone are severely affected by the health consequences of nuclear armament and by the US government's nuclear disposal plans. Hundreds of aboveground and underground atomic bomb tests have taken place in their area ( Nevada Test Site , Nye County, southern Nevada). The United States' central nuclear repository is planned for the future in the Yucca Mountains, sacred to them, in the Nevada Test Site area . The Western Shoshone filed a lawsuit against these plans in the Federal Court in Las Vegas in March 2005 . You refer to the "Treaty of Ruby Valley".

To this day, the "Treaty of Ruby Valley" of 1863 is a source of the dispute between the Western Shoshone and the United States, never having been canceled. For the Shoshone it is the basis of their never-extinct claims to sovereignty over their vast tribal territory, which extends from southern Idaho across Nevada down to Death Valley , California. The USA, on the other hand, consider the treaty today, in a one-sided normative interpretation of the settlement of the area in question by the whites ( gradual encroachment ), as factually "irrelevant".

The Western Shoshone tribal government, the Western Shoshone National Council , and many traditional Western Shoshone opposed this view for decades. With the entry into force of the so-called Western Shoshone Claims Distribution Act on July 7, 2004, which the Democratic US Senator from Nevada, Harry Reid , and the Republican MP James Gibbons had introduced in the US Congress, the approximately 8,000 registered Western Shoshone finally received - after a tribal referendum - for the effective loss of 11,000,000 hectares of their land, the federal government paid out cash compensation of 145 million US dollars (including interest) (about $ 30,000 per tribal member). The Western Shoshone's claim to land rights has thus become formally irrelevant.

The struggle for land rights of the Western Shoshone took place against the background of the interests of the military (atomic bomb tests and nuclear repository in the Yucca Mountains), the extensive pasture and livestock farming and the economic interests of the international gold companies ; Nevada has some of the richest gold deposits in the world. It was finally ended at the end of 1990 when the US government paid out compensation to the Western Shoshone, which a majority of the Shoshone - against the bitter resistance of "traditional" Shoshone such as the siblings Mary and Carrie Dann (Crescent Valley, Nevada) - had pronounced.

The struggle for land rights also attracted international attention when in 1993 the two Shoshone ranchers Mary and Carrie Dann were awarded the “Alternative Nobel Prize” ( Right Livelihood Award ) in Stockholm - in recognition of their long-term struggle for the securitized land and life rights of the Western Shoshone. Calls from the Organization of American States (OAS) to Washington to respect these rights have been ignored by the USA.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has issued this reason on 10 March 2006 against the United States a verdict that confirms the complaints of Western Shoshone, the US violated their traditional land rights. The UN committee was particularly concerned about reports of US legislative efforts to privatize traditional Western Shoshone land in order to offer it to multinational gold and energy companies or to use it as a nuclear test site or repository. The UN committee was also concerned about the pasture fees imposed by the US authorities on Western Shoshone ranchers, about arrests, confiscations of cattle and the restrictions on hunting and fishing rights for the Western Shoshone. The USA has not yet issued a statement on the UN verdict (as of March 14, 2006).

See also

literature

  • John R. Swanton: The Indian Tribes of North America . (= Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 145). Smithsonian Press, Washington DC 1969. (1971, ISBN 0-87474-092-4 )
  • Virginia Cole Trenholm, Maurine Carley: The Shoshonis - Sentinels of the Rockies. University of Oklahoma Press, 1964, ISBN 0-8061-1055-4 .
  • Corbin Harney (Spiritual Leader of the Western Shoshone Nation): The Way It Is: One Water ... One Air ... One Mother Earth. Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1995, ISBN 0-931892-80-5 .
  • Steven J. Crum: The Road on which we came - A History of the Western Shoshone. Univ. of Utah Press, Salt Lake City 1994, ISBN 0-87480-434-5 .
  • Susanne Hübel: Western Shoshone. A forgotten people - threatened with extinction. With e. Foreword by Renate Domnick. Publishing house for American studies, Wyk auf Föhr 1992, ISBN 3-924696-71-3 .
  • Warren L. D'Azevedo (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians . Volume 11: Great Basin . Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington 1986, ISBN 0-16-004581-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See "HR 884: Western Shoshone Claims Distribution Act" govtrack.us