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Article Excerpt
In the early 1970s, tourists flocked to the lavish Furnace Creek Inn in the heart of Death Valley National Monument. With its swimming pools, palm-shaded gardens, and fine dining, the hotel seemed every bit the American version of an Arabian oasis. At the resort, visitors could enjoy the austere desert beauty of Death Valley without experiencing true discomfort or unpleasant encounters with the unforgiving landscape. Patrons of the inn, located near the monument headquarters at Furnace Creek, California, commanded a sweeping view of the snowcapped Panamint Range and white salt flats of the valley floor, a scene framing gray and beige uplands to the west. If visitors strained their eyes, they also could see a small collection of adobe casitas and ramshackle trailers on the southwest edge of the park complex. Although not marked on tourist maps, the hamlet was "Indian Village," home to the Timbisha Shoshone, the original inhabitants of Death Valley. At the rime, the Shoshone enclave was an anomaly in the National Park System; federal officials had removed other native groups from western parks. As such, the village was at the center of a brewing conflict between the National Park Service (NPS) and the Shoshone over the very existence of the enclave, with each party holding decidedly different views of native presence on federal parklands. As the 1970s progressed, Indian Village was important to debates over the proper place of native groups in national parks, what constituted wilderness and "natural" land uses, and conceptions of stewardship, resource management, and preservation. In 2000, the Death Valley conflict ended in an unprecedented way--with the NPS recognizing the Shoshone's traditional land uses, and more importantly, acknowledging their right to live within the park itself. For the first rime in its long history, the NPS agreed to create an Indian reservation within the boundaries of a national park.
The Shoshone conflict with the NPS represents a significant chapter in the evolution of public policy toward Native American land uses within national parks. Standard works on the nation's parks by Alfred Runte and Roderick Nash detail how the nineteenth-century "national park idea" coalesced around the goal of preserving uninhabited, seemingly pristine wilderness. Important recent studies by Mark David Spence, Philip Burnham, Robert H. Keller, and Michael F. Turek, show that the Park Service's secret history was that these seemingly untouched environments were predicated upon Indian removal beforehand and exclusion afterward. As historian Spence concludes, when officials evicted the last Miwok tribesman from Yosemite Valley in 1969, it brought the park in line with the "standards of the national park idea." (1) Although path-breaking works on Indians and parks contain brief discussions of the Timbisha Shoshone, the following pages provide a fuller picture of the anomalous state of affairs at Death Valley National Park, a NPS unit that, unlike nearby Yosemite, never conformed to the national park idea. Whereas existing scholarship on Indian communities and the NPS largely focuses upon reservation tribes, their removal, and their generally fruitless battles to regain lands held by the NPS, the Shoshone case reveals a non-reservation, unrecognized tribe that remained on its aboriginal lands and, through decades of struggle, ultimately regained portions of its homeland.
Beyond the specifics of local history, this article expands existing scholarship by revealing a growing trend in Native American-Park Service relations. As this story demonstrates, federal officials more and more are acknowledging that indigenous land-use practices are not inherently detrimental to park landscapes and may actually provide benefits to ecosystems that have been affected by human management for thousands of years. Ethnobotanists M. Kat Anderson and David E. Ruppert argue that traditional Native American management techniques should be utilized in restoring and sustainably managing environments once perceived as pristine. (2) In this vein the Timbisha example seems to confirm that the NPS is moving toward a model envisioned by these scholars, evolving from a primarily conflict-based relationship with native groups to a more accommodation-oriented approach. The Shoshone history also reveals a growing public acceptance of Native American presence within national parks and indigenous uses of parklands. Examining the Death Valley case thus provides insights into an anomalous Indian--Park Service association that affected public policy and may prove normative in the future. The Timbisha Shoshone success may signal a change in public conceptions of the national park idea, one that includes Indians.
The Shoshone's battle to secure a tribal homeland began in earnest in the early 1970s. At that rime the group's spokeswoman, Pauline Esteves, a determined woman of Spanish and Shoshone descent, joined forces with the California Indian Legal Services (CILS) to fight Death Valley National Monument's ongoing removal policy. Since 1938, Esteves and her people had rented casitas and dilapidated trailers at Indian Village on lands owned by the National Park Service. In fighting for their rights, the Shoshone were in a weak position. Although identified as Indians, they lacked federal recognition as a tribe and did not possess a protected reservation homeland. They also did not have clear treaty rights to their lands, a fact that had allowed federal officials to usurp the group's territory in the early 1930s. The Shoshone also had an ambiguous relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a fact that resulted in fluctuating support from the Indian agency. (3)
The Timbisha Shoshone fell under the virtual authority of the NPS in 1933. That year President Herbert Hoover created Death Valley National Monument to protect the unique flora, fauna, and areas of scientific and educational value of the valley. As at other early parks, preservation of monumental scenery and promotion of tourism were foremost goals. The new monument encompassed lands of great contrast. The park contained the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level near Bad Water, while nearby Telescope Peak loomed more than 11,000 feet. Death Valley was also infamous as the site where the hottest temperature in the United States was ever recorded, a searing 134[degrees] in 1913. (4) In the early 1930s NPS officials produced excited and glowing studies of the monument's wildlife, geological features, historic mines, and ghost towns. Park records, however, rarely mentioned the Shoshone. Because the Indians lacked treaty rights and a reservation, in the short term, it appears park agents simply ignored them.
The ambivalence shown toward the Shoshone stemmed from the NPS having no coherent policy toward Native Americans at the time. Congress had recently established the Park Service in 1916 with somewhat ambiguous notions of what deserved preservation. As noted historian Hal Rothman writes, national monuments, a category that included Death Valley, had a less clear mandate than parks did, essentially comprising a catchall category for lands set aside to preserve archaeological ruins, historical sites, scientific features, and other lands that did not fit the monumental scenery criterion of the national parks. (5) Despite some ambiguity as to early park management, preservationists such as John Muir clearly conceived of parklands as pristine wilderness, untouched by humankind; as a result, Indians generally were not a welcomed presence. At parks created prior to 1916, such as Yellowstone, early planners used military threat to remove the native Shoshone, Crow, and Bannock. Apparently promoters feared these powerful Indian nations would harm or scare away visitors. By the rime Congress upgraded Grand Canyon to a national park in 1919, the indigenous Havasupai were ensconced on a 515-acre reservation west of the park boundaries, although tribal members continued subsistence activities within the preserve. When Death Valley National Monument was created in 1933, the lack of an established, formal policy toward Native American presence in parklands contributed to the anomalous Shoshone situation. An added problem for the Death Valley Indians was the fact that their entire territory was subsumed within the park. (6)
In the short terra, park officials allowed several Shoshone groups to remain in Death Valley not so much from omission, but from a complex set of circumstances. The Shoshone families had long roots in various parts of the valley and showed no inclination to leave. Early Death Valley visitors also seemed to have viewed the Indians as part of the landscape. In the 1830s, artist George Catlin is credited with first dreaming of what he called "a nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty." (7) In this vein, a 1930 Saturday Evening Post article on Death Valley Scotty, a grubstake miner who built the famous Scotty's Castle for millionaire Albert Johnson in the late 1920s, remarked that Scotty "enjoys the Indians as part of the desert which has meant so much to him." Another book of the rime similarly concluded the Shoshone were the "highest form of wildlife in Death Valley." (8) Aside from their seeming "oneness" with the environment and curiosity value, the Indians also served as a valuable source of labor in the isolated park. Shoshone men and women such as Hank Patterson and Joe Kennedy helped build tourist facilities at Furnace Creek and worked on the famous Scotty's Castle in Grapevine Canyon. Although local Miwoks at Yosemite also contributed to the early park in tourism-related activities, the Death Valley situation was most closely related to the Havasupai in Grand Canyon, where Indians provided manual labor for early park development. (9)
Other factors contributed to the monument staff's ambivalent position toward the Death Valley Indians. The small number of Shoshones living inside the new preserve and non-Indian beliefs about the inevitable disappearance of Native Americans certainly affected the leniency afforded them. Correspondence at Yosemite reveals that park officials saw the resident Miwok as a dying race that soon would cease to be a problem. Letters from Death Valley indicate influential non-Indians considered the Shoshone a "lost" band that had become separated from their relatives outside the park and would wander back someday. Additionally, there were as few as two hundred Shoshones in Death Valley, living at widely dispersed locations; and the core families at Furnace Creek actually made their permanent homes on lands owned by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, a long-time industry of the valley, so were not living on park lands per se. In light of their presence within the unit's boundaries, the monument's first superintendent, John R.
White, who also administered Sequoia National Park, made an effort to ascertain the Indians' rights with an eye toward removing them from monument lands. (10)
Like many non-Indians, the Death Valley superintendent had little knowledge of local Native Americans. Adding to the confusion, the Timbisha Shoshone did not constitute a "tribe" in the popular conception of the word. They organized themselves into loosely integrated kinship groups. In the greater Death Valley region, ethnologist Julian Steward found the local Indians comprised seven family-centered "districts" based at isolated springs and food sources. A headman led each group but held power largely through personal skills; consensus was a cardinal virtue among the people. The district bands were part of the larger Western Shoshone cultural group. The native people in the immediate vicinity of Death Valley National Monument spoke Panamint Shoshone, a distinct language in the Uto-Aztecan family. Overall, ethnic boundaries in the region were fluid, however, and the Timbisha Shoshone incorporated nearby Paiute and other groups through intermarriage. As ethnologist Beth Sennett has noted, indigenous individuals commonly married non-Indians. The Death Valley Indians accepted children of such unions, such as Pauline Esteves, who had a Spanish father and Shoshone mother, as full community members. By the time the park was created, the Furnace Creek "district" became the focal point of the modern tribe; the band there taking the name Timbisha from the Panamint Shoshone term for the red ochre found in the vicinity. (11)
Prior to the monument's creation, the Shoshone's subsistence practices...
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