United Nations Intervenes on Behalf of Native American Tribe
21 September 2005
Responding to an appeal filed by the Western Shoshone people, a UN committee requests a response from the US government on human rights violations.
Denied fair resolution in US courts, the Western Shoshone people have appealed to the United Nations on the grounds that the US government is violating their rights to ancestral lands—rights that had been granted to this Native American tribe by treaty more than 100 years ago.
In response, the Geneva, Switzerland-based UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has issued a list of questions to the US government regarding cases of discrimination and harassment by federal agencies and mining corporations.
“I’m asking the US government for respect. Respect for our spiritual ways. Respect for the land, water, and air,” explained Carrie Dann, a Western Shoshone grandmother and one of the leaders in this effort.
This is just the latest action in a long battle between the Western Shoshone Defense Project, an Oxfam partner, and the federal government. Two years ago, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the body charged with human rights investigations for the hemisphere, found that the US Bureau of Land Management had violated the tribe’s right to due process, property rights, and equality under the law—and was failing to behave in accordance with international human rights law.
In recent years, federal agencies have stepped up the harassment of tribal members living on the Western Shoshone lands, from restricting hunting and fishing to imposing trespassing fines to the impounding of livestock—culminating in a dramatic roundup of more than 500 horses by federal rangers in 2003.
For the Western Shoshone people, the stakes in this battle could not be higher. Their ancestral lands—approximately 60 million acres stretching across what is now referred to as the states of Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and California—are fundamental to the preservation of their cultural integrity as an indigenous people. These lands were formally granted to them by the Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1863.
Powerful industry opponents
Their opponents are federal agencies along with mining and energy industry stakeholders, who are determined to get unlimited access to the valuable gold and geothermal resources lying under the Western Shoshone land. At the core of the government’s argument is a 1962 Indian Claims Commission ruling that the tribe lost its treaty rights due to “gradual encroachment” by non-native Americans. But the Western Shoshone claim that there has never been a legally valid transfer, sale, or cession of land by the Western Shoshone to the United States.
Nuclear waste is another element is this dispute. Congress has passed legislation to allow dumping of all the nuclear industry’s high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, an area that is spiritually significant to the Western Shoshone.
CERD has asked for a US response to its questions by December 31 and will reconvene in Feb. 2006 in Geneva. Tribal leaders are launching a massive signature gathering effort to build support for its case.
For more information, visit the Western Shoshone Defense Project website at www.wsdp.org.
