Conflict Resolution Blog

Government-to-Government Negotiations: How the Timbisha Shoshone Got Its Land Back

admin : April 29, 2010 3:27 pm : Conflict Resolution Blog

Timbisha_Article

In September 1998 the US Department of Interior reached a comprehensive
negotiated agreement with the Timbisha Shoshone tribe in Death Valley,
California. It thereby resolved a grievance it had ignored since 1933 when
President Herbert Hoover seized the tribe’s ancestral lands and created the
Death Valley National Monument.
At the time of this land seizure, the federal government made no provision
for the tribe whose lands these had been for hundreds and perhaps thousands
of years. Government officials hoped the tribal members would pack up
their meager belongings and disappear quietly. To their surprise and frustration,
fifty of some 275 people refused to go. For the next sixty-five years, under
almost continuous agency pressure to leave, these remaining tribal members
lived as virtual squatters on the outskirts of the national park headquarters in
Furnace Creek. They clung stubbornly to the hope that they would live to see
the day when the federal government would acknowledge the injustice done
and restore their tribal homeland.

Timbisha_Article

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