Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

The BLM contends that all Shoshone rights were abrogated by the payment of $26 million to trustees of the tribe in 1979. However, Carrie Dann refuses to acknowledge U.S. government rule and argues that “[t]here’s no Constitution as far as I can see. It doesn’t protect me, it doesn’t protect people of my color” (qtd. in Solnit 195). Dann’s repudiation of federal authority reflect the position of traditionalist Shoshones in regard to the government’s offer of $26 million in compensation for their land. Traditionalist Shoshones refuse to accept payment because they believe, as Shoshone leader Raymond Yowell states, that “the land cannot be sold.”² Nevertheless, the U.S. Supreme Court found in 1985 that the Shoshone had been compensated for the government’s taking of the land after the $26 million was placed into a Bureau of Indian Affairs trust account. Carrie Dann “is particularly infuriated by that trustee-controlled payment scheme, which gives native people the status of children” as wards of the trustees (172). This status evokes the “controlling and coercive metaphor” of primitivism, which legitimates paternalistic practices such as the trustee system (Carr 2). Indeed, this patronizing dynamic is at work in the BLM’s characterization of the Danns as indigent “trespassers” (“Report from Amnesty International”).

The Danns’ struggle with the BLM illuminates culturally distinct and contradictory interpretations of the meanings of land and its proper uses: the BLM abides by the rulings of the court system and federal land-use policies in its regulatory approach to land as a commodity shared by multiple users, whereas the Danns articulate a tribal view of Shoshone ancestral land as the basis of their people’s cultural community and continuity. Because this part of Nevada was never relinquished by its original Shoshone inhabitants, the Danns contest the government’s presence on the land and particularly the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) reductive equation of the Danns’ claims to the region with those of non-Native “public land users.” Moreover, the BLM views the Danns’ resistance in terms of a period of thirty years of ongoing lawsuits, impoundments, and impasses, while the Danns make explicit the connection between BLM regulatory impositions and over one hundred years of U.S. colonialism in Shoshone territory.³