National parks are often imagined as untouched wilderness. Death Valley tells a different story: it sits on the homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone, who for more than 50 years resisted the National Park Service's efforts to remove them — a campaign led, from the 1950s on, largely by women.
After the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act of 2000, the park's new entrance signs added "Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone." Credit: National Park Service.
Timbisha
The name "Death Valley" supposedly comes from a lost party of forty-niners in the California Gold Rush. Tribal elder Pauline Esteves called it an unfortunate name for a place where people had thrived for generations. To the Timbisha Shoshone the valley is timbisha, after the red ochre of the Black Mountains that the "Old Ones" used for spiritual purposes. They lived with the heat, moving with the seasons between mountains and valley floor, mesquite groves and springs.
As settlers arrived, the Timbisha Shoshone added seasonal wage work, and industries such as mining began to shape where they could live. Then, in 1933, President Hoover created Death Valley National Monument.
The "Indian Village"
Esteves, born in 1924, remembered uniformed men appearing whom her people took for soldiers up to "no good." The monument's first acting superintendent, John White, saw the Timbisha Shoshone as a problem to be removed for the sake of the landscape. Because they had never been forced onto a reservation, they also lacked federal recognition and the help that came with it.
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 1936 | Under a New Deal agreement between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Park Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps builds 11 adobe houses for about 60 Timbisha Shoshone on 40 acres near — but out of sight of — the ranger station and the upscale Furnace Creek Inn. No plumbing or electricity; a single water tap |
| Following years | The houses decay without the maintenance the Park Service had promised, and restrictions on traditional hunting and gathering push many men to leave for work |
| 1957 | Superintendent Fred Binnewies adopts an "Indian resident housing policy" aimed at removing the remaining residents. When families leave for the hottest months, as they always had, rangers hose down the empty adobe homes |
A ranger washes down a Timbisha Shoshone adobe house, April 1958. The Park Service, responsible for maintaining the houses, used their "neglect" to justify destroying them. Credit: National Park Service, Death Valley National Park collections.
Women hold the line
Federal officials assumed, as historian Theodore Catton has written, that the Timbisha Shoshone would move away, die out or assimilate. They didn't count on the tribe's women. As men came and went for work, four women — including Esteves's mother — refused ever to leave, keeping the village alive.
Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham carried on that resistance. When the village was fenced with barbed wire and tour groups came to look at the residents, Durham recalled, the women first laughed, then got angry, then put a stop to it. Humor, anger, action became their method as the tribe sought a land base.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1983 | Federal recognition as a tribe — but no reservation, leaving it unable to exercise sovereign rights at Furnace Creek or qualify for many grants |
| 1994 | The California Desert Protection Act requires the government to identify land for a reservation in consultation with the tribe |
| Memorial Day, 1996 | Negotiations with the Park Service break down. The tribe, neighboring tribes and environmental groups including Greenpeace march half a mile in the heat to the visitor center; one sign reads "Cultural Respect Not Cultural Genocide." The tribe takes its case to the United Nations: without a homeland, its culture would scatter and vanish |
| 2000 | President Clinton signs the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act |
Timbisha Shoshone members and allies march on Memorial Day 1996. Credit: National Park Service, Death Valley National Park Archives.
The Homeland Act
A second round of talks, with the Park Service now willing to give up land at Furnace Creek, produced a law without precedent:
- nearly 7,800 acres returned to the tribe — more than 300 acres at Furnace Creek, inside the park, and more than 7,000 acres outside it;
- special use areas where tribal members can gather traditionally;
- room for modest homes and businesses at Furnace Creek, including a community center, tribal museum and desert inn.
Death Valley became the first and only U.S. national park to return land and create an Indian reservation within its boundaries.
A homeland, always
For Esteves, no law was needed to prove where her people belonged: the Timbisha Shoshone had always lived there and always would, and their history was written in the mountains all around. The land, she said, is not a commodity but part of the people, who are meant to protect it. The tribe's victory pushed the Park Service to recognize Indigenous land rights within public lands — and invites visitors to see national parks as Indigenous homelands, whether formally restored or not.
Sources
Based on "Timbisha Shoshone Demonstration," by Nicole Martin, PhD, part of the National Park Service's Home and Homelands virtual exhibition; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article draws on Theodore Catton, To Make a Better Nation: An Administrative History of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act (2009), and Pauline Esteves's oral history in the Death Valley National Park archives.
In these publicationsDeath Valley National ParkHome and Homelands Exhibition: Politics
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
1
0
0
0
Comments
