The Silver State Has a Scary Future

In July, the Feds handed down to Nevada its bitterest defeat and sweetest victory in ages; the former, a termination of thousands of years of Western Shoshone history; the latter, a reprieve from an apocalyptic future as the world's biggest – and maybe dumbest – nuclear waste dump. In one three-day period, Nevada's past got cancelled while its future was salvaged. But this Indian war and these nuclear politics are just part of a panoply of glaringly weird things going on in the state; there's a gold rush, a water war, and vast military operations, just for starters, and all of them are ecological bad news.

Nevada's invisibility may be as alarming as the apocalyptic dimensions of its plight. The state is a truly peculiar place, a hole in public consciousness. Where else could you set off a thousand nuclear bombs unhindered – from 1951 to 1991 at the Nevada Test Site – while even most antinuclear activists were arguing about nuclear war as a terrible possibility rather than an ongoing regional catastrophe? Once nuclear testing went underground in 1963, and American babies stopped having fallout-induced radioactive milk teeth, Nevada fell off the map even as the nuke-a-month program continued unimpeded for almost three more decades.

Western Shoshone Showdown

Across the U.S., the contemporary Indian wars are invisible in part because most non-Native Americans believe they all happened in the picturesque past, in part because they're fought by other means, in part because the mainstream media don't give a damn. One of the most egregious of them has been the ongoing battle between the Western Shoshone and the federal government for title to most of Nevada. It began in 1848 when the U.S. government claimed the Southwest from Mexico, heated up in the post-World War II era when the Shoshone went to court to protect their rights, and may have ended July 7, when President Bush signed into effect the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill.

That bill dishes out money the government set aside a few decades ago as payment for much of eastern and southern Nevada. The area had looked so worthless to the bureaucrats of the nineteenth century that they drew up a treaty letting the Western Shoshone, unlike most indigenous nations, retain title to their lands. The bureaucrats of the twentieth century realized that the best way to seize title to Nevada was to pretend that the land had already been taken – back when it was more affordable. Of course, you have to overlook the fact that, as Western Shoshone bumper stickers say of their homeland, "Newe Sogobia is not for sale." The price set was $26 million or 15 cents an acre, discount prices even for the 1870s. (With interest, the sum to be disbursed is now $145 million.)

Reasonably enough, the Western Shoshone point out that they never offered their land for sale and many of them refuse to take the money. The disbursement was made against their strenuous opposition. (Others believe that $30,000 per person is the best they'll ever get and are willing to settle up.) The case matters in part because Western Shoshone "traditionalists" have strenuously opposed mining, military operations – 20% of all military-controlled land is in Nevada – and nuclear activities on their land. Though environmentalists sometimes decry their cattle-grazing as destructive to the desert, they look like far better stewards of Nevada's arid lands than the federal government ever has been. They have deep roots in the past and are interested in the long-term future of the place.

Then there's the simple matter of justice: the Western Shoshone are being stripped of their birthright and their rights just as surely as any Palestinian on the wrong side of Israel's Great Wall of Intolerance or the Iraqis whose resources have been redistributed to various American corporations.