In our religion we don’t practice within four walls. Our religion is written in all these mountains and in the valleys, in the waters, in the wildlife—everything that belongs to the Creator. So, we’re in church everyday. That’s what we say. —Pauline Esteves, 92, Timbisha Shoshone Elder, November 2015
Scattered prospecting and mining had occurred within the proposed monument boundaries beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The only commercial entity that managed to have any lasting success here was Pacific Coast Borax Company. After relocating their borate operations to more economically productive areas elsewhere in the Mojave Desert, company brass successfully lobbied the federal government to create the monument. Doing so conveniently supported their foray into the business of hospitality tourism while making use of their existing but obsolete borax shipping rail line. Instead of hauling borax, the trains would convey adventuresome tourists into Death Valley for lodging at their swank Furnace Creek Inn, constructed in 1927. Outside of this resort development, along with their nearby Harmony Borax Works, plus a handful of other private inholdings and mining claims, Death Valley was considered a “vacant” territory, thus ideal for national monument status. This determination disregarded the fact that Indigenous people, the Timbisha Shoshone, did indeed occupy this valley—especially the area surrounding Furnace Creek. They had done so since time immemorial.[1]
Tümpisa (Timbisha) is the Shoshone name of red ochre earth sourced by the Old Ones from the Black Hills overlooking the popular Furnace Creek recreational area. This medicinal material is smudged onto their faces and used in their homes to “strengthen their spirituality.” In the past, Tümpisa was provided to visiting Shoshone bands who sought to obtain it due to its “powerful healing properties.”[2] The Timbisha have in fact resided in Death Valley—a contemporary place name that many Timbisha loathe—for thousands of years. Vast physical artifacts affirming their occupation can be found throughout its borders, including the often overlooked Grinding Rock at the Furnace Creek Inn’s lower parking lot with foot deep holes on its surface that were created from the continuous grinding of mesquite beans into flour over time.
The decision by the federal government in the 1930s to exclude the Timbisha from the monument was a conscious one. After all, the Timbisha had no treaty rights because they were not an officially recognized tribal entity. With no sovereign land base to call home, they had zero bargaining power. Rather than admit that the Timbisha had a long and enduring presence in Death Valley, federal officials simply “pretended” that these Native people did not exist. This egregious denial of their aboriginal land tenure consequently allowed the proposed national monument to proceed as planned.
Tüpippüh is the Timbisha name for their ancestral homeland. Tüpippüh encompasses the valley floor, playas, dunes, springs, meadows and mountains—every landform and ecology within the borders of today’s national park and the surrounding region. Although anthropologists believe that their Uto-Aztecan ancestors migrated into the region more than 1,000 years ago, the Timbisha state that they have been here from time immemorial.
Both Timbisha oral traditions and archeological findings recognize that traditional Timbisha people moved seasonally between semi-permanent villages throughout greater Death Valley. At these encampments, they made use of or harvested a variety of plant and animal resources when seasonally available. Winter villages were located in four different areas within Death Valley proper but also within Panamint and Saline valleys, plus other locations. In the vicinity of Furnace Creek, families lived in conical brush houses with three to ten other related family groups in close proximity to native mesquite groves that are still present in the valley. This location was ideal, as these meticulously managed groves provided ample cover for small game to be tracked and hunted, plus the mesquite’s beans provided an important and highly nutritious winter food source.
When the valley floor became unbearably hot during the summer months, family groups migrated up into the cooler mountain elevations to seasonal camps at Wildrose Canyon, where piñon nuts, seeds, roots and berries were communally harvested. A variety of wild game was hunted, including bighorn sheep, mule deer, yellow-bellied marmot and black-tailed jackrabbit.[3] Normally about fifty people gathered together at these summer sites. During particularly plentiful annual harvests, more than 100 individuals could be present. The summer communes also served an important social function where relatives could reacquaint themselves or where marriages were arranged. All hunting, food gathering and travel to seasonal camps were banned after the founding of the national monument, with the exception of a few special-use permits to collect pine nuts and some other native foods within its boundaries.
By 1933, plenty of hard evidence supported the existence of semi-permanent Timbisha Shoshone encampments within Death Valley and monument administrators were certainly aware of this conflict. Just a few months after DVNM was established, newly appointed superintendent John R. White—who was concurrently heading Sequoia National Park—stated on an October 1933 radio broadcast that “one of the problems there—will be looking after the hundred or two Indians who range within the monument.”[4] White’s indifferent response subtly reflects the cornerstone of contemporary wildlands conservancy which was first spelled out in the groundbreaking 1964 Wilderness Act, stating that Wilderness is a place where “man himself is a visitor who does not remain” and precludes aboriginal people from these same places even if their ancestral tenure goes back thousands of years.[5] White and his colleagues’ myopic view clearly suggested that the Timbisha did not belong here. Thus began a conscious effort by federal officials to sever the Timbisha’s deep attachment to this particular landscape.
Historically, only one homestead claim by a Native American existed within the monument prior to its founding. The claim belonged to the relatives of Hungry Bill, a Timbisha Shoshone who filed in 1907 on acreage in Johnson Canyon but failed to receive his patent upon death in 1919. Bill’s heirs eventually secured the 160-acre allotment by the late 1920s.[6] By 1936, complications arose when another Timbisha named Robert Thompson filed a homesteading claim at Warm Springs on land that his family had farmed since the 1880s. Like Hungry Bill’s claim, the holding was located on the eastern slope of the Panamint Range. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) worked to secure the property for Thompson from a group of self-serving miners leasing it from him for their mining operation. The miners contested Thompson’s right to ownership with the intent to take control of the claim.
Reacting to the Thompson case, White commented, “I do not believe that these Indians should be allowed to patent the springs which are of the greatest importance for public use and for monument development.” Thompson did receive his patent but no other Timbisha man (or woman) would do so afterward. By the 1950s, the combined acreage of Hungry Bill’s and Thompson’s allotments was sold back to the federal government with BIA support.[7]
Notably, several early-twentieth-century newspaper articles shared the popular account of “Panamint George” Hanson, a Timbisha Shoshone born in Death Valley in 1841, who as a young boy witnessed the forlorn Jayhawker party struggling across the desiccated playa at Furnace Creek near where his family’s winter village was located.[8] Growing up, I was led to believe that the ’49ers existed in some kind of cultural vacuum—as if they were the first humans to gaze upon what they consequently regarded, because of their adverse experience, as “Death Valley.” My middle school history lesson did not include the memoir of a ’49er corroborating Hansen’s account describing a “big Indian camp” in the vicinity of Furnace Creek.[9] I wonder what went through George’s mind as he watched the emigrants in bewilderment burn their wagons and slaughter their oxen as their gold driven lust turned into a survival-of-the-fittest nightmare?
Other early records documented Death Valley Indian settlements, including an 1891 report of a government expedition, stating that “Panamint” Indians (the name given to the Timbisha at the time) had been long cultivating “acres of corn, potatoes, squashes and melons in the southern end of the Death Valley,” confirming public documentation of Timbisha occupation within the valley prior to 1900.[10]
White’s previous comment clearly references the 1916 National Park Service Organic Act mandate promoting public use of the country’s national park resources in a manner that would “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” He and other agency officials were concerned that the Timbisha would require federal assistance down the line—an issue that the agency was not prepared to address or even fiscally take on. Visiting tourists naively described the Timbisha as “destitute” in their “squalid” village adjacent to Furnace Creek, which only made matters only worse for monument officials. However, some humanitarian-minded individuals in the NPS and the BIA came together to lay the groundwork to “improve” the lives of the resident Timbisha through an official memorandum agreement, “Establishing a Colony of Indians on the Death Valley National Monument,” signed on May 23, 1936.
The first improvement was the relocation of the Indians to an out-of-view forty-acre sandy tract. With $5,000 provided by the BIA, a collection of eleven austere adobe houses were built in 1938. None of the structures had electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, heating or cooling.[11] A nominal monthly rent of $3 was established for maintenance but was not collected by NPS rangers, so repairs were never completed over the years that they had stood. Employment within the monument was not offered to Timbisha men, so most of them left in order to find work elsewhere to support their families. A laundry and trading post was constructed, providing the only local jobs available for the remaining Timbisha. For several years, Timbisha women were essentially put on display while they created and sold native crafts at this trading post; however, this arrangement was short-lived.[12]
The BIA had urged that the colony be funded to allow the designated landholding to eventually be turned into an Indian trust territory. Doing so would provide a way for the Timbisha to gain recognition under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Unfortunately, the BIA’s plan was shortsighted in that only an act of Congress could transfer public land out of a national monument. This failed effort left the Timbisha without a sovereign homeland. The federal government continued to treat them as wards of the state because, without a land base, they could not obtain official standing. Consequently, the Timbisha were sadly viewed as “squatters” in their own homeland well into the latter part of the twentieth century.
By the mid-1950s, Furnace Creek’s Indian Village was in a deplorable state. Several of the adobes were now falling down even though families continued to occupy what was left of the structures. Rather than repairing them, the NPS (which was actively eliminating NPS inholdings wherever possible) with the approval of the BIA (which was under pressure from Congress at the time to “get out of the Indian business”) decided to eliminate the community through a planned administrative policy that would annul the previous 1936 memorandum of understanding.
Referred to as the “Death Valley Village Indian Housing Policy,” this program adopted in 1957 gave implicit permission for NPS officials to destroy homes that appeared abandoned while disallowing any repairs on occupied homes without NPS approval. The policy was particularly cruel in that the NPS administration was well aware that the Timbisha undertook annual trips to the high country during the extreme summer months, just as their ancestors had done so before them. Homes vacated for any period of time would be targeted for destruction.
Incoming DVNM superintendent Fred W. Binnewies ordered five of the “unoccupied” partially collapsed homes to be hosed down with water which, in turn, quickly disintegrated the structures due to their earthen composition.[13]
This act completely demoralized Timbisha onlookers, including Pauline Esteves, 92, who was in her early thirties at the time. As a child, Esteves had witnessed three separate forced relocations of her people’s village to increasingly less desirable locations around Furnace Creek. Out of fear of having all of the homes destroyed—most likely leading to their forced eviction—Esteves’ mother, Rosie, and four of her sisters collectively refused to pay the special-use permit fee and remained within their homes in defiance of the NPS’s officials. Some years later, monument officials would halt the proposed eviction plan, anticipating that the remaining occupants would abandon the village once these women passed away.[14] The officials were foolishly unaware that younger, irrepressible tribal members such as Pauline Esteves would continue their fight.
With the assistance of California Indian Legal Services and after years of persistent activism by Pauline Esteves and other tribal members, the Timbisha Shoshone gained federal recognition as a sovereign tribal entity in 1983. However, they continued to be a landless tribe. This issue would become the community’s top priority when it had escalated into a crisis during the 1990s.
To provide a context, Congress supported a provisional study for trust lands suitable for the Timbisha inside the monument. The study was part of the California Desert Protection Act (CDPA), signed into law by President Clinton on October 31, 1994. The act additionally renamed the monument as Death Valley National Park (DVNP), increasing its holdings by another 1.3 million acres, thus creating the largest U.S. national park with the exception of those in Alaska.
The process to identify appropriate trust lands after the signing of CDPA took a contentious turn between the tribal members and their representatives, the NPS and the Department of the Interior after negotiations failed. Impatient with the unproductive dialog between parties, Timbisha Shoshone representatives struck up a partnership with the Alliance to Protect Native Rights in National Parks and organized about seventy-five protesters including several Timbisha elders along with Indians from neighboring tribes, plus representatives from four environmental groups including Greenpeace. The group assembled early morning on Memorial Day 1996 near the village entrance at State Route 190, carrying placards stating, THIS IS OUR HOMELAND and CULTURAL RESPECT NOT CULTURAL GENOCIDE.[15] The group walked in solidarity a half-mile toward the Furnace Creek visitor center in near sweltering heat, aided by water cooling stations along the route. Their presence stopped passersby traveling along the S.R. 190 who became curious about the commotion that had sparked international news coverage.
Considered a success, the protest, in part, brought about a restructured and more inclusive “government-to-government” dialogue between all parties involved. This led to the eventual signing of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act by President Clinton in 2000 that turned a global spotlight on the tribe’s sixty-five-year struggle to secure a permanent land base within their ancestral homeland. The act transferred 7,753.99 acres to the tribe, including a 313.99-acre parcel at Furnace Creek, with the remaining acreage as three noncontiguous parcels outside DVNP.[16] It additionally specified “designated special use areas in which tribal members are authorized to pursue low-impact, ecologically sustainable, traditional practices under a management plan mutually agreed upon by the Tribe and the NPS.”[17]
The act does allow modest commercial development, including a visitor center and gift shop, plus a “small-to-moderate” desert inn, but prohibits any future Indian gaming within trust lands inside park boundaries.[18] Special-use Areas include seasonal camps at Wildrose and Hunter Mountain, plus a “mesquite use area” near the Furnace Creek village allows tribal members to continue traditional mesquite-harvesting practices within DVNP under a cooperative management plan between the tribe and the NPS. Shortly after the act was passed, the acting park superintendent had the subheading, “Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone” added to the park’s entry signage—a modest, but extremely important gesture for the tribe.
This far-reaching policy shift allowing the Timbisha Shoshone to exist permanently within one of our nation’s national parks sets a precedent affirming Native peoples’ land rights within our shared public lands and confirms their legitimate and continued role as managers and stewards of our most valued wild spaces.
Today thirty-five to forty Timbisha live year-round at their homeland within DVNP, although their tribal membership numbers top 400 regionally. Contemporary Timbisha will continue to face uphill challenges including collective management disagreements among their tribal membership to a shortage of younger tribal members willing to learn and continue traditional practices. Although the Timbisha have shown their persistence and resilience in one of the planet’s most harsh environments, climate change will affect their ability to thrive within their ancestral homeland well into the future.
The author consulted with Timbisha tribal elders Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham for this story. This article is co-published with KCET Artbound. Visit Artbound’s Mojave Project page here.
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FOOTNOTES (click to open/close)
[1]The Timbisha Shoshone were one of the few groups of western Indians to have “escaped the clutches of reservation life” in the early twentieth century.
[2] Pauline Esteves, preface to the Draft Secretarial Report to Congress, April 1999 in Theodore Catton, To Make a Better Nation: An Administrative History of the Timbisha Homeland Act, Report Prepared Under Cooperative Agreement with Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit for Death Valley National Park, October 2009. http://npshistory.com/publications/deva/better_nation.pdf.
[3] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 19.
[4] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 23.
[5] For further reading see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69-90.
[6] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 23.
[7] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 30.
[8] Steven J. Crum, “Pretending They Didn’t Exist: The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe of Death Valley, California and Death Valley National Monument,” Southern California Quarterly 84, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2002): 225.
[9] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 20.
[10] The author suspects that this is a reference to either Hungry Bill’s or Thompson’s allotment, as they were both known to be farming in this same area. Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 21.
[11] Timbisha Village did not receive electricity until the mid- to late-1970s. Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 33.
[12] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 29.
[13] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 29.
[14] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 30.
[15] Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 5.
[16] The three additional parcels are located at Scotty’s Junction, Death Valley Junction and Lida, Nevada.
[17] Bill Text 106th Congress (1999-2000) S.2102.ENR. Section 4. Definitions. (a).
[18] Barbara Durham, personal communication with the author, June 23, 2016: “A faction of the Tribe chose to move our Administrative office to Bishop. The Tribal Council is proposing a Timbisha Shoshone casino outside our sovereign land bases in Ridgecrest, California.”