As tribal elders, we write this out of exhaustion and frustration.
Federal officials are not done targeting Bahsahwahbee as an industrial zone, continuing a decades-long trend that Western Shoshone and Goshute tribes are actively trying to upend.
The Bureau of Land Management’s recently released Western Solar Plan, which opens up and likely fast-tracks approval for solar development on millions of acres across the west, tactfully targets our sacred gathering area and massacre site in Spring Valley as “available for development.”
The effort by BLM comes as the tribes actively work to designate a 25,000-acre National Monument managed by the National Park Service, allowing the site to be preserved and commemorated by the agency known as “America’s storyteller.”
For years, the tribes have engaged with federal officials and the White House to designate the monument near Great Basin National Park.
The question we have is: What’s behind BLM’s attempt to scrape Bahsahwahbee into a solar zone that would radically transform the physical and spiritual nature of the landscape?
In the Western Solar Plan, BLM identified that “traditional cultural properties and Native American sacred sites” are “eligible” for exclusion from utility scale solar development. In 2017, Bahsahwahbee was listed as a traditional cultural property in the National Register of Historic Places, approved by the National Park Service. But for such a site to be eligible for exclusion as a solar development zone, it would have to be “recognized by the BLM.”
So why was Bahsahwahbee not recognized? Do our people not deserve recognition and respect?
The BLM’s blueprint for solar development across the western United States amounts to a proposed 31 million acres of industrial development that includes Native American sacred lands, federally and state protected species’ habitats, culturally significant springs and water-dependent systems, and hot spots for biodiversity and sensitive species.
Of the nearly 12 million acres proposed for solar development by the BLM in Nevada, about 7,000 are in the heart of Bahsahwahbee National Monument proposal, an area that Senator Cortez Masto’s landmark legislation (S.4828) rightly called “a nationally significant cultural and natural landscape.”
During the past 50 years, this ancient church and mass graveyard has been given consideration by BLM and other federal entities to be part of a missile transportation tract, an oil and gas development zone, and an energy development corridor that now includes fast-tracked solar. But lest we forget: The BLM approved the absolute destruction of Bahsahwahbee when it approved a Right of Way for the illegal and immoral Las Vegas Pipeline proposal that the tribes and GBWN ultimately defeated in court.
Our ancestors were massacred at Bahsahwahbee. It is unconscionable that the site would be considered by the federal government as a development zone instead of a place to be preserved and commemorated. The federal government doesn’t propose developments in other cemeteries or seek to bulldoze other peoples’ churches. In fact, graves and churches are generally protected under federal and state laws. But for the resting place of our ancestors, we have to wonder why it’s ok?
So, why the continued attempts by BLM to develop over the incredible history, culture, and a place we love? This is especially bizarre when for years three Tribal Nations have been working to designate their hallowed grounds as a National Monument to be managed by the National Park Service – the federal agency with a mandated historic preservation mission.
Senator Cortez Masto’s bill, introduced to the Congress in July, even called for protection, education, and interpretation of the site. It didn’t call for it to be a solar development zone.
We have worked for years to educate non-native folks about our sacred place. A big list of entities has called for Bahsahwahbee and the swamp cedars to be protected, preserved, and commemorated alongside Senator Cortez Masto and Senator Jacky Rosen: the Nevada State Legislature, the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada, the National Congress of American Indians, environmental justice groups, private businesses, and even renewable energy companies.
If solar and wind companies are calling for Bahsahwahbee to be preserved and commemorated within the National Park System, why can’t BLM?
The best thing BLM can do is end this saga by working with Indigenous leaders to enact the vision of the people who were on the land long before the United States government.
Please act for Bahsahwahbee and sign the tribes’ petition in support of the monument proposal and read the latest news on this matter in the Nevada Current and the Review Journal.
Thank you for your support.
Delaine and Rick Spilsbury