To make a better nation: An administrative history of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act
Catton T. 2009. To make a better nation: An administrative history of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act. Park Administrative Histories. Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, National Park Service
As a new nation, the United States took virtually all of the ancestral lands of our Native American predecessors leaving them with little foundation for their own distinct cultures to survive. As a visionary nation, the United States invented National Parks so that America’s most evocative places could be preserved forever. Often those parks, and the lands most important to Native Americans, are one and the same. Such is the case in the Death Valley area where much of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland and Death Valley National park not only coincide physically but are highly valued by the Tribe, the National Park Service, and the American public. In December 2000, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act, which transferred into trust 7,753.99 acres of land for the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe. The lands included 313.99 acres at Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park together with six other noncontiguous parcels located outside the national park in California and Nevada. In addition, the act 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 National Park Service. Administrative history reports serve as management tools and a way to preserve institutional memory for current and future managers. They also serve to improve agencies’ understanding of what they have done right and wrong in the past. The story of how that National Park Service and the Tribe mutually found their way out of their historic impasse and created a new cooperative relationship is instructive in both the negative and positive sense, for National Park Service officials and tribal leaders were by turns inflexible, frustrated, innovative, and successful in steering their way through this process. This administrative history is a formal account of the story behind the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Catton, Theodore
- Date of Issue
- 2009-10
- Publisher
- Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, National Park Service
- Units
- DEVA , HIST
- Keywords
- Bureau Of Land Management, Congress, Cultural Resources, Death Valley, ehistory, History, Indigenous People, Preservation, Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act