Part of a series of articles titled Home and Homelands Exhibition: Politics.
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Timbisha Shoshone Demonstration
Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD
Starting in the 1950s, women became the leaders of the Timbisha Shoshone’s fight for federal acknowledgement. For over fifty years, they resisted attempts by the National Park Service to evict them from their ancestral homelands in Death Valley National Park. It was through the political activism of Tribal members and Tribal elders, such as Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham, that President Clinton signed into law the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act in 2000. The act transferred nearly 7,800 acres of land back to the Tribe, including over 300 acres at Furnace Creek. The law made Death Valley the first and only U.S. park to return lands and create an Indian reservation within its boundaries.1
Though the Homeland Act was a pivotal step in tribal sovereignty, Pauline holds a deeper perspective. "The Timbisha people have lived in our Homeland forever and we will live here forever."2 No piece of paper, she explains, could tell her people that their history is in Death Valley. "It's in those mountains, everywhere you look, you'll see us. You can't get rid of us."3
NPS Photo
Timbisha
"The term 'Death Valley' is unfortunate," Pauline stated in a draft report to Congress in 1999.4 The name supposedly originated with a lost party of forty-niners during the California Gold Rush. The name stuck, despite generations of people thriving in the desert landscape.5
However, to the Timbisha Shoshone, this is their home, and it teems with life. They know the valley as timbisha, a word that refers to the red ochre found in the Black Mountains, which the "Old Ones" used for spiritual purposes.6 The Timbisha Shonshone learned to live with the heat rather than in spite of it. Traditionally, they moved with the seasons between mountain and valley, mesquite groves and springs, enjoying the game and harvests each offered.
As non-Indian settlements became more common, the Timbisha Shoshone began to incorporate seasonal wage labor into their way of life. Local industries such as mining began to influence where the Timbisha Shoshone could reside. Then everything changed in 1933 when President Hoover created Death Valley National Monument.7
The "Indian Village"
Born in 1924, Pauline remembers when the men in uniform appeared. Her people believed they were soldiers up to "no good."8 The new monument's first acting superintendent, John White, saw the Timbisha Shoshone as a "problem." Contrary to Timbisha Shoshone beliefs, he did not think they were part of the land and ideally needed to be removed to preserve the landscape. Another "problem" was that the Timbisha Shoshone had never been forced onto a reservation. As a result, they were not officially recognized as a federal tribe and thus lacked federal oversight and assistance.9
These circumstances birthed the "Indian Village" plan. In 1936, as part of New Deal efforts, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the NPS signed an agreement in which the Civilian Conservation Corps built eleven adobe houses that served about sixty Timbisha Shoshone. The village consisted of forty acres near, but out-of-sight, of the park's ranger station where visitors congregated and the upscale Furnace Creek Inn. The houses had no plumbing or electricity and only a single tap provided a water source for the village.10
NPS Collections, Death Valley National Park, Negative np.1877
The houses quickly fell into disrepair without any of the planned maintenance work the NPS had agreed to perform. The NPS also increasingly restricted Timbisha traditional subsistence activities within the monument, forcing many men to leave the village to find wage work. In 1957, the monument superintendent, Fred Binnewies, enacted a new "Indian resident housing policy." The policy supported the systematic destruction of the village homes in hopes of pushing out the Timbisha Shoshone Tribal members still living within the monument. Binnewies ordered rangers to destroy any vacant houses. When the Timbisha Shoshone people left during the hottest months, as they had always done, the rangers hosed down the empty adobe houses to the shock and dismay of village residents.11
Women's Tenacity and Political Activism
Historian Theodore Catton explains that federal officials operated from the mistaken assumption that the Timbisha Shoshone "would move away, die off, or assimilate into the non-Indian population."12 They were not expecting the tenacity and political savvy of the Tribe, especially the women. As men moved in and out of the village, women remained and formed the heart of the resistance. Four women, including Pauline's mother, refused to ever leave, allowing the Timbisha Shoshone to persist in the village.13
NPS Collections. Death Valley National Park Archives, AILO Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act Records, DEVA-02549, DEVA 53416, Box 5, Folder 69. Courtesy Pauline Esteves
Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham continued in the footsteps of these women. When their village was surrounded by barbed wire and guided tours came by to look at them, Barbara explained their reaction was to laugh, get mad, and finally, "put a stop to that."14 Pauline and Barbara skillfully used this strategy – humor, anger, action – as the Tribe shifted its focus to gaining a land base within Timbisha. They realized the first step was gaining federal recognition as a Tribe if they hoped to benefit from a slew of legislation that passed in the 1970s that supported "Indian self-determination."15
In 1983, the Timbisha Shoshone won federal tribal recognition but were not granted a reservation as they hoped. Without a land base, they could not practice their sovereign rights, such as securing their future at Furnace Creek and qualifying for various government grants. Led by Pauline and Barbara, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe continued to fight for a formal reservation through legal action, public awareness campaigns, and lobbying Congress.
A turning point came in the form of the 1994 California Desert Protection Act. The act included a mandate to identify suitable lands for a Timbisha Shoshone reservation through consultation with the Tribe. When negotiations with the NPS broke down in 1996, the Timbisha Shoshone rallied again, launching a protest on Memorial Day 1996. They organized with neighboring tribes and environmental groups like Greenpeace to walk a half mile in the sweltering heat toward the park visitor center. One of the protestors held a sign that read, "Cultural Respect Not Cultural Genocide," an argument they expanded on in front of the United Nations – without a land base in their homeland, their culture would disperse and cease to exist.16
NPS Collections. Death Valley National Park Archives, AILO Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act Records, DEVA-02549, DEVA 53416, Box 5, Folder 69.
The Triumph of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act
The second round of negotiations were far more productive. The NPS returned to the table with a willingness to give up land at Furnace Creek. The end result was the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act, signed into law in 2000. The novel act not only provided the Tribe with a formal reservation within the park, over 300 acres at Furnace Creek, but also over 7,000 noncontiguous acres of land outside the park. Additionally, the act designated special use areas where the Timbisha Shoshone people can pursue traditional gathering practices. Finally, the act allows for modest residential and commercial development at Furnace Creek, including a community center, tribal museum, and desert inn.17
The Timbisha Shoshone people endured despite decades of harassment at the hands of white settlers and the U.S. government. Though they were forced to live within the boundaries of a small village, unable to make any economic developments, or carry on traditional use or sacred practices on their ancestral lands, they remained. Powerful women like Pauline and Barbara were tireless leaders. Through legal action, protest, and negotiation, they reclaimed a permanent homeland within a national park, a homeland they knew had always been theirs.18
In the process, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe forced the park service to live up to the promise of America’s "best idea" by affirming Indigenous land rights within shared public lands. They also built a foundation for the public to reconsider their relationship to national parks. Rather than being places we visit and recreate in, they are Indigenous homelands, whether officially restored or not. As Pauline reminds us, "It's part of life. It's what we live on. It's not a commodity, it's part of us. We are supposed to protect it."19
1 Theodore Catton, To Make a Better Nation: An Administrative History of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act (October 2009), 1-2. Mark Miller, "The Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park Idea: Building toward Accommodation and Acknowledgment at Death Valley National Park, 1933-2000," Journal of the Southwest 50, no.4 (Winter 2008): 438.
2 Pauline Esteves, preface to the Draft Secretarial Report to Congress, April 1999 in Catton, To Make a Better Nation, viii.
3 Pauline Esteves interviewed in "Death Valley: Life Blooms," American Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, aired July 5, 2022.
4 Esteves, preface to the Draft Secretarial Report to Congress.
5 "The Lost '49ers," Death Valley National Park, National Park Service.
6 Esteves, preface to the Draft Secretarial Report to Congress.
7 Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 19-22.
8 Pauline Esteves, interview by Kimberly Selinske, "Pauline Esteves Oral History: Women of Change Oral History Project," Death Valley National Park Archive, October 28, 2021.
9 Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 23-24.
10 Miller, "The Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park Idea," 425.
11 "Statement of Indian Village Policy" and “Death Valley Indian Village Housing Policy,” May 9, 1957, Death Valley National Park Central Files, DEVA-02599 / 001.002.004-002, Timbisha 1998-1, Folder 1 of 2. See also Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 28-29.
12 Ibid., 101.
13 Ibid., 30.
14 Barbara Durham, interview by Kimberly Selinske, "Barbara Durham Oral History: Women of Change Oral History Project," Death Valley National Park Archive, October 27, 2021.
15 For more on the importance of tribal recognition, see Miller, "The Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park Idea," 432-34. See also, "What is a federally recognized tribe?," Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior.
16 Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 5, 35, 44-46, 65-66, 89.
17 Ibid., 89, 91-92.
18 To learn more about life post-Homeland Act, see Margret Grebowicz, "They Lost Their Land to the Park Service. Now They're Losing It to Climate Change," The New Republic, January 9, 2024. See also the epilogue in Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 94-101.
19 Esteves, "Death Valley: Life Blooms."
Last updated: June 11, 2024