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Non-native readers may be surprised to learn that many of the attitudes and myths portrayed in Ken Burn s documentary The West are still alive and haunting the first people to have called the West home. Our country s Native American Indians still witness the appropriation and destruction of their homelands by moneyed interests. While their trustee (the federal government) sits paralyzed by multi-national corporations who employ all means to achieve their ends.

America s newest National Park, Death Valley, is the latest battleground for a fight being waged between corporations, conservationists, and a band of Indians who have had a National Park created out of land that they and their ancestors inhabited for centuries.

Mining corporations want the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe s land (two miles outside the Park) to employ open pit cyanide heap leach gold mining technologies. If granted their way, Canyon Resources (CYNR) of Boulder, Colorado, will return to the pick and shovel scarred landscapes of their forefathers to finish the job started in the 1800 s--namely displacing American Indians to wrench from the land its last bit of gold.

The Nuclear Power Industry wants the Timbisha Shoshone's land to place the country s first high-level radioactive nuclear waste facility (Yucca Mountain) twenty miles outside the Park s boundaries and on top of the aquifer that supplies the tribe s traditional watering areas.

Finally, the National Park Service and their ubiquitous American Public want the Timbisha Shoshone s land so urbanites can flee the city to their mythical concept of the wild west and temporarily escape the squalor of urban life.

Meanwhile, the Timbisha Shoshone s are asking the US government to recognize their inherent rights as a Native American Indian tribe by establishing a permanent landbase for them in Death Valley National Park. The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe have been federally recognized since 1983 and are without a formal landbase. The National Park Service, however, refuses to relinquish control over any of the 3.2 million acres that comprise Death Valley National Park fearing the precedent such an action may set and based on a strongly held belief that the Park s mandate to provide visitor services that enhance the American public s use and enjoyment of the Park supersedes any responsibility the US government may have to Indian people.

It is in the non-Natives refusal to remember that a culturally rich and diverse group of people, with inherent rights, have lived on this continent centuries before their arrival, that many of the atrocities culminated during the westward expansion continue. Secretary Bruce Babbitt put it best, in an editorial run by the Scripps Howard News Service, when he said, Washington s trust responsibility to Indian tribes was established more than two centuries ago by our nation s Founding Fathers; it was ratified by the states and upheld by the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall in 1832 established a key American legal principle, arguing that Indian Nations had always been considered as distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original native rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil....

If we as a country are to move from ideology and stop the annihilation of this country s first people and their culture, we must begin to follow the principles established by our nation s Founding Fathers and recognize the rights of Native people to live on and control the land that has sustained their way-of-life for centuries.