Reporting from Indian Country

This article appeared in  Indian Country Today Media Network in July 2016.  M embers of the Battle Mountain Band of Te-Moak Western Shoshone visited the Tosawihi Quarries on June 22 to view and pray over the remains of a doctoring trail that leads into and through the sacred site. The trail, which has been declared eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, is a critical feature of a northern Nevada cultural landscape that the Western Shoshone and other tribes have used for more than 10,000 years. However, construction of a mining-related power line along the doctoring trail is in the process of obliterating it. Starting about two weeks prior to the June 22 visit shown here, a road has been bulldozed over the spiritual pathway, and a long trench has been gouged across the face of a nearby hillside. Battle Mountain Band council member and former chairman Joe Holley said that when tribal members saw what was happening, they were horrified and speechless. “It is so

This article appeared in Indian Country Today Media Network in July 2016.  A bulldozer plows up an ancient trail, lined with medicinal plants, in a sacred site the Western Shoshone and others have used for more than 10,000 years. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has denied the Te-Moak Band of Western Shoshone Indians’ request for an emergency injunction to stop the destruction of an ancient trail in the Tosawihi Quarries, a 10,000-year-old sacred site.  Though a legal appeal and an over-arching lawsuit concerning the entire project are still pending, an international gold-mining consortium’s bulldozer is already at work constructing a power line along the doctoring trail, said the Band’s attorney, Rollie Wilson, of the law firm Fredericks Peebles & Morgan.  The construction equipment was fired up within days of the court’s June 8 order, according to Wilson. The panel’s one-page decision did not detail the court’s reasoning in this matter. Destr