Reporting from Indian Country

This article first appeared on Indian Country Today Media Network in July 2016. 

Members 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 at least 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 much dam…

This article was first published on Indian Country Today Media Network in July 2016. For more, see Lost Bones, Damage and Harassment at Ancient Sacred Site, also on ICTMN; two posts below this one, you'll find Eve of Destruction, published on Rural America In These Times.
A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has denied the Te-Moak Band of Western Shoshone’s 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 one-page decision did not detail the court’s reasoning.
Dest…