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Showing posts from July, 2016

Down and Dirty: Destruction Accelerates at Ancient Native Site

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This article appeared in  Indian Country Today Media Network in 2016.  For more on topics like this, see my book,  American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... 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 tha

Gods and Monsters: Bulldozer Rips Into Ancient Shoshone Sacred Site

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This article appeared in Indian Country Today Media Network in 2016.  For more on topics like this, see my book,  American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... Bulldozer plows up an ancient trail, lined with medicinal plants, in a Western Shoshone sacred site. 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