The survey results also indicate that the program contributed to the alumni’s efforts by providing skills, knowledge, and confidence as well as confirming and shaping values and career goals. Blending hands-on and classroom education on a wide variety of food systems topics, combined with the Apprenticeship’s residential structure, appears to play a major role in these outcomes. THE past several years of natural resource development in the western United States have seen increased interaction between anthropologists and resident Native American groups. Nowhere has this been more evident than in California ; however, similar events have begun to unfold in Nevada in the 1980s. To date, few anthropologists operating in the development field appreciate the full extent of concems of the Nevada Indian groups, their recent gains in reasserting control over traditional resources, or even who they are. The present paper identifies the network of Indian communities spread across the state and attempts to demonstrate how many of the expressed concerns are deep-seated in Indian-white relations extending back over 150 years. Not fully considered below are cultural persistence factors involving regious beliefs, cermonial activities and many aspects of social organization , and the effects of resource conflicts on belief systems . Conflict over the control and use of natural resources in Nevada has proceeded through several levels of intensification. It began indirectly in the early 1800s when mounted Indian groups from California and the Columbia Plateau incorporated northern Nevada into alargetrade network . Ute and Navajo slaving raids were also taking place at this time at the other end of the State .
The later 1800s witnessed the statewide loss of lands and resources to mining and ranching interests and efforts to reserve some resources for use by the surviving Indian peoples. Most recently,vertical grow system the principal conflicts have been associated with the planning of massive energy systems and large-scale mhitary projects . Due to the pervasive role of the Federal govemment in the management of Nevada’s natural resources today , Indian-white relations may be frequently translated into Indian-U. S. Government relations in regard to many issues. On the other hand, because the Federal govemment does control such an overwhelming majority of Nevada’s resources, the Indian tribal governments are placed in competition against the State of Nevada for control of the balance of the resources. The following paper describes the loss in land base, the depletion of resources and the decrease of access to them experienced by the Indian peoples of Nevada and their attempts to reestablish rights to these resources . As in pre-contact time. Great Basin Indians continue to have in small groups scattered throughout the state, many on numerous Federally recognized reservations and colonies . Ties to ancestral lands have thus persisted, unbroken in time, and certain traditional practices and values are sthl key components in the maintenance of cultural integrity and social cohesion . The reservations and colonies are presently experiencing a gradual increase in growth and economic diversification. At the heart of this trend is the widespread desire for economic self-sufficiency and independence from the U. S. govemment. The form of Indiandected economic development varies to some degree, ranging from Yomba Shoshone cattle ranching to Washo industrial parks, Moapa Paiute farming and Pyramid Lake Paiute fisheries. However varied, attempts at expanding tribal lands, establishing water rights and protecting certain food resources are central to most of these efforts. These interrelated areas of contention are described in the following sections. From the 1820s to 1858, loss of natural resources and access to favored camping areas was concentrated in the immediate vicinity of two new transportation routes across northem and southern Nevada.
The traffic along these routes consisted of traders, trappers, explorers, slavers, emigrants and, in the south, Mormon colonists . By the end of the 1840s, a number of stations were established in the eastern flanks of the Sierras where emigrants could rest and graze livestock while waiting for good trans-Sierran travel conditions . Envhonmental deterioration was primarhy due to hunting and trappmg by the intruders and grazing and trampImg by theh mounts, pack animals, and livestock . By 1829, the beaver population was decimated and by 1845 emigrant diaries noted the general dechne of game and grasslands along the trahs. The loss of beaver not only took away a source of meat and clothing, but also disrupted hydrologic patterns affecting fish populations . A common response of native populations to these conditions during the first half of the 19th century was to withdraw from the routes and campsites frequented by the intruders . There were also, however, more vigorous responses, notably by elements of the Northern Paiute, who formed mounted raiding bands apparently operating out of eastern Oregon, and preying upon wagon trains in northwestern Nevada . In the south, by the early 1850s, following the long, devastating period of slave raids. Southern Paiute were becoming field laborers for Mormon colonists. A Mormon mission was established in Las Vegas Vahey in 1855 and by 1857 cooperative farming villages were located in key oases, such as the Virgin Valley. During this period many Southern Paiute were forced to abandon their horticultural fields and rely more completely on a hunting and gathering way-of-life . Many native groups in the vast south-central section of the state, yet to be directly exposed to these intrusions or to suffer the loss of land and degradation of resources, continued to follow the traditional seasonal cycle of movement . Discovery m the late 1850s of the famed Comstock Lode in western Nevada and of silver at Potosi Mountain in southern Nevada introduced a new era of more intensive resource conflict.
The most devastating effects of the northem discoveries were felt in the Washo territory , where the new town of Virginia City attracted thousands of people, and where large-scale mining soon resulted in the loss of land, and in serious conflicts over water as well as in the disappearance of game, logging of pinyon groves, and depletion of fish in the valleys. Mining led to the deterioration of streams, the spread of tailings over productive gathering areas and extensive cutting of pinyon-juniper woodlands for charcoal production, mine timbers, posts and fuel . Previously fertile seed areas were plowed to raise farm products and the important aboriginal fishery at Lake Tahoe was commercially exploited. Commercial fishing began at Tahoe in 1859 and by the 1880s, tons of trout were taken annually . Mining and associated ranching activities spread rapidly outward to other regions of Nevada in the 1860s, quickly disrupting traditional lifestyles on a much broader basis . Around Austin m the Reese River Valley of central Nevada, native grasses, reported abundant in 1859, were being heavily grazed by 1862 . Silver ore discoveries at Mt. Irish in 1865 and Pioche in 1868 led to the establishment of Panaca as a supply center for southem Nevada . Finally, the completion of the transcontinental railroad across northern Nevada in 1869 greatly expanded the markets available to Nevada ranchers, and thus encouraged the extension of large-scale livestock grazing into the “empty” lands outside the immediate vicinity of the mining communities. During this period of white expansion,cultivo frambuesa most lands claimed by ranchers under the Federal Homestead Act were choice grassy meadows watered by springs. However, since much of Nevada was unsurveyed, the homestead laws did not immediately apply and, in many areas, settlers could fence large areas and live on the land for years without holding title or any other form of legal consent by Congress . By the 1880s, huge herds grazed in northern Humboldt and Elko counties destroying native shrubs and grasses that were economically important to the Shoshone and Paiute. Major sunflower seed areas in southern Nevada were similarly eradicated . As the mining and ranching interests expanded, the Indian peoples around the state responded in large part by forming settlements on the outskirts of mining camps, railroad towns and farming communities or by attaching themselves to particular ranches . As early as 1862, there was widespread economic dislocation . The traditional seasonal economic round, disrupted in many areas by rangel and fencing , resource depletion , and the introduction of privaty property rights, was abandoned, or at best greatly modified.
Men hauled and chopped fh-ewood, sold pine nuts and fish, hauled water, dug irrigation ditches, worked as loggers, plowed fields, bounty hunted for rabbits, or commercially hunted large game, while women worked as laundresses, maids, and kitchen helpers. The production and use of most traditional technological items had essentially ceased by 1880 . The archaeological record has yielded additional information about 19th century aboriginal ties to mining towns and mral ranches . As resource conflicts intensified, so did hosthities. The mounted Northern Paiute bands raided cattle on outlymg ranches in the Pyramid Lake area . Increased depredations by miners in 1858 led to the “Paiute Indian War” which continued for several years . U. S. Army troops established posts in Ruby Valley in Western Shoshone territory in 1858 and at Ft. Churchih in western Nevada in 1860 for the protection of communication and transportation routes across Nevada . In 1863, a Steptoe Valley Shoshone vhlage was razed by troops responding to reported hostilities in the area . Similar violent clashes occurred in southern Nevada near Alamo in 1867 and again in 1875, leading to the abandonment of the Pahranagat Valley by Southern Paiute . Beginning m 1865, the state legislature of the newly formed State of Nevada passed the first in a series of resolutions asking Congress for military aid to thwart Indian “depredations” . Such was the state of Indian-white relations when the first formal attempts were made to resolve the conflicts and to protect the Native Americans from further harm. The nature of these efforts varied about the state and at different times. Many actions left important issues unresolved and they thus form the background for present-day attempt by Indian communities to obtain redress for the long string of injustices suffered by their forebears. Treaties were established with several Shoshone groups across the western United States m 1863. The Ruby Valley Treaty was signed by members of a few north central Nevada Western Shoshone groups , and the Tooele Valley Treaty by members of groups residing on the Nevada-Utah border. The purpose of the treaties was to establish friendly relations between the U. S. government and Western Shoshone, thus ensuring the safety of transportation routes, such as the new Overland Stage and Mah Route, through Shoshone territory. The treaty also allowed for certam forms of development by whites in Shoshone territory , established annual payments to the tribes for 20 years, and promised eventual establishment of reservations within the traditional territories. In subsequent years no payments were provided and the Duck Valley Reservation, not permanently established unth 1877, was located outside traditional Shoshone territory. Attempts to establish reserves in Western Shoshone territory in Ruby Valley in 1859 , the Elko vicinity in 1868 and at Carlin in 1877 proved to be false starts, causing further frustrations over lost lands. For example, a six-mile-square reservation was informahy set aside in Ruby Valley in 1859, but it was never formally withdrawn and by the 1870s it had been abandoned. A later attempt in Western Shoshone territory was initially more successful as it led to the establishment of the Carlin Reservation in 1877. A scant two years later, however, in 1879, Carhn was abolished by Executive Order due to the contesting of land claims by whites in the area . Subsequently, the Government attempted to escape its treaty obligations by encouraging Western Shoshone from as far away as the Reese River Valley in central Nevada to move to the Duck Valley Reservation. However, the great majority of Western Shoshone preferred off-reservationhfe in theh ancestral lands and refused to move . Due largely to the efforts of Indian Agent James Dodge, the Northern Paiute history of land reserves has taken a different course. Two sizable reservations—Pyramid Lake, including over 400,000 acres and Walker River, consisting of approximately 320,000 acres —were formally withdrawn in 1859 and designated as reserves in 1874. Both reserves initially included large natural lakes containing rich fish resources .