fire management techniques—had to be factored into assessments of what had constituted the ecosystems before Euro-American arrival. That is to say, these new frameworks and voices transformed nothing less than history, nature, and culture in far-reaching ways.
For me there was tremendous hope in the reemergence of people grounded in something other than the Judeo-Christian and European worldviews, who had lived in places for millennia without, for the most part, devastating them. The deep ties some had to the old ways and places seemed to me to provide crucial capacities to navigate the future (which I would see in full power with the Zapatistas of southern Mexico starting in 1994 and in the powerful presence of indigenous people in the twenty-first-century climate movement). The Native North American creation myths in which the world was never perfect, never fallen, and never finished being created shone a clear light on the problems with Genesis and the Judeo-Christian preoccupations with perfection and purity and the fall from grace. In those years I’d also been working with a Native California artist, Lewis DeSoto, whose installations and landscapes and ways of thinking about place and the sacred also showed me new perspectives and possibilities.
In 1990 I met environmental organizer Bob Fulkerson, a fifth-generation Nevadan, and he invited me to join some other Nevadans and journey farther into the state. It was on that short road trip that I grasped how extensive and destructive the military infrastructure was throughout the West, got a sense of these intrepid, resourceful, devoted Westerners dedicated to their rural and remote places along with a desire to join them and a sense that I had been looking for them since childhood. We stayed in touch, and Bob urged me to show up for the Western Shoshone sisters Mary and Carrie Dann’s last day in court, in Reno, Nevada, in late spring of 1991. I did so. Their troubles had begun in 1973, when a federal agent asked Mary why she wasn’t paying grazing fees on her cows. She told him that it wasn’t federal land, and she was right that the treaty the Western Shoshone signed in 1863 did not cede their territory. The Danns pushed their claim all the way to the Supreme Court. They lost only because in the course of their case, the government invented a date that it had taken the land in the 1870s, a date that described no actual event, and decided it could compensate the tribe for the land in 1872 prices without interest. The traditionalists, catalyzed by the Danns, refused to accept the payment.
After the court case ended, Bob introduced me to Western Shoshone environmental organizer Virginia Sanchez, and she asked me to write an overarching history of Western Shoshone land rights for a small environmental publication. I took the assignment eagerly, and began it by spending several days in the archives of the University of Nevada in Reno. There I sat in a straight chair spooling through the microfilm of the CIA—the Commission on Indian Affairs that preceded the Bureau of Indian Affairs—reading, printing out, and taking notes on the reports of field officers in Nevada in the 1860s and 1870s. The reels of microfilm were scored with long horizontal scratches, and the letters were all written in beautiful copperplate handwriting that was hard to decipher, but what they meant became increasingly clear.
The neatness of the words unfurling in arcs and curves along hand-ruled pages suggested a kind of orderliness and propriety reaffirmed by the elaborate politeness in the salutations and the signoffs in these letters about genocide. About how to push the Native people out of the way as whites flooded west and subjugate them and let their resources be pillaged, how to contain them and give them some handouts as their homelands were so degraded that food sources vanished. We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizably monstrous, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time, trained in what to feel and think and notice and what not to. The men who wrote these reports seemed like earnest bureaucrats, sometimes sympathetic to the plight of the people they were helping to exterminate, always convinced of their own decency. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.
Somewhat relieved of mine, I became a member of the Western Shoshone Defense Project when it was created the next spring