American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In September 1998 the US Department of Interior reached a comprehensive negotiated agreement with the Timbisha Shoshone tribe in Death Valley, California. It thereby resolved a grievance it had ignored since 1933 when President Herbert Hoover seized the tribe's ancestral lands and created the Death Valley National Monument. At the time of this land seizure, the federal government made no provision for the tribe whose lands these had been for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. Government officials hoped the tribal members would pack up their meager belongings and disappear quietly. To their surprise and frustration, fifty of some 275 people refused to go. For the next sixty-five years, under almost continuous agency pressure to leave, these remaining tribal members lived as virtual squatters on the outskirts of the national park headquarters in Furnace Creek. They clung stubbornly to the hope that they would live to see the day when the federal government would acknowledge the injustice done and restore their tribal homeland.