NEVADA VIEWS: Stop the Thacker Pass mine

Alongside other traditional members of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe and our sister tribes, I have been vocal and active in the fight against the Thacker Pass lithium mine due to the destruction it will bring and the harm it will leave behind for our people and our way of life.

For us, the mine is a desecration of our sacred site, Peehee Mu’huh — a place where our ancestors lived, hunted, gathered, sang, danced and died when they were massacred by U.S. Army soldiers in 1865. In modern day, it is a place where we go to gather our medicines, which we credit with curing many of our members of COVID during the pandemic. We hunt for our foods and hold ceremonies in the area.

Or at least, we did.

But now, most of it has been destroyed. Our ancestors were horrifically killed on that land and received no proper burial. Their graves are now a construction site. Think about your own ancestors in place of mine, and you will see how insensitive and wrong this mine is.

During my tenure as a Tribal Council member at Fort McDermitt, we started renegotiation of a previous and one-sided “agreement” made between our community and Lithium Nevada Corp., which was never reviewed by a tribal attorney. We were told time and time again that there was nothing the company could provide other than what was initially agreed to. The initial funds we were promised could not be adjusted for inflation, we could not meet with investors and corporate leaders, we could not retract the letter of support for the mine that the prior council had released … the list of things we couldn’t do went on and on for months.

We found out last year that at the very same time they were stonewalling us, Lithium Nevada was negotiating with the Trump administration. Soon the federal government took a 5 percent ownership stake in mine parent company Lithium Americas, and a 5 percent stake in the mine itself. And, just a few weeks ago, congressional Democrats made allegations involving the mine and potential ethical lapses by an Interior Department official.

All through these years of fighting to protect our sacred place, and in the back of my mind, I always knew the government wasn’t “neutral.” It always felt like they were a partner with the mine, striking deals behind closed doors, loaning the company more than $2 billion, criminalizing and surveilling the protesters and figuring out how to undermine opponents like us.

As a native person, this is nothing new to us. We know the U.S. government cannot be trusted. Time and time again they find new ways to colonize our land. Now, the U.S. government is just another business partner with the state of Nevada and the mining industry. Historically, Nevada’s mining industry has been a joint government-corporate project since the first silver miners came to steal our land, under protection from the guns of the U.S. Army, in the 1850s. Nothing has changed.

When I was an elected official for my tribe, the question in the back of my mind would always: How should we respond to these threats to our traditional lands? I made governmental decisions based on my teachings from my elders and basic historical knowledge. We should never become business partners with the colonizers. Of course, that will make you money, but it will also hollow out our traditions.

Our medicines will diminish. The destruction of the land will harm the animals that live and breed in the area and our ability to hunt. We then must ask: What use are hunting skills when the animals are no longer in the area? How can we do ceremony when our sacred sites are taken away? As native people, these things are important to our way of life, how we move in life and how we are required to teach our children about survival. Basic sustenance is implied with all these teachings. Those that do not understand the way of life are taking it away for greed. I am positive that our ancestors would find this unconscionable and, therefore, how can I live knowing this? I cannot. When will the world see that money cannot buy generations of ancestral knowledge?

How should we respond to these threats to our traditional lands? By becoming business partners with the colonizers? Some people argue that the answer to these conflicts is to make sure the wealth generated from mining is shared. Our sister tribe and our close relatives, the Shoshone-Paiute Tribe of Duck Valley, recently signed a profit-sharing agreement with gold mining company Integra Resources. This is becoming more common. But it’s not justice.

Our tribe doesn’t have money to pay lawyers and experts to help us understand and negotiate these agreements, and we don’t have the political power to fully stop projects to protect what is sacred to us — and that means we usually must take whatever they offer us. Like my friend the late Reno-Sparks Indian Colony Chairman Arlan Melendez said, “They take advantage of our poverty.” His profound words are mirrored in the “community benefits agreement” my tribe has signed with Lithium Nevada.

Our ancestors fought and died to defend these lands. It is a slap in the face to be forced to take blood money from these companies and to see the government that supposedly represents all of us making deals to get in on the profits.

We want our land back, the protection of our sacred sites and non-human relatives and respect as sovereign nations, because we have always been here and we are still here.

Shelley Harjo is a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, born and raised on the reservation. She currently lives in Reno.