On a crisp and sunny November morning, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation welcomed nearly 400 people onto their land to plant 8,500 trees and shrubs. Steam rose from the Bear River’s hot springs. As volunteers arrived, the tribe’s conservation partners unloaded black plastic trays filled with cuttings of willow, cottonwood, chokecherry and more. Brad Parry, the tribe’s vice chairman, stood in a pickup truck bed and greeted tribal members, environmental activists, college students and church groups. “This is the Bear River Massacre site,” he said, “what we call Wuda Ogwa, or Bear River.”
Here, on Jan. 29, 1863, the U.S. Army murdered an estimated 400 Shoshone people, decimating the Northwestern Band in one of the deadliest massacres of Native people in U.S. history. Afterward, Mormon settlers dispossessed the Shoshone of their land throughout the Intermountain West. Some surviving Northwestern Shoshone went north to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation or east to the Wind River Reservation, but many stayed, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and moved onto land the church claimed in northern Utah. The tribe wasn’t federally recognized until 1987, and it still lacks reservation land.
The settlers diverted water from the Bear River — the Great Salt Lake’s largest tributary — for water-intensive agriculture and livestock. “That was one of the starts of the problem for the Great Salt Lake,” Parry told High Country News. Today, as climate change-induced drought exacerbates the effect of over a century of unsustainable water use, the lake verges on ecological collapse.
In 2018, the tribe purchased roughly 350 acres of its ancestral land at the massacre site, making it the largest area owned by the Northwestern Shoshone. Now, the tribe is restoring the area, estimating that it can return 13,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake annually by shifting vegetation from invasives to native plants, cleaning up creeks and restoring degraded agricultural fields to wetlands.
Today, as climate change-induced drought exacerbates the effect of over a century of unsustainable water use, the lake verges on ecological collapse.
The day after the land was purchased, then-Tribal Chairman Darren Parry, Brad Parry’s cousin, shared plant journals and other cultural information collected by tribal members with scientists at Utah State University. They included illustrations of plants such as serviceberry and wild rose alongside details about their characteristics and cultural and medicinal uses. Darren Parry asked the USU scientists for help restoring the area, and they quickly agreed. Brad Parry, who became project manager, brought on BioWest, an environmental science consulting firm, while conservation nonprofits, the Utah Conservation Corps, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agencies signed on as partners.
Northwestern Shoshone and other tribal members play key roles on conservation and research teams. “It feels good to help another Indigenous community, even if I’m not necessarily a part of that Indigenous community, to have that land restored to what it used to be,” said Aidan Klopfenstein, a member of the Navajo Nation and environmental specialist with BioWest, who guided volunteers during the planting day.
The Northwestern Shoshone’s oral history and knowledge ultimately lead the work. Rios Pacheco, the tribe’s cultural and spiritual advisor, has extensive knowledge of culturally significant plants. Before the volunteers began planting, he offered a blessing. “I come to prepare the land because this land was walked through by people that had to give their life,” he said.
“FOR THOUSANDS of years, this wasn’t a massacre site,” Brad Parry told the crowd last fall. The area — now known as Preston, Idaho, just 10 miles north of the Utah border — was a gathering place where the Northwestern Band lived, celebrated, performed the Warm Dance and connected with other bands of the Shoshone. “By inviting you all out and doing this, we want to recapture that,” Parry said. “We want to make this a place to come again.”
The planting event was the first of its kind since the Northwestern Shoshone reacquired its land. The tribe hopes to plant 300,000 native trees and shrubs, a goal set by BioWest based on the site’s acreage and the survivability of seedlings. To create space for them, the Utah Conservation Corps spent the past three years removing hundreds of thousands of invasive Russian olives, which consume 75 gallons of water per day.
The volunteers dispersed along Beaver Creek — or Battle Creek, as it became known after the massacre — which runs like frothy chocolate milk along the edge of the site until it meets the clearer Bear River. Conservation partners distributed the plant cuttings. Groups of friends, families and colleagues dug into the muddy exposed creek bank and gently placed the twig-like cuttings into the soil.
“It feels good to help another Indigenous community, even if I’m not necessarily a part of that Indigenous community, to have that land restored to what it used to be.”
Meanwhile, Jason Brough, a Northwestern Shoshone tribal member who is pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology, ran between groups of volunteers to make sure that no one dug up important cultural material or human remains. “For a lot of our community members, this is where their ancestors passed on,” Brough said. “We have a responsibility not just to the ancestors, but to the plants and the animals that used to be there and can be there again.”
The willows and cottonwoods will provide habitat and food for wildlife. Nizhonii Begaye (Diné), a USU senior studying ecology, has been working with USU professor Eric LaMalfa to install and monitor wildlife cameras. She has documented deer, birds, bobcats and coyotes, and hopes to see elk and moose return, too.
The native vegetation will also stabilize the creek bank, furthering the tribe’s goal of cleaning up the watershed and restoring wetlands. BioWest is fencing off part of the creek to keep cattle out. USU students led by the nonprofit Sageland Collaborative are building beaver-dam analogs to filter out sediment and agricultural runoff. Once the creek is cleaned up, the tribe will work with Trout Unlimited to reintroduce Bonneville cutthroat trout. Eventually, the creek will be restored to its ancestral braided, meandering path.
“THE BYPRODUCT of what we’re doing should have a huge impact on the Great Salt Lake, which really plays into our whole story,” Darren Parry said. The tribe’s creation story takes place on Antelope Island. Shoshone traded salt from the lake with other tribes, while the deer, rabbits, ducks and plants around the lake provided food and medicine.
Currently, Utah lacks adequate monitoring infrastructure to ensure that downstream farmers don’t take the water the tribe returns to the Bear River. State boundaries also complicate things: Wuda Ogwa is in Idaho. “We’re considered a Utah tribe, but we are trying to teach people that state lines don’t mean anything to us when it comes to our aboriginal territory,” Brad Parry said.
Darren Parry has been outspoken about Indigenous leaders’ exclusion from Great Salt Lake decision-making bodies, but Brad Parry said the situation is improving. The tribe has met with Utah’s lieutenant governor and state agencies who have expressed their determination to get water to the lake. Both Parrys also sit on local watershed councils, which were created by Utah’s Legislature in 2020 to provide a forum for water-policy discussions.
The tribe is also raising millions of dollars to build a cultural interpretive center. Brough hopes to make the center Indigenous-designed, -run and -interpreted. “We don’t want to be just a museum,” Brough said. “We want our perspectives told, even if it’s difficult for people to hear.”
In the meantime, Pacheco said, “You don’t even need a center to be healed. Right now, you’re healing people with the land.”
Brooke Larsen is the Virginia Spencer Davis Fellow for HCN, covering rural communities, agriculture and conservation. She reports from Salt Lake City, Utah. Email her at brooke.larsen@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow her on Instagram @jbrookelarsen or Twitter @JBrookeLarsen.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline LandBack, WaterBack.
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