Inspiring social change through print, spoken word, and live performance.

Somebody's Got To Speak

With these words, Carrie Dann introduced herself to an audience of international human rights activists gathered in Sweden in 1993 to honor her with the International Right Livelihood Award. The Right Livelihood Award is given to "people who have rejected the notion that nothing can be done to halt our global slide toward injustice and destruction." This award is also known as the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize.

Despite the international attention she receives, Carrie Dann is modest. She's lived all of her 60 some years on ancestral lands in Nevada. She was taught in the traditional Western Shoshone ways by her grandmother and didn't learn English until she attended public school at age 6. For the past 40 years, she has been speaking out against the treatment of her people and the land.

In 1991, Carrie Dann founded the Western Shoshone Defense Project, a grassroots organization that works for indigenous peoples' lands rights and environmental sanity. Her work has earned her increasing amounts of attention from governments world wide, yet she still refers to herself as a hard working rancher. This modesty shouldn't be mistaken for meekness, however. I've seen video footage of her shouting in the faces of armed federal agents.

I first heard about Carrie Dann and the Western Shoshone Defense Project a year before I went to Nevada, My friend Greg had been touring with some small punk rock bands with big causes, like State of the Nation and Inside Out - both of whom are affiliated with the Defense Project. While keeping me updated on the tour, Greg unwittingly turned me into a novice expert on the issues surrounding Carrie Dann and the Western Shoshone. Greg loves to tell a good story, especially one that involves exposing injustice. And I'm a sucker for Greg's stories. The only problem is that I eventually reach a point where knowledge becomes a responsibility. I could only listen to Carrie Dann's story for so long before I felt invested. Activism by osmosis I guess.

Or maybe it's more complicated than that. I've been interested in Native Americans since I was a little girl. I grew up in eastern Washington near places like Kennewick, Yakima, and Umatila, I went on field trips to the Whitman Mission and the Oregon Trail. I was surrounded by stories of Indians and the wild west. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them an Indian princess, Barbie, or the president, depending on my mood.

These romantic notions weren't only a product of pop culture. I can't help but think that being raised Mormon has had something to do with it. The Mormon church has always had a complex relationship with Native Americans. The Book of Mormon, the founding text of the Mormon church, is an account of Christ's ministries to the people of the Americas. Perhaps because of this, Mormons have had a high conversion rate among indigenous peoples. Yet along with this conversion comes the expectation that Christian culture is the proper one, In the stories in the The Book of Mormon, the good Indians are the ones who follow a Christian God.

In the 1950's, the Mormon church implemented the Indian Placement Program (IPP) in which Indian children would live with Mormon families during the school year and then go back to the reservations during the summer. A Navajo girl named Joanne lived with my mother's family for two years while she was in junior high. "I think part of it [the IPP] was to teach them American Culture," my mother says. "And the schools were really bad on the reservations back then. I think they're trying to improve things on the reservations themselves nowadays. I just don't think people really realized back then what they were doing." The IPP was abandoned some time in the 70's.

I wonder if any of the complicated attempts by the Mormon church to help Native Americans are prompted by some sense of guilt. Being involved in Native American issues has made me extremely self conscious of my religion and the role it has played in the genocide of indigenous peoples, Mormonism is dependent on the idea of manifest destiny. If Columbus hadn't "discovered" America, the Mormon religion (founded in America in 1830) couldn't exist. Likewise, without westward expansion to Utah, the Mormon church would not have flourished. In 1847, when the Mormons first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, they were essentially the only white people there. The wagon trails they grooved led the way for thousands of settlers. As the church grew the Indians were either converted, killed, or driven out. A common response from my Sunday School teachers regarding any questions about the treatment of native peoples has been, "Sometimes bad things have to happen in order for good things to come about." The underlying assumption is that genocide is justifiable. That Christianity is something better. Needless to say, Carrie Dann does not feet this way.

When you lose your spirituality, when you lose your culture, who are you anyway? You don't know who you are! You're turned into nothingness. Now you've become one of, maybe the "Human Resource." You go out there and slave for others and they give you a little bit of money andyou think you're rich. Rich in what? Rich in material things? That's not life! You've lost everything else.

In the face of such cultural tension, I'm not sure how to evaluate my motives for being interested in Carrie Dann and the Defense Project. But I went to Nevada anyway. Greg and I drove down from Seattle in his grandpa's dusty Dodge Aries K stuffed with a copy machine, reams of paper, and cardboard boxes filled with food and supplies. As soon as we arrived at the Defense Project headquarters, I was issued a permit on which I was asked to indicate my citizenship. Western Shoshone or "other", those were my choices. I checked "other" and wrote down "US." This permit allowed me to "enter, assemble and depart" the Western Shoshone Nation. The fine print at the bottom read: "[This permit] must be carried at all times when within the land use and occupancy area indicated (Dann Band Area). Upon request, this permit must be made available to an officer of the Western Shoshone National Council and may be revoked at any time by the officer or the Western Shoshone National Council."

It was clear from the moment I entered Western Shoshone land that I was a guest. A welcome guest, but still a guest. The permit I was issued also exempted me from certain federal laws. In the event of trouble, I could hide under the skirts of the Western Shoshone Nation and claim that I was acting under the protection of their laws. I'm really not sure how much this would have helped me if we'd been caught while trespassing to photograph activity at the Cortez Gold Mine or if we'd been arrested during a protest. I know little about the laws of the US in relation to myself And even less about the laws concerning a nation of people living within the US boundaries.

We are not citizens. We do not even have the rights of basic citizens. What happened to the constitutional right to liberty, property, where Indians are concerned? What happened to the Human Rights of the Indigenous People of the Americas? How can the US talk about other nations without even a glance at its own treatment of the Indigenous People?

Until I held that permit in my hand, I hadn't realized that such complex international relations existed within the US. I thought everyone lived under the same major government, Sure there are smaller tribal governments on reservations which answer to the US federal government, but the Danns do not live on a reservation. The Western Shoshone are a tribe of people living in Nevada who have existed independent of the US government for thousands of years, and as far as many of them are concerned, they continue to be independent. By refusing to acknowledge and respect this independence, the US government is continuing its tradition of warfare against native peoples.

The United States and multi-corporations under any name--of law or policy, looking for gold, uranium, coal, oil, and so on, have intruded on the land of our indigenous people, and go on in the same way as they always have. Their methods have changed little since they used outright slaughter or someform of violent assault, germ warfare, deliberately introducing smallpox, etc., and now by legal manipulations [they are] separating our people from our aboriginal land where we have our homes.

Carrie is not exaggerating. The ancestral lands surrounding her ranch have been raided 3 times in the past 10 years by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). During the most recent raid, on November 19, 1992, over 30 armed federal agents invaded this area in an attempt to round up livestock that they claimed was grazing illegally on public lands. All roads in and out of the area were blocked by federal vehicles. Guns were drawn and pointed at Clifford Dann, Carrie's brother, while he poured gasoline on himself and threatened to light himself on fire to protest the raid. "By taking away our livestock you're taking away our livelihood and our lives," he yelled at them. He tried to show the federal agents that they were killing him as surely as the fire would.

Instead, he ended up face down on the ground being kicked and doused with fire extinguishers as Carrie hollered at the agents, You cannot do this to this man. You let him go. Officers held her back as they arrested her brother for threatening the lives of federal officers. All this happened just a few days before Thanksgiving - an American national holiday. I suppose the BLM and others had a feast of joy, in one of their final acts of ethnic cleansing of our land, of the Indian People.

Stories like this aren't new. And maybe that's part of the problem. The United States government has been treating indigenous people like this for hundreds of years. The "Indian problem" is a part of American history and therefore we tend to think of it as something in the past. All the major battles were fought long ago; America has won and there's nothing left to do. People should deal with it and move on. This is an attitude that Carrie must constantly fight against. After hearing Carrie speak, a student in the freshman composition class I teach wrote, "I think that if you want to survive in today's society you need to abide by the rules that are placed and not dwell so much on the past. I can see why the Danns are so mad because the government has dealt with them so poorly, but I think the Danns are being too stubborn. "

Carrie disagrees. Our indigenous situation now, today, is such that there is no way to forget or ignore the past To do so would be to ignore the current situation. She cannot go along with the rules because to do so would be to commit suicide. Her way of life would be dead for her and for the future generations. My grandmother always told us, you have to look out for the unborn that aren't even here yet. Somebody's got to speak up for them. So she refuses to remain silent. It's my opinion, and I think history will show, that only dictators and tyrants have and will take control of land that does not belong to them.

The land surrounding the Dann ranch has a long history of lies and broken rules. In 1863 the Western Shoshone signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley in which they agreed to cease war against the US and allow the construction of railroads, telegraph lines, mines and ranches. This treaty is unique however, because nothing in the treaty gave, ceded, sold, or traded land to the US The Western Shoshone remained a sovereign nation and caretakers of the land.

As soon as the treaty was signed, it was violated. The US government sold huge tracts of land to the railroads, and, as was often the case, rations promised as compensation for destroyed land were never delivered. In 1934, the first tiny reservations were created allowing the US government to install tribal leaders who were more answerable to the federal government than their own people. This act also broke the Western Shoshone Nation into a series of smaller units such as the Yomba, the Temoak Bands, and the Duckwater Shoshone tribe. Many traditional people still refuse to recognize this system and it continues to be a source of divisiveness with the Western Shoshone people.

Tribal councils are known as puppets of the American government. A handful of people were picked and trained by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. They were indoctrinated in the values and morals of egotistic, racist, white maIe Americans.

The fact that the Western Shoshone have never ceded or sold their land to the US government has been Carrie Dann's hard and fast argument for allowing her animals to graze freely on the land surrounding her family's ranch.

I have no right to sell this earth. It belongs to the children-- to life other than myself. The Western Shoshone have never given our land to the United States. It's still Western Shoshone land. That's why we have a resistance camp, because we want others to look at what has happened to our people. In the April 10, 1992 round-up of cattle, I asked the BLM or others to furnish me with the documents of the Western Shoshone land transfer to the US. If there were no records of transfer of land - treaty land - then we, the Traditional Western Shoshone and the Western Shoshone National Council would continue our resistance.

In 1962, almost 100 years after the Treaty of Ruby Valley, no one could produce this bill of transfer. The Indian Claims Commission (ICC) concluded that it was "Unable to discover any formal extinguishment" of the Western Shoshone land title. However, it concluded that the lands had been taken at some point in history. Obviously the land couldn't still belong to the Indians in 1962. It had been conquered decades ago. Therefore, the ICC concluded that by gradual encroachment, the title to the land had been extinguished. The ICC arbitrarily picked July 1, 1872 for the "date of taking", even though at this date there were virtually no white people in the area. In 1979, the ICC determined the land value in 1872 (15 cents an acre) and used this amount to determine adequate compensation, 26 million dollars. The ICC lawyers then opened a bank account on behalf of the Western Shoshone Nation (because they refused to accept payment for land that hadn't been sold) and deposited the money in a bank account. The money is still sitting in that bank account earning interest. It has never been touched by the Western Shoshone.

The word 'taking' is repulsive to me. In my lifetime I have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Guff War all in the name of democracy. Yet we, the Indigenous People, do not have the right to be treated as humans, let alone have constitutional rights in the US, which is the alleged protector of human rights ... I wonder what carpet the US government swept these rights under when it came to us? What happened to the US Constitution that read: "Treaties are the supreme law of the land?"

This discrepancy has made Carrie Dann a regular in the court system. In 1974, the BLM charged Carrie and Marie Dann with trespassing because they were grazing livestock on public lands without a permit. The Dann sisters and the Western Shoshone National Council concluded that the BLM has no jurisdiction over traditional lands and refused to pay for a permit. After all, it's their land. Thus began a series of court cases in which the Danns were continually thwarted. After much complex legal maneuvering, a district court ruled that the Western Shoshone Nation's title to the land had indeed been valid. However, when the Western Shoshone "sold" their land in 1979, the title was relinquished. The fact that the Western Shoshone have not touched the ICC's money doesn't seem to make a difference. The Dann's case against the United States is currently being reviewed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a commission that exists independent of the US government. This was not something I'd ever been taught in school. I'd learned that the Indians had given up their land a hundred years ago. Whether I was taught the salad bowl or the melting pot theory, it was still made very clear to me that we were one big nation.

Anyone can be an American, but look beneath the hard surface, there are large numbers of indigenous people who are not recognized as people by political leaders of the US. 7hereis the court system that refuses to recognize the people with land rights .... To most indigenous thinking people, the United States is not a melting pot; it is a boiling mess.

Carrie's concern over the destruction of her people's way of life extends to concern for the environment. She has been arrested at nuclear protests in Nevada and is an avid protester of gold mining, nuclear testing and other atrocities that happen on indigenous peoples' lands.

We look at the land as sacred. We don't look at it in the same way that non-Indian societies look at it. To traditional Indians, you can't destroy land, because land is what gives you life. You may not be destroying your life, but there's interconnection between all life. There are lives out there that don't speak in any human language.

The Defense Project was founded in order to support the Dann family in their battle for land rights and as a way to help battle what's being done to the land itself. The Defense Project heads extensive letter writing campaigns, attends local meetings and, when necessary, literally stands in the way of mining companies and nuclear testing. Several members of the Defense Project are also studying land restoration techniques in hopes of repairing some of the extensive damage that's occurred because of nearby mining corporations. Of course any restoration efforts they make are illegal because they are tampering with "public lands."

I spent several days at the Defense Project in August of 1995, repairing buildings, learning about local agricultural projects and scouting the Cortez Gold Mine. I immersed myself in the landscape, seeking out the environmental issues because as a middle class white girl, the land itself seemed like a less loaded issue than human rights. No matter what my race or cultural background was, I could legitimately speak out about land restoration and the dangers of cyanide leach mining. I didn't feel like I had much authority to speak out about the atrocities involving indigenous people. After all, where would I be if Columbus hadn't come, if the West hadn't been "won"? What kind of ground do I have to stand on?

When I met Carrie Dann for the first time she didn't seem to mind that I was some college girl from Washington. I'd read and heard so much about her that I almost wasn't sure I wanted to meet her. I was intimidated. I'd seen her on video tapes and read her interviews, and I'd never met anyone so determined, so passionate. In one interview I'd read she said I strongly believe that the Untied States for many years has systematically and deliberately, through its acts and actions, made moves to destroy our ways and leave us with nothing. If indeed the US took our land, extinguished treaty and our land rights - this is genocide. What was I supposed to say to her? Geeze, that sucks? I recognized Carrie as soon as she peeked her head through the door of the lodge. She's small. She comes up to my chest, but I'd never describe her as frail, Her broad, brown face is wrinkled and weathered and when I met her it was crinkled in a smile. In all the videos I'd seen of her, she hadn't once smiled. She was not what I expected. I expected someone serious, someone sad, someone angry. Instead she came in smiling.

Anger is there - anger is there. At first you cry with tears. After that there's no more tears: our people used to say, "I'm crying with my heart." Your beliefs keep you going. And I have a lot of good people who keep me going. They keep me sane!

Whenever I've seen Carrie not speaking or protesting, she's smiling. That night, her short, dark gray hair was pushed beneath a mesh cap. She wore blue jeans and a windbreaker, and she rolled her own smokes. Mind if I smoke, she asked after introductions and a soft cool handshake. I wondered if she noticed how sweaty my palms were.

Instead of quizzing me or lecturing me, she introduced me to her sister Mary and asked how I liked the place. I loved it there. Earlier in the evening I bathed in the hot springs on the hill overlooking the valley. The Dann family rigged it so the springs drained into two porcelain bathtubs. I laid there in the dark with the hills huddled around me. The stars were so many and so bright that I couldn't even pick out the Big Dipper, I'd never been in a more perfect place. But all I said was, "Yah, it's great."

Carrie chatted about the canyons, about her new red truck, about the weather, putting me at ease. She joked with Greg and some of the other Defense Project volunteers. I was invited to the spring gathering that's held there every year and Greg teased Carrie about what had happened last year. She laughed before she even began telling the story. I'm too old for all this technology I guess. When she left the spring gathering late on the last night to go home and sleep, her key wouldn't work in her truck. She tried again and again and finally went back inside to get Greg to help her. Turns out I had the wrong key. Can you believe it? The wrong key. She laughed harder than anyone, doubled over in her chair, her cigarette long since forgotten. When it got late, she and Mary headed back to the ranch. They found the right key and drove off in their new red truck leaving me with the smell of Drum and a stomach ache from laughing.

About a year and a half later, I had a chance to meet with Carrie Dann again. This past March, several Native American organizations in the Seattle area arranged for Carrie to come and speak at various events and in several Native American schools. Since the trip was already paid for, she agreed to let Greg drive her the hour and a half to Bellingham to come and speak in the freshman composition class I was teaching at Western Washington University. As long as there were a few people willing to listen, she was willing to tell her story.

I opened the class up to the public because I wanted everyone to hear Carrie speak. It's one thing to hear about her, another to listen to the passion in her voice. As I publicized the event I made fliers proclaiming "Internationally acclaimed indigenous land rights activist and Western Shoshone Elder." As I watched those words pile high from the end of the copy machine at Kinko's, I began to wonder about the word Elder.

In Mormon culture, Elder is a term used when addressing male missionaries or high ranking church officials. Women never have been and never will be elders in the Mormon church. In my brief encounters with Western Shoshone culture, I've been drawn to the ways in which women seem to have so much more of a voice than they do in the culture that I grew up in. When I was at the Defense Project I helped with some repairs at the moonlodge, a structure built and maintained solely by women. It's a place for women to go when they want a safe spot to spend time alone to think and meditate. Even the land is connected to women. Carrie and Mary Dann inherited their ranch from their grandmother. I assume the ranch will go to Carrie's daughters after she dies. Part of me is jealous of all this. I've heard Carrie say It's tough to be an indigenous people. It is hard to have no rights to have no one listen. And yet, she has things that I don't have. The more I know about her culture, the more I understand why it is that she fights so hard. And the more I wonder which things I feel are worth preserving in my own culture.

As I showed her to the room where she'd be speaking, Carrie asked me if there would be any native students there that night. "I don't think so." There were none in my class.

Are there many native students at this school? She'd just come from speaking to a group of 1000 native students in Seattle. Tonight there would be none. " I don't think Western has a large native population," I said, realizing that I had absolutely no clue what I was talking about. "There's an Indian college nearby," but as I said it I realized I didn't know where it was or what it was called or even which Indian tribes live around Bellingham.

But she didn't seem bothered. As we sat waiting for students to file in, she offered me a lollipop from her purse. She had a friend who worked in a government office that she visited before coming to Seattle. She took a lollipop from a basket on the woman's desk and mentioned how good it was. Her friend proceeded to fill the purse with lollipops. So we got the city of Beowowe to thank for these. Despite the laughter, I'm sure she saw the irony. The two of us sucked lollipops together until the room filled up.

We showed the "Rights, Resistance, Restoration video" which chronicles the Western Shoshone Defense Project's history while we waited for the last stragglers to arrive. Carrie giggled when she saw herself on screen. At one point, as she watched herself climb over a fence to get in the way of federal officers, she let out a whoop. I'm not certain if she was amused or embarrassed, but as usual, she was laughing.

When she got up on stage though, the laughter stopped. There was no mocking, no teasing. No time for small talk. She grabbed the podium with both hands and kneeled behind it on a chair. I do that too when I'm nervous, grab onto things, tuck my legs under me to keep them from shaking. But I don't think anyone else noticed. As she began to speak there was no hint of nerves. Her voice was clear and strong.

I am not a public speaker. But I will do my best. Many of you do not know what is being done to indigenous peoples. You do not know what it's like to have no one listen, to have no rights.

When she finished and walked slowly from the stage, she srniled again and started up with her self depreciating humor. I'm such an old lady. My knees are hurting me from kneeling like that. I didn't think I'd make if off the stage. You think it went okay?

It amazes me that after 40 years of speaking, she still feels uncomfortable, still worries. After all this time, she doesn't seem like some slick professional. She hasn't lost her passion. She never prepares her speeches ahead of time, The acceptance speech in Sweden is the only speech she has written down. She often prefaces her ideas with it's my opinion or this is only my opinion, but she has never once apologized for those opinions.

After her speech and the question and answer session, Greg and I took Carrie down to Casa Que Pasa to get burritos and unwind before the trip back to Seattle. Again, I felt that initial unease that I feel when I interact with Carrie. I was going to eat burritos and make small talk with this woman who just got done explaining the systematic genocide of her people. What were we going to talk about?

At the restaurant, Carrie teased Greg and me for ordering tofu instead of meat. We teased her for ordering such a plain meal (a chicken taco). I'm an old lady, she said. My stomach doesn't like spicy foods.

She made me think of my grandparents. They are miserable in restaurants - pizza, Mexican food, Thai food, it is all too spicy for them. Meat and potatoes only. I was surprised to realize that Carrie Dann had more in common with my grandparents when it came to food than I did. I wondered what THAT meal would be like. Carrie and my grandparents sitting down for pot roast. My grandmother bragging about her pioneer ancestry, Carrie looking her in the eye as she says, "Hey, I wonder if our genealogy's ever crossed paths. I had a great great uncle who settled in Nevada..."

But Carrie and Greg and I managed okay. We chatted about how we thought the night went and about her other speaking engagements. We teased Carrie into trying a burrito and made jokes about falling asleep on the drive back.

As she left to go, she thanked me for letting her come and speak. I thanked her and felt stupid that she was thanking me, not really understanding why she thought I was doing her a favor. A little while later, I read an interview she'd given and it helped me understand a little more about why she wants to speak to anyone and everyone, even an audience of white, rich college kids.

There's always hope ... I'd like to see future generations have the opportunity to go out and enjoy and look at the landscape like I did when I was growing up. Freedom - I had freedom for so long. The only thing I can do now is do the best I can - talk to other humans and see if they can be of any assistance to the earth. Because that's what we're fighting for now...the survival of the earth. I can't see it any other way.

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