FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Lithium Nevada Begins “Bulk Sampling” in What Attorney Calls “A Dirty Trick”
Tribes: “BLM and Lithium Nevada Are Destroying Our Cultural Heritage”
OROVADA, NEVADA (September 20, 2022) Lithium Nevada Corporation (LNC), the company behind the embattled Thacker Pass lithium mine project, has begun digging up portions of Thacker Pass for “bulk sampling” despite consultation still being ongoing between the Bureau of Land Management and regional tribes over cultural sites.
Will Falk, attorney for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe and co-founder of the opposition group Protect Thacker Pass, says this is a violation of federal law.
“The Federal Government has not even meaningfully started consultation with tribes about the September 12, 1865 massacre site in Thacker Pass, let alone the earlier ‘Peehee Mu’huh’ massacre described in oral history and the entire Thacker Pass Traditional Cultural District,” Falk said. “But that doesn’t even begin to describe how much of a dirty trick this is. BLM is allowing the destruction of a massacre site without consulting, over the objections of multiple tribes and members of the public, using a permit more than a decade old.”
“Thacker Pass is a living traditional cultural place where Paiute and Shoshone people still gather to practice our culture,” says Michon Eben, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. “The Snake War was the most violent Indian war in the west, and not a single site from this important event for our people is protected. BLM and Lithium Nevada are destroying our cultural heritage with this dig.”
Over the past six weeks, at least four tribes – the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, Winnemucca Indian Colony, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe – have all demanded that BLM designate the entirety of Thacker Pass as an historic or traditional cultural district eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. BLM has also received letters from members of the public and experts such as Alexa Roberts, former National Parks Superintendent at the Sand Creek Massacre Site in Colorado. Ms. Roberts informed BLM of “striking similarities” between the Sand Creek and Thacker Pass massacres, and urged the agency to protect the entire landscape as a National Historic District.
The tribes assert that all of Thacker Pass should be considered eligible for listing under the National Register of Historic Places because the site contains a unique record of more than 10,000 years of Native American history, including the Thacker Pass component of the “Whitehorse Obsidian Procurement District,” the presence of tools and arrowheads, millennia-old seasonal camps, two massacre sites, oral histories regarding the importance of the Pass, significant medicinal and food plants, culturally-significant animals such as golden eagles and sage-grouse, and ongoing traditions of hunting, gathering, and religious practice.
The tribes are arguing that additional damage to the Thacker Pass landscape jeopardizes its ability to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Planned Digging
Attorneys for LNC informed mine opponents of the work in a September 9th email, writing that “Lithium Nevada will be performing some bulk sampling under its Kings Valley Lithium Exploration Project Plan of Operations.”
The Kings Valley project was permitted more than a dozen years ago and included only cursory consultation with one tribe. However, BLM has been criticized in Federal Court for failing to consider 2009 statements from Dale Barr, then-chairman of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, made in response to BLM’s inquiries about sacred sites in Thacker Pass and Kings Valley, that Thacker Pass was historically and culturally significant due to oral histories of the “Peehee Mu’huh” massacre.
Despite Barr’s statements being documented in BLM records brought to light in the lawsuit, BLM’s final Environmental Assessment for the King’s Valley Lithium Project states erroneously that “Fort McDermitt Tribal Chairman Dale Barr stated that the Tribe had no concerns about the Project.”
According to oral histories, the Peehee Mu’huh massacre took place on the west side of Thacker Pass, where Lithium Nevada plans to perform their “bulk sampling.” “On July 18th of this year after one year of litigation, BLM finally acknowledges a massacre took place in this area and they still continue to sanction the destruction of our ancestors final resting place, a human rights violation. In simple terms this is cultural genocide being committed on our tribal homelands,” says Eben.
“The scenario that is currently unfolding is precisely why the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and Summit Lake Paiute Tribe have specifically requested that any construction work or other physical disturbance in Thacker Pass be suspended until BLM completes the 36 CFR § 800.13(b)(1) post-review discoveries process,” Falk said. “Yet BLM continues to ignore this request.”
Shelley Harjo, a tribal member from the Fort McDermitt Shoshone Paiute Tribe, has called the planned destruction of Thacker Pass “the biggest desecration and rape of a known Native American massacre site in our area.”
Max Wilbert, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass with Falk, recently reported that online bots were being used to spread online misinformation about protesters. Falk and Wilbert are currently fighting a $49,890.13 fine levied against them by the BLM after they constructed a pit toilet for native elders as part of a year-long protest encampment last year.
Tribes have recently been made aware of allegations that Native American artifacts were stolen from Thacker Pass during BLM-authorized archeological excavations earlier this summer.
For more information please call Bethany Sam, RSIC Public Relations.
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About the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony
The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony formed a federally recognized government in 1936 under the Indian Reorganization Act. Located in Reno, Nev., the RSIC consists of 1,206 members from three Great Basin Tribes – the Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe Tribes. The RSIC is a vibrant, diverse organization, which balances traditional teachings and rich culture with contemporary business methods. Our mission is to offer opportunities for tribal members to improve their lives and enhance tribal values by making community programs, services, and projects available.
Our modern world is a jungle of spinning plates. They all have to be kept spinning, or it will all come tumbling down. Our lives are defined by how many plates we have on the go. It makes us rush around adding more. I catch myself doing this constantly, worried that what I want I will not get.
Our companies reflect this. They rush around to prove they are doing good. We want EVs, grid storage batteries, power packs for our phones. They compete to do good but create more problems, driving resources into scarcity and increasing costs for themselves and everyone else. Our environment and cultural heritage are damaged and scattered in this stampede to do good.
In a world past where resources were plentiful, spinning more plates was great. The more we spun the better it was for all. There were sites with no particular significance everywhere; we explored them and did good.
Today, we have outgrown that world. We cannot tread without stepping over history for the simple reason everywhere without historical significance have been trodden over. Today, we cannot do good without causing harm.
The tragedy of the lithium mining is it will accelerate the climate warming it is wanting to prevent. We cannot mine lithium without increasing our use of oil, gas, and coal. Using them will create more of the harmful greenhouse gas emissions and drive even more extreme weather events. So even if we think mining the lithium is worth losing the historical heritage to protect the climate, in this jungle of spinning plates we cannot add more without knocking the whole jungle down.
The true lesson is we need to accept some plates will have to stop; we cannot have everything. This is our challenge: How do we innovate? You and I want to innovate. Because we want to innovate, this is what our corporations will do. The essence is to innovate inside, not outside, the proverbial box.
When we innovate inside the box, and the box is already full, it means innovating to create room, rather than innovating to do more. We will need to choose. We will not be able to create room without forgoing something. What do we forgo? Better still, what do we hold on to?
Our choice has to give us purpose and empower us with fortitude so we hold on to them even when life gets difficult as it as surely will. We may each have our own ideas. Mine is the hold on to the things that give us joy.
Our cultural heritage, our history, our landscape, these are the things that bind our communities and lie at the root of the things that truly give us joy. That is why I favour innovations that can avoid using energy than ones that need mining for lithium.
I live in London and attended the Queen's lying-in-state. It was a tranformational experience of people coming together to say they care. It moved me to write about it. https://rethinkingchoices.com/2022/09/20/it-was-a-river-of-hope
It proved that it not true people are selfish and do not care. People care. I know because on that journey, we cared.
The climate changing is behind the losses of our landscape, history, heritage. It is behind the call for more plates to be added to our already over-burdened jungle. There are many efforts to deal with it. Like it or not, even the lithium mining is one of them. Our efforts create contradictions on contradictions; we all aim to do good, but it cannot be good when we fail to see there is no more room.
Please do check out our website rethinkingchoices.com for our blueprint of Tranformational Ownership and engage with us to help promote it.
The blueprint shows how we can take away the contradictions when we come together to make sure the big picture is looked after.
We can take ownership of oil, gas, and coal to put ty hem into stewardship to protect our f2f uture and preserve our past. Setting production on a clear irrevocable path of reduction guided independently by climate science and distributing all the profits from oil, gas, and coal will people everywhere on an equal person basis will bring all our efforts from transforming our industries to protecting the oceans together and protect them from causing or being derailed as by worsening climate change. We can fund it by taking a part of the money we spend as a fee to maintain the planet, recognising that everything we do uses its resources.
We want to talk with people everywhere in the run up to COP27.
Please take a look at the blueprint and help.
Disgusting, but unsurprising. Keep at it Max and all others involved. We have similar unforgivable BS in Australia all the time: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/rio-tinto-just-blasted-away-an-ancient-aboriginal-site-heres-why-that-was-allowed/u3z24uw2h