Eve of Destruction: Bureau of Land Management Sacrifices Native Site to Mining Group
Wednesday, Sep 30, 2015, 11:57 am
Eve of Destruction: Bureau of Land Management Sacrifices Native Site to Mining Group
By Stephanie Woodard
[font size=1]
An aerial view of the Hollister Underground Mine Project in the Tosawihi Quarries in Elko
County, Nevada. Recently acquired by Waterton Global Mining Company/Carlin Resources,
the site has long been regarded as sacred by Native people.
(Bureau of Land Management, Elko District Office, Tuscarora Field Office, Nevada)
[/font]
This isn’t the “new” world for the Western Shoshone. And their West was never “wild.” It is a place of deep cultural connections to a homeland that at one time extended across portions of Idaho, Nevada, Utah and California. For more than 10,000 years, they have met in what is today called the Tosawihi Quarries, a stretch of Elko County, Nevada, to gather a type of white flint and to practice their sacred rituals.
“That stone is very sacred to us,” says Joe Holley, chairman of the Battle Mountain Band of the Te-Moak Western Shoshone, one of several federally recognized, related tribes. “We use it every day and have done so for millennia, for tools, ceremonies and healing. The stone, the water, the entire place is sacred.” The word Tosawihi means White Knives, an ancestral Shoshone tribal name that ties the land and its features to their culture and identity. The Tosawihi Quarries has been deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and part of it was declared an Archaeological District in 2010.
However, gold lies under the flint, also called chert, and a multinational mining group wants it.
In 2013, Nevada-based Waterton Global Mining Company, owned by a firm registered in the Cayman Islands, bought a bankrupt gold-mining operation that had been exploring for and extracting gold in the Tosawihi Quarries. In March 2014, an official at a related Canadian private-equity firm, Waterton Global Resource Management, told Reuters it had been snapping up struggling U.S. mining concerns hurt by the several-year downturn in gold prices. Reuters quoted the firm’s chief investment officer as saying, “This year I think (acquisitions) will pick up dramatically.”
By 2014, mining operations had resumed on the Shoshone's ancestral lands, and Waterton Global Mining Company had changed its name to Carlin Resources. The new work began in previously disturbed ground and moved out from there. “A drilling pad was built in a once-pristine area,” says Holley, “and several rock shelters were demolished when they pushed through a road.” On a recent trip to the area, he saw that several ancient stone hunting blinds, from which concealed hunters observed their prey, were gone. Tribal members report that workers have videotaped them when they visit.
More:
http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/18461/eve-of-destruction-bureau-of-land-management-sacrifices-native-site-to-mini