Shoshone Indians use modern cartography in their fight for territorial lands.

When talking about his work with Native American tribes, geographer Joe Bryan likes to say, “More Indian land was probably taken by maps than by weapons.” And, he claims, more Indian land can be reclaimed using maps as well. Bryan, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, is combining cartography with cultural history to help Western Shoshone Indians in Nevada in their long-standing legal dispute with the federal government over the boundaries and regulation of its land.

For many years, the western Shoshone have been protesting the terms set by the Indians Claims Commission, which was set up initially to reward Native Americans for their service during WWII and pay them for lands taken during white settlement of the West. But the Shoshone refused to accept money from the government, claiming the agreements made at the time were unfairly established. That money currently sits in an escrow account, and the Shoshone say the government never fairly obtained this land from them. In the meantime, gold and alluvium mining companies are mining and polluting much of the area, power lines may soon go right through some of the Shoshone lands, and once the government’s Yucca Mountain repository for spent nuclear fuel finally opens for business, trucks carrying nuclear waste will travel directly through the Shoshone homelands.

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