OAS Commission Again Sides With Shoshone Indians Posted Jan. 18, 2003 By Martin Edwin Andersen The Organization of American States (OAS) human-rights commission yesterday reaffirmed an earlier decision in favor of land-rights claims by Utahs Western Shoshone Indian tribe, rejecting an 11th-hour attempt by the federal government to derail the Native Americans legal arguments. It marked the first time that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) found that treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government violated international human-rights law. The IACHR did not require that any lands claimed by the Western Shoshone be returned to them, but it did call on the United States to establish a fair legal process to determine the merits of the land claims. This is a very reasonable result that respects the fundamental human rights of the Indians but does not place any undue burden on the United States, said Steve Tullberg, Washington director of the Indian Law Resource Center, one of the groups representing the Western Shoshone. At issue was a 30-year-old dispute between two elderly Western Shoshone sisters, Carrie and Mary Dann, over the right to graze their livestock on traditional Indian lands. In September, 40 heavily armed federal agents backed by a helicopter seized 227 of the Danns cattle and sold them at a public auction. On Dec. 17, two government agents served the Danns with a notice of claiming their unauthorized use of federal lands and ordered them to remove their livestock -- some 250 cattle and 1,000 horses -- from the premises. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) claimed that the Danns livestock overgrazed the range, located about 60 miles southeast of Elko, Nev. The BLM also alleged that the Danns owed grazing fees of almost $3 million -- representing three decades of accumulated arrears. However, the Danns countered that they have a right to pasture their animals on the federal land under the terms of the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The Western Shoshone have refused to pay fees for grazing their animals on land they consider part of their birthright. Some 26 million acres in Nevada alone are under dispute, rangeland the Indians say they never legally turned over to the federal government. In making its provisional ruling in October, the IACHR found that the United States used illegitimate means to gain control of the American Indians ancestral lands. The federal government, it said, violated the equal-protection, fair-trial and right-to-private-property clauses of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man. The rights body demanded that the U.S. government return the Danns confiscated cattle and halt further actions against the sisters pending review of the case. Officials at the State Department reportedly are very upset with the OAS ruling, and Indian rights activists say they fear such hostility signals the federal governments continued intention to defy the IACHR. Martin Edwin Andersen is a reporter for Insight.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 00:16:47 +0000
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