Modern developments

Contact with Spanish and Euro-American colonizers drastically altered Great Basin societies and cultures. The Southern Ute were in sustained contact with the Spanish in New Mexico as early as the 1600s, but other Great Basin groups had little or no direct or continued contact with Europeans or Euro-Americans until after 1800. Between 1810 and 1840, the fur trade brought new tools and implements to those residing in the eastern part of the region. In the 1840s, Euro-American settlement of the Great Basin began, and a surge of emigrants traveled through the area on their way to Oregon and California.

As elsewhere in the United States, government policy in the Great Basin was overtly designed to assimilate the tribes into Euro-American society. Assimilation was accomplished by undercutting the indigenous subsistence economy, removing Native American children to distant boarding schools, and suppressing native religions in favour of Christianity. Beginning in the 1840s, for instance, private-property laws favouring Euro-American mining, ranching, and farming interests either destroyed or privatized most indigenous food-gathering areas. Piñon groves were cut for firewood, fence posts, and mining timbers, and the delicate regional ecosystem was disrupted by an influx of humans and livestock.

The indigenous peoples of the Great Basin attempted to resist colonial encroachment. Mounted bands of Ute, Shoshone, Shoshone-Bannock, and Northern Paiute fought with ranchers and attacked wagon trains in attempts to drive the intruders away. The struggle culminated in several local wars and massacres in the 1850s and ’60s. After 1870 the tribes were forced onto reservations or into small groups on the edges of Euro-American settlements; their land base was reduced to a small fraction of its former size. This forced the abandonment of most aboriginal subsistence patterns in favour of agriculture and ranching, in those areas where land remained in native hands, or in wage work, usually as farmhands and ranch hands.

The Great Basin peoples were perhaps most successful in resisting religious assimilation. In 1870 and again in 1890, so-called Ghost Dance movements started among the Northern Paiute of western Nevada. The dances were millenarian, nostalgic, and peaceful in character. The 1870 movement, led by the Paiute prophet Wodziwob, centred in Nevada and California. It was an elaboration of the round dance, a traditional ceremony for the renewal and abundance of life. Wodziwob’s vision indicated that the dance would resurrect the victims of an epidemic that had decimated the region a year earlier.

The 1890 movement, led by the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka, was adopted by many tribes in the western United States. Wovoka’s movement stressed peace, accommodation of Euro-American development projects, truthfulness, self-discipline, and other tenets of “right living,” including performance of the round dance; his message was so apt for the time that he was soon mentoring novitiates from throughout the trans-Mississippi West. Despite Wovoka’s best efforts at promoting the core aspects of the new religion, the Ghost Dance message evolved from one of renewal to one of destruction as it was taken home by novitiates from the Plains. Particularly among the many bands of Sioux, ghost dancing was thought to have the power to effect an apocalypse; if properly performed, it was believed, the tribes would have the opportunity to annihilate the colonizers (or at least drive them back to the sea), the dead would be resurrected, the bison herds would be repopulated, and traditional ways of life would be restored. Ultimately, Euro-American fears related to the movement contributed to the 1890 massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek (in present-day South Dakota). In the Great Basin, however, the movement’s original message endured, and Ghost Dance congregations became important reservoirs of traditional culture that persist into the 21st century.

The 20th century fostered other religious movements in the Great Basin as well. The practice of ingesting peyote in a religious context was introduced to the Ute and Eastern Shoshone in the early 1900s by Oklahoma Indians. It later spread to other peoples in the region. Most peyote groups became part of the Native American Church, a nationally recognized religious organization. Great Basin peyote rituals are generally a mixture of aboriginal and Christian elements. Ceremonies are led by experienced individuals known as “road chiefs,” because they lead believers down the peyote “road” or way. A peyote ceremony, which typically lasts all night, includes singing, praying, and ingesting those parts of the peyote cactus that produce a mild hallucinogenic experience. The tenets of the Native American Church stress moral and ethical precepts and behaviour. The Eastern Shoshone and Ute also adopted the Sun Dance from the Plains tribes. The four-day dance continues to be performed, usually annually, to ensure health for the community and valour for the participants. The Sun Dance spread to some other Great Basin groups in the second half of the 20th century. For the Ute, the bear dance, a spring ceremony, also remains important.

The U.S. Indian Reorganization Act (1934) led to the establishment of local elected tribal councils for the various reservations and colonies in the region. These councils have since developed a number of tribally based economic enterprises, including ranching, light industry, and tourism. They have also been plaintiffs in lawsuits seeking to reclaim ancestral lands. In 1950, for instance, the U.S. judicial system found that the Ute tribe had been illegally defrauded of land in the 19th century; while the courts did not revert title to the land, they did mandate substantial monetary compensation.

In the 1950s many tribes in the United States—including several bands of Utes and Southern Paiutes—were subject to termination, a process whereby they lost federal recognition of their Indian status and thus their eligibility for federal support of health care and other services. Although most bands fought this process, some did not regain federal status until the 1980s. Others continued to fight for recognition and land well into the early 21st century; the Western Shoshone, for instance, turned to the international court system in their efforts to regain their traditional landholdings. (See also North American Indian: The evolution of contemporary cultures.)