The story of a lithium mine in remote northern Nevada, and the two-spirit Paiute elder who fought to stop it.
For full story, listen to audio above. The following text are excerpts from the episode.
Dean Barlese: “I've gone to the other place and seen it. It's very beautiful.”
The path flowed like water
from the one place, to the next
and Dean Barlese walked it.
Dean Barlese: “So I've gone three times, I guess, in my hospital stays. And I've seen my mom, my dad, my grandmas standing there waiting for me. I'm walking up this little trail with green grass and flowers, sagebrush all around. You can hear the birds singing.”
And then, another time
there was a group out there
a group of protestors crouching in the sagebrush.
They were away from camp now, several paces off the ribbon of a dirt road that cut from the paved highway to a new chainlink fence. Behind the group, a teepee stood tall against the ridge — sage was waist-high as far as you could see, down into the valley, rippling to the next range in the east, purple and soft blue in the distance. The Nevada sun filtered through the hushed green leaves to reveal to them on the desert floor below: a nest.
Dean Barlese: “You had small birds in there that were just hatched. And the mother was trying to protect them.”
And then the group was back at their protest camp.
This was before the police came.
Dean Barlese. Photo by Max Wilbert.
Dean Barlese: “It made us feel good to stop construction, desecration of that place, sacred land, sacred ancestors that are still out there. It made us feel good. And we knew the ancestors were with us, by the little whirlwinds that came up through the road they had built. We knew we weren't alone.”
Not far from these little whirlwinds rising from the newly cut mine road, about 160 years south, a man named Fredrick West Lander met with the Paiute War Chief Numaga.
In 1860 Numaga had successfully defended his people with an incredible feat of military strategy. He lured a large group of war-bound vigilantes and miners and settlers hellbent on racial bloodshed into a canyon on the Truckee River near its terminus in Pyramid Lake, just upstream from Dean’s house.
The settlers rushed confidently, guns drawn, right into an ambush, and the Paiute warriors appeared in mass on a sandy ridge, then many more silently closed ranks behind them in a crescent, pinning the storming, ragtag brigade against the icy current, their clothes still wet and heavy from several nights of late spring snow. Their plans to exterminate the tribe once and for all were shot to pieces as many of the invaders lay dead in the sand.
When the few battered survivors returned to their newly established cities, Virginia, Carson, they enlisted a cavalry from California, who returned in force but only managed a stalemate with the tribe. The Paiutes retreated from their home on the lake.
They roamed the desert for a long time, as the United States Government waged war on their way of life, and built an overland wagon route through their homeland.
Fredrick West Lander was in charge of ensuring the safety of the wagon route and set up the meeting with War Chief Numaga. As custom, they sat silently for hours before speaking, Numaga studying Lander’s face and intentions until sundown, then a pipe was passed around and the meeting began.
According to an account compiled by author Ferol Egan, the two men spoke of past fights, settled accounts, tried to agree on the truth of things to varying degrees of success. Lander, on behalf of industry leaders and the federal government, then asked the Paiutes for safe passage through their land, heading toward the mining towns in western Nevada and over the great mountains to California.
“You have have big horn sheep and antelope ranges that the whites do not want.” Lander said, “You have lakes full of fish that the whites do not want.”
•••
A decade later, Numaga was dead of disease and a fort was built in those unwanted antelope ranges, and the Snake War unfolded as the Paiutes and Shoshone and Bannock wondered the steppes in retreat, and the military approached a camp at dawn and shot through the tent walls, killing everybody, entire families. And only 3 children survived.
Photo by Max Wilbert
A battery has 2 main polar parts: the cathode, the anode. Between them is a separator and a sort of fluid called an electrolyte. Lithium is a lightweight element that can be used in both the cathode and electrolyte solution. Basically, it holds a charge, and it can be reused over and over again. When the battery degrades, the lithium can be removed and reused without limit for the most part, assuming somebody is incentivized or required to recycle it.
There are other minerals that can do this too—hold a charge—sodium, magnesium, aluminum, vanadium…but lithium is lightweight, and already standard so momentum makes it the current mineral of choice. It’s also abundant. There are big deposits in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, China, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, California…Here, the mine plans to use a water-intensive hydraulic mining process that will remove lithium-rich clay from the earth, then more water to process it into commercial grate lithium-carbonate.
Nevada is the driest state in the US, and the protesters and at least one nearby rancher believe that adding an industrial scale water user will decimate the meager water supply that is here.
This landscape has long been marked on the government maps as wasteland. Gold, silver, nuclear testing, data centers; the things they don’t want end up here, and the things they do want, flow out in big trucks.
And so the protesters stood in the road.
“We've always been here… Being two-spirited, or in our Paiute language, we say mu ka kwee tuhu uno a takadu (spelled phonetically)—Those who feast with the mountain lion. That is an ancient term for who we are, what we are, and in our old ways, we were created along with man and woman…a combination of both male and female. And we were the teachers, healers, caretakers of the knowledge, traditions that were passed on, stories…”
“We deal a lot, even in the old days, we had a lot to do with getting people ready for burial, dressing them up, wrapping them, doing the final prayers. So even today, once in a while, somebody asks me to come in and go into the mortuaries and dress the bodies, get them ready for burial…In the old days, we'd wrap the people up, take them out to burial. It's sad, but it's also a strong thing to do—to help people on their journey.“
Two Aeolian Harps used in this episode: Snake of Truth Wind Harp by Eleanor Qull and Obsidian Sky Wind Harp by Fil Corbitt + Mike Corbitt.
Thank you to Dean Barlese for trusting me with this story. Also a big thank you to BC Zahn Nahtzu (a co-defendant in the case, BC has an Etsy store here), Max Wilbert (a co-defendent who provided pictures), Olive Greenspan, Tara Tran, Ray Pang, Kate Cowie-Haskell, Taylor Wilson for talking to me about the chemical properties of Lithium and Daniel Rothberg for speaking about mining’s effect Great Basin water tables. Daniel has a newsletter called Western Water Notes which I highly recommend if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Also a shout out to the podcast Boomtown; a Uranium Story by Alec Cowan. Some of the books for this piece:
Sand in a Whirlwind by Ferol Egan
Legends of the Northern Paiute by Wewa and Gardner
Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
1491 by Charles C. Mann
Explusions by Saskia Sassen
Crow’s Range by David Beesley
Music from the Free Music Archive and Yclept Insan
Tags, Topics and Mentions: Peehee Mu'huh, Thacker Pass, Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, Ox Sam Camp, Ox Sam, Protect Thacker Pass, People of Red Mountain, Snake War, Fort Mcdermitt, Nevada, Lithium, Lithium Mining, Protest against lithium mine, Dean Barlese, Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation, Numaga, Pyramid Lake, Sand in a Whirlwind, Mountain Lion Harrah's Casino in Reno, Sagebrush, Mining, Lithium Carbonate, Winnemucca
