Bad Medicine' at Peehee Mu'huh: An Environmental History of Thacker Pass
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Authors
Hill, Kelsey R.
Issue Date
2024
Type
Thesis
Language
Keywords
Environmental History , Lithium , Massacre Studies , Mining , Native American , Northern Paiute
Alternative Title
Abstract
Thacker Pass, located in the remote northern Nevada high desert, is both a lithium mine and a massacre site. To some people, it signals an opportunity to fuel America's electrified, green-energy future and to others, particularly local Numu, Newe, and Bannock peoples, it is a reminder of a violent history. Numu people call this place Peehee mu'huh ('Rotten Moon' in Numu) and it is the resting place of their ancestors slain in historic massacres�"including one committed in 1865 by the U.S. cavalry. In 2021, the approval of the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine has splashed this contention of the meaning of this place across headlines and blogs and ushered in years of social and legal challenges to the project, some of which were led by tribes and Indigenous groups. To contextualize the deeper history of this current issue, this thesis examines Thacker Pass/Peehee mu'huh through many stages of its long history as part of the sagebrush steppe of the northern Great Basin and a culturally revered place to local Native peoples. This environmental history combines recent primary sources, tribal histories, anthropological studies, and scholarship of the American West to provide the 10,000 year historical context of a culturally significant landscape currently contested over extraction. As this longue durée framework portrays, Thacker Pass is an ancestral homeland touched by evolving forms of violence over its history that has shaped its specific meaning to Native peoples over time, and a modern place of both extraction and subsequent Indigenous resistance. This study contends this history, while uniquely rooted in place, is also a microcosmic case study for broader trends in Indian County and histories of the American West.