Healing the site of the worst Native American massacre in U.S. history

Brad Parry is the vice chairman for the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and the leader of the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project in Cache Valley, Idaho.

The project he manages began in 2019 when the tribe embarked on a large-scale watershed restoration of 500 acres along Battle Creek, near its confluence with the Bear River. But the effort is much more than rewilding a river corridor.

The swath of land being restored is the site of the Bear River Massacre of 1863, widely considered the largest attack on Indigenous people in U.S. history.

Along the way, the project has gathered the support of a wildly diverse range of corporations, religious institutions, and state and federal entities that represent a broad swath of political and idealogical perspectives.

Still, when Parry — who grew up in Syracuse, Utah, and now lives in Salt Lake City — heard that he was awarded the inaugural Schnitzer Prize of the West for his efforts on the project, he was totally caught off guard.

The new prize, which was announced in late April, is awarded by the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, to celebrate “extraordinary individuals whose efforts combine collaboration, innovation, and social impact to address the region’s enduring challenges.”

The challenges facing the West are, as folks who live there understand, quite significant. Water scarcity, wildfire, tribal rights and sovereignty, land use and conservation are among the legacy issues nominees are working on. But the list the prize committee considered is far longer.

Each of the 93 people nominated are actively seeking out and working collaboratively to execute solutions to big Western issues. They’re all inspiring and exemplary in their own way, which only emphasizes how extraordinary Parry’s efforts — as well as the four other finalists — are in order to stand out. It’s no surprise he was so immersed in his project that he nearly forgot that he’d been nominated.

Changing the narrative about the massacre

Parry said that he thinks the prize is a wonderful way to raise awareness for the Shoshone Tribe and to help more people regard water and climate issues in the West through a Native, cultural lens.

For on the landscape where Parry is managing the restoration process, that culture-prioritizing effort is turning tragedy into hope.

“The tribe feels about it now like, we’re done being mad. We’re done being sad about it,” Parry said. “We just want to change the narrative and, you know, changing the narrative of a Civil War massacre site isn’t super easy.”

The beneficiaries are downstream, too. Battle Creek flows into the Bear River, which is the largest tributary to the Great Salt Lake. The restoration will add an additional 13,000 acre-feet of water back into the struggling lake every year.

Through Parry’s efforts, the site’s becoming not only a place of ecological healing, but one of cultural healing too. And, by building such an impressive and unexpected cast of supporters and partners who might otherwise seem like opposing forces, he is charting a new path toward coalition building in a polarized world.

That ability to create allegiance across ideological and political camps was an important factor that impressed the Schnitzer Prize committee.

The prize is supported and spearheaded by Jordan Schnitzer, the Oregon philanthropist and art collector, who wanted to bring greater awareness to those solving the West’s legacy issues. It comes with $50,000 as well as a unique art piece.

A horrific day in American history

During the 1860s, tensions between European settlers and the Shoshone were escalating. So much so that in the winter of 1863, a volunteer cavalry attacked the tribe’s winter camp on Jan. 29.

In a four-hour window, they killed between 300 and 500 men, women and children — estimates vary depending on who is telling the story — who had gathered near the convergence of the Bear River and Battle Creek for their seasonal Warm Dance, celebrated at the site’s hot springs.

Despite its scale, the event is not as well known as several other bloody moments in the American Indian Wars. But in the effort to rewrite the narrative, Parry likes to remind people that though it was a truly awful event, it was just a single day.

“That horrific thing happened for one day,” he said. “And we’ve been there for at least 8,000 years.”

In 2018, the tribe was offered the opportunity to purchase about 500 acres of land on the north side of Battle Creek where the massacre occurred. “It wasn’t even a question” as to whether they would buy it, Parry said. “It was like, ‘Yeah!’”

At first, the tribal council considered selling the water rights, but Parry — who had only just joined the council but had spent 18 years working for the Bureau of Reclamation — knew the value of the water and suggested something entirely different.

Parry wanted to focus on their cultural values and traditions and change it back to a place where people want to return to for ceremony, meeting and greeting. “Our ancestors don’t recognize this place right now,” Parry told the council. “So, that’s where we started out.”

He asked the council to approve bringing in ecologic consultants to see if they could restore the land. What they found showed that it would be difficult, Parry said, but still possible. They’d have to remove the water diversions, weed out invasive species, plant more native vegetation and slowly return it to its natural state.

“So, what do we do when we buy it?” Parry mused. “We decided to do a full ecological restoration knowing people are buried there.”

By doing things that were culturally correct, Parry said the tribe and tribal elders realized they could also change the narrative around the massacre.

The next thing they knew, the project grew to the next level. From watershed restoration it appeared that their efforts could help with drought control. Soon afterward, folks started asking if they could produce water for the Great Salt Lake.

Church and state support

The University of Utah and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were both early supporters. The states of Utah and Idaho are partners, as are several different agencies within the Department of the Interior.

There are, of course, a slew of conservationists and Great Salt Lake advocates, but there is also a chemical company and a weapons manufacturer pitching in, too.

Dana Whitelaw, the executive director of the High Desert Museum, called the project and its scope “so profound.”

That’s particularly in light of Parry finding a path toward progress with uncommon collaborations and otherwise incompatible factions, Whitelaw said. Somehow, Parry and his co-counselors project appeals to folks from many different and disparate walks of Western life.

“Where is this prize winner really stepping into a place that seems virtually impossible to find a path to make progress?” Whitelaw said. “That’s where it lands as this incredibly inspiring work.”

Parry did not realize how others perceived the work, himself until the National Judicial College, an entity in the Bar Association that trains judges, asked him to speak about his project not once, but for a second time.

He didn’t understand at the time of the first presentation why a bunch of judges would be interested in the work of a small tribe out of northern Utah and southern Idaho, let alone the second. So, he asked.

Parry remembers his contact saying that the judges felt they had to talk to the person running a Native American project on tribal ground who had two different states, the Department of the Interior, the United States Department of Agriculture, Procter & Gamble, Rio Tinto, Northrop Grumman, universities and nonprofits all coming together to see a project through.

“They were like, ‘Do you not see like how different that is?,’” Parry said. He recalled replying, “Well, when you put it like that ...”

Traditionally, Parry said that tribes are often at odds with the states and with the feds. In this case, however, everyone working toward the restoration of the Bear River Massacre site is somehow harmonious.

“We didn’t do this to impress people downstream. At first, we thought we were doing a project that was just going to be us building this thing,” Parry said.

But as folks started to learn about it, they realized the project was an example of climate and ecological control that could potentially be scalable, and benefit a lot of people. Which led them to ask, Parry said, “How can we make this bigger?”

Solving issues in the American West

Whitelaw said that the prize is the vision of Schnitzer, a benefactor of the High Desert Museum, who believes that it’s critically important to find and share with a broad audience the stories of people who are working to solve problems facing the West.

“This is really his idea and his connection to the museum,” Whitelaw said, “to see these types of projects and work that’s happening and to inspire others with these uncommon collaborations.”

For nominees to be considered, the prize committee was looking for people who had “made significant steps toward solving one or more legacy issues in the American West,” that showcased “exceptional innovation and scalable impact” and found “common ground between competing forces, organizations, agencies, and groups.”

They were also looking for demonstrated leadership, recognition and respect from peers and the potential for system-level impact that could be replicated.

The other finalists were Amy Bowers Cordalis of Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group that was instrumental in the Klamath Dam Removal project; Kelley Delpit of Sustainable Northwest, who works to establish sustainable agriculture practices in Oregon and California; Julie Rentner of River Partners, who has led hundreds of millions of dollars worth of landscape-scale river restoration projects in California; and Laura Van Riper, a former Bureau of Land Management conflict resolution expert whose consulting has helped navigate thorny issues across the West.

Even among the finalists, however, Whitelaw said that Parry stood out. Between the broad cultural and ecologic impact, water is among the most important issues facing the West and the fact that his project will increase the flow to the Great Salt Lake — what Whitelaw called “a symbol for all of us” of “the urgency of the drought in the West” — and found a path forward for such a large tent of partners is as inspiring as it gets.

“We didn’t do this to save the radius of the lake. We didn’t do this to impress people downstream. At first, we thought we were doing a project that was just going to be us building and doing this thing,” Parry said.

But by sticking to their cultural values, Parry and the Shoshone Tribe are doing impressive, beneficial ecological work. And through it, they’re changing the narrative of a massacre into an inspiration.