Western Shoshone tribe asks U.N. for help in land dispute

GENEVA — A group of American Indians appealed for the United Nations to condemn what they said were abuses of their ancient land rights by the U.S. federal government.

Leaders of the Western Shoshone said Tuesday they hoped a U.N. panel would back their case that the American government is trying to chase them off their ancestral territory, causing them physical, economic and cultural hardship and violating U.N. human rights treaties.

"We are here hoping that the international community can put pressure on the United States to stop its discriminatory conduct against the Western Shoshone people," said tribal elder Carrie Dann.

The Western Shoshone tribes — numbering about 6,600 — live mainly in the western states of Nevada, California, Idaho and Utah.

Dann and her sister Mary have been a focal point of a dispute over land since the government sued them in 1974 for grazing livestock on federal land.

The Shoshone delegation said the U.S. government has authorized the use of environmentally damaging cyanide for gold mining and approved military testing and nuclear waste storage on Shoshone lands.

Some 85 percent of Nevada is federal land, and the Nevada Public Lands Act aims to sell it off to private companies, the Shoshone said.

The Shoshone have asked a U.N. panel — the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination — to condemn the United States, arguing that the U.S. action amounts to racism.

A ruling by the committee in 1999 gave hope to indigenous groups around the world by declaring that Australia should suspend implementation of new land rights laws as they discriminated against Aborigines.

The committee has been reviewing a report by U.S. authorities on the government's compliance with an international anti-discrimination treaty which the United States ratified in 1994. The panel is expected to issue its ruling on the U.S. compliance report next week.

On Monday the U.S. Justice Department's newly confirmed civil rights head Ralph Boyd Jr. responded to the panel's questions about the Shoshone case.

Boyd said that U.S. law stated that "as a result of European discovery the Native Americans had a right to occupancy and possession, but that tribal rights to complete sovereignty were necessarily diminished by the principle that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it."