Building an Archive and Uncovering Stories: Environmental Humanities + Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation

Sequestered in a plain-walled classroom at the J. Willard Marriott Library, people collect in small knots around a series of sturdy, gray archival boxes. Combing through 160+ years of records, the hum of conversation rises into exclamations when someone finds a notable document. Each document identified is part of a collaborative effort between the Environmental Humanities Program, the Department of Communication, Marriott Library, and the Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation (NWBSN) to build an archive in support of the Nation’s ability to preserve and tell its own stories.

Over the past two years, Environmental Humanities Director and Professor of Communication Danielle Endres has led an interdisciplinary team of students and researchers in collaborating with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation on a community-based archive project. Guided by Native Research Methods, the project supports NWBSN sovereignty and ability to tell its own stories/histories through collecting, digitizing and sharing materials from the University of Utah Marriott Library’s Special Collections about NWBSN history. The history of academic and Indigenous collaboration has been fraught with extractive practices, with researchers often taking knowledge and advancing their own careers without returning benefits to the Native community. In contrast, collaborators on this project specifically reject extractive models of research, instead committing to “respect, relationship, representation, relevance, responsibility, and reciprocity,” key principles of Indigenous Research Methods.

“The work of University of Utah students in the archives at the Marriott Library has been greatly enhanced by the support and involvement of Elders from the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. These leaders have provided context and meaning to the papers and reports which students have researched while exploring the historical records,” according to Todd Samuelson, associate dean for Special Collections at the library.

Sharing these materials with the Nation not only helps the Nation to tell their own stories but also contributes to ongoing tribal projects, including the restoration of tribal lands and more. “This program has really been good for the tribe in terms of the information that we can gather. We only have so much here. The tribal elders have really taken it upon themselves to be committed and they really enjoy the research because it’s writings that they may have never seen, or sometimes brand-new information that gives us a perspective on how we lived back then and the events that led us to where we are today,” says Brad Parry, Vice Chairman of the NWBSN. “That’s really the biggest part of this: helping the tribe remember who they are and to be able to explain to people who we are. Information is the most valuable thing you can have.”

While the project is focused on all aspects of NWBSN history, the Nation asked that the project specifically focus on collecting materials about the Bear River Massacre and its aftermath. On January 29, 1863, a group of soldiers led by Colonel Patrick Conner attacked men, women, and children located at a winter site on the Bear River (near present day Preston, Idaho). The Bear River Massacre represents one of the deadliest massacres of Native peoples, with over 450 deaths. The California volunteers and Conner had been stationed at Fort Douglas, now a part of the university and the location of the Environmental Humanities Program. Despite efforts by tribal members such as Mae Parry to preserve oral and written history, the massacre and its aftermath precipitated the loss of many of the NWBSN’s historical materials.

Several years ago the NWBSN purchased the land on which the massacre took place, which set into motion a restoration project. The Wuda Ogwa Water/Land/Habitat Restoration Project is in the process of replacing invasive species with native vegetation, wetlands reparation, and protecting historical artifacts that provide evidence of continuous usage of the lands as a wintering location by NWBSN peoples for at least 4,000 years. The Nation has plans for the development of a community history center and sees the site as a key part of telling their story. 

Several Environmental Humanities and undergraduate Environmental and Sustainability Studies students working on the archive project visited the Wuda Ogwa site to participate in a tree-planting ceremony. Rios Pacheco, Spiritual Advisor of the NWBSN, begins every visit to the site by sharing the history of the location, and a blessing. “The blessing is not just on the land, but to the people who come to work, so they are connected to the spirit of the land and can have conversation that is like talking to your family,” Pacheco says.

The experience for students, connecting the physical historic site to the archival work, is transformative. Caleb Grow, a senior honors student majoring in environmental and sustainability studies who participated in the tree-planting, reflects on his experiences. “The most meaningful experience was when we got to go plant trees at the site of the Bear River Massacre, which is now owned by the Shoshone. It is literally sacred ground,” says Grow. “A Shoshone elder, Rios Pacheco, gave a blessing on the land before we started, which was powerful. It was great to be a part of a meaningful project to restore a sacred area. I believe all people have some sort of sacred ground in their lives, and recognizing and respecting that sacred ground is important to us all.”

The archival project includes a community-based learning component that educates students and grants an opportunity to navigate, in real time, the ethics and praxis of a community research partnership. Students in undergraduate and graduate communication and environmental and sustainability studies courses do archival research in digital newspaper archives and Marriott Library Special Collections on the Nation’s history. Students also learn about the history of the Bear River Massacre and other significant events in the Nation’s history through working with tribal leaders and through their archival research. Says Grow, “It has reminded me that the best form of putting education into practice is when we use that education to strengthen our communities, learning more about other people and the world around us in the process.”

With the support of librarians Dale Larsen, Jessica Breiman, and Rachel Ernst and Graduate Teaching Assistants Jessie Chaplain (Communication) and Caitlin Quirk (Environmental Humanities), students have found over 200 different materials from a variety of newspaper and archival collections. Says Quirk, “One of the highlights for me has been working with students in the archives – it expands their notion of research, and they get to engage with physical materials. It’s a very tactile way to engage with history.”

Beyond the educational value of archival research for undergraduates involved in the project, the collaboration has had a positive social impact as well, turning up materials that have been central to the NWBSN’s goals. “In one of our conversations with Brad Parry, vice-chairman of the Nation, he expressed interest in learning more about the soldiers who were part of the massacre,” says Endres. “It was thrilling to learn that our students found a list of the surviving soldiers. With that list we are now able to expand our archival research in the hopes of finding more information about what they did later in life and if they left records.”

Since the project’s launch in Fall 2022 with Endres undergraduate Indigenous Communication class, students from several in-person and online courses at the U have engaged in this work, including the Graduate Seminar in Indigenous Communication, Communication and Social Responsibility, and Rhetorical Criticism. Jessie Chaplain, who has taught several of the classes, says, “Seeing how much the students learn and are engaged in this process each semester has been so rewarding. Students consistently express how much they appreciate the opportunity to learn from Brad [Parry] and the tribal elders and support the Nation directly.”

Leaders from the NWBSN are also having positive experiences with the project. Maria Moncur, Communication and PR Director from the Nation, speaks highly of the EH program and students. “Danielle and her team have made it super streamlined, and they are so easy to collaborate with,” says Moncur. “It’s been awesome to watch the classes not only learn about pieces of history that they didn’t know existed, and see how they’re excited to learn and uncover. They’ve enjoyed seeing the elders visit the class, and expressed their gratitude.”

The archive project is supported, in part, by an NSF grant led by Anthropology Professor Brian Codding focused on supporting the ecological restoration of the Bear River Massacre site. In support of this project, students are collecting archives that specifically reference ethnobotany (plant/human relationships), trail pathways, and animal species that used the site before and around the time of the massacre. “These archives provide important baselines of what plant and animal communities looked like in the 1900s. We’re combining these with other sources like archaeology and field ecology to stitch together a more holistic picture of the environment that can help inform the restoration of Indigenous ecosystems and relationships with the land,” Codding said.

The project has already opened space for continued collaborations between the U and NWBSN. For example, the NWBSN is now in conversation with Special Collections at the U about field trips to the archives for elders and cultural leaders and methods for storing and digitizing NWBSN archives that follow NWBSN ethical guidelines. Through the process of building this archive together, stories are being uncovered and partnerships are being strengthened through mutual work and reciprocal respect.