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Show THE GOSHUTES W E S H A L L R E M A I N : U TA H I N D I A N C U R R I C U L U M G U I D E 118 assistance, farming undercut traditions of mobil-ity and familial independence. Goshute members who did attempt to farm encountered difficulties. Within a few years, the government-sponsored farming experiment failed due to a lack of federal support and because as one local white official reminded the Commis-sioner of Indian Affairs in 1862, "much of the tillable portion of the desert-like country had been occupied by whites." In 1863, in another ef-fort to survive the invasion of their homeland, the Goshutes signed a treaty with the U.S. government that affirmed the tribe's sovereign land rights. By 1870 a number of Goshutes had resumed farming operations at both Deep Creek and Skull Valley. Yet even with this success, the support of the new local Indian superintendent, and the 1863 treaty, the Goshutes found that white settlers were still encroaching on the few decent pieces of farmland remaining in tribal control. The next decade saw the Goshutes fighting on another front. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs failed to appreciate the tribe's effort to adapt to white ways and called for the removal of the Goshutes to the reservation the govern-ment was establishing in the Uintah Valley, over two hundred miles east of the Goshute homeland. Of all Utah's tribal nations, the Goshutes appeared most resistant to displace-ment. William Lee, a Mormon farmer who served as both translator and frequent advocate for the Goshutes, reported that "They are willing to do anything on their own land, the land of their fathers . . . they are not willing to go to the land of the stranger." That reasoning did not convince government representatives, who in 1872 and 1873 recommended moving the Goshutes to the Uintah Reservation, Fort Hall, Idaho, or Indian Territory in Oklahoma. These efforts prompt-ed yet another adaptive strategy on the part of the Goshutes. Skull Valley leaders attempted to shape federal policy by seeking the support of officials with leverage in Washington; in the end, they successfully avoided a variety of relocation efforts. Through ingenuity and an unswerving dedi-cation to the place they called home, the Goshutes made it into the twentieth century still in control of some of their homeland. How-ever, their adaptive skills could not overcome all the challenges brought by the presence of so many outsiders. The Goshutes were unable to sustain their traditional mobile way of life, and, reflecting a trend initiated with the arrival of white settlers, the Goshute popula-tion continued to dwindle. But remaining tribal members kept fighting for their own and their tribe's survival. Around World War I, the federal government finally reacted to persistent Goshute efforts by creating reservations at Skull Valley and Deep Creek, and the Goshutes subsequently negotiated with the government to increase these land holdings. Goshute adaptability still is evident today. At the end of the twentieth century, the Skull Valley Goshutes asserted their sovereignty in a unique and ingenious way in order to persist as a people. To learn more about the Goshutes' twentieth-century land right and sovereignty issues, see the "Skull Valley Goshute and the Nuclear Waste Storage Controversy" lesson plan and We Shall Remain: The Goshute. |