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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 59 The Goshutes have lived in the Great Basin region of present-day western Utah and eastern Nevada since what they describe as time immemorial. Al-though there is controversy in Western science over the exact date of Goshute arrival in the Great Basin, the Goshutes certainly predate non-Indian settlers. As is typical of American Indian his-tory, contact between the Goshutes and settlers included a mix of conflict and violence, mission-ary activities, and a few moments of peace. In the early 1900s, the federal government established two Goshute reservations through executive or-ders. The contemporary Goshutes are comprised of two federally recognized nations, each with its own reservation and governance. The Confeder-ated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation is located in the West Desert, straddling western Utah and eastern Nevada. The governing body of the Con-federated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation is a five-person tribal council. The Skull Valley Band of Goshute Reservation is located approximately forty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City in the Skull Valley between the Stansbury and Cedar mountains. A general council (all members of the tribe) and a three-person executive committee serve as the governing units of the Skull Valley Goshute. For nations with limited land holdings, the Gos-hutes have faced many controversial issues re-lated to their sovereign use of that land. From 1996 to 2006, the Skull Valley Band of Goshute engaged in a controversial battle over the storage of 40,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste on their reservation. This delicate and controver-sial issue highlights the Goshute struggle for sov-ereignty and economic independence. The idea of temporary storage of high-level nucle-ar waste first gained the notice of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute in the early 1990s. Due to an-ticipated delays in the Yucca Mountain High Level Nuclear Waste Repository, in 1987 Congress cre-ated the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator with the goal of finding a temporary storage site for high-level nuclear waste until Yucca Mountain opened. The siting process was voluntary, and the agency offered significant monetary compen-sation in exchange for storing high-level nuclear waste. Four Native American nations reached the final stage of consideration: the Skull Valley Band of Goshute, the Mescalero Apache, the Tonkawa, and the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone. Al-though the Skull Valley Band was poised to sign an agreement for a storage facility, Congress cut funding for the program in 1994, before an agree-ment was made. Around the same time, a consortium of energy companies called Private Fuel Storage (PFS) ap-proached the government of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute about leasing reservation land for a temporary high-level nuclear waste disposal site. Private Fuel Storage and the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes signed a lease agreement in 1997, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) approved the proposal in 1998. In September 2005, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved a license for Private Fuel Storage to store 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste on land leased from the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Reservation, but a year later, two separate rulings, one by the BIA under At a Glance: GOSHUTE SOVEREIGNTY AND THE CONTESTED WEST DESERT |