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Show Goshute T H E G O S H U T E S 6 2 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 I would think if people are so concerned about their health and radioactivity etcetera, they ought to be concerned about particles and the pollution in the air in Salt Lake Valley. That's certainly a far more serious situation here. And they ought to be concerned about the emissions that are coming from the coal firing plants-power plants in our state. And, of course, there's so much politics and money involved in that. They're not about to even consider that. And the idea that you can have clean coal-burning plants is a fiasco also. I heard the good side of that and then I heard the bad side of that and I've come to realize that that's a joke. We need to be pursuing alternative sources of energy with rigor, not in a mediocre fashion or as something we can do in our spare time. This needs to be taken seriously. DE: So you mentioned several times that there were fairness issues, . . . that it was unfair. Who was it unfair to? FC: It was unfair to the [Skull Valley] Goshutes. It was unfair to Leon [Bear], the chairman of the Skull Valley Tribe. He was villianized as the bad guy, the person who wants to expose Utah citi-zens to waste-nuclear waste. And there have been far more bad guys that have endangered the health of Utah citizens far more than Leon Bear. You have the atomic energy experimentations. You have nuclear bombs in Nevada, the [Nevada] Test Site. Then a lot of the fallout was entering Utah and a lot of people were exposed to the fall-out and consequently died of cancer-various forms of cancer. And they certainly were far more dangerous than Leon Bear. The originators and the operators with Envirocare and now, Energy Solutions are far more dangerous to Utah citi-zens than Leon Bear. The owners and operators of Magcorp that were dumping tens of thousands of gallons of waste from chlorine gas into the air-and they've been doing that for some thirty years-are far more dangerous than Leon Bear. But these people are never spoken about. You know, you don't hear anything about them. They get away with it. And they make millions of dol-lars in the process. And that's not fair. It's not fair that some people in this state get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars not to grow crops while my brother and I barely can't-we lose money raising hay to feed our horses. Some of these are very wealthy people that are getting paid by U.S. Department of Agriculture. So there's lots of un-fairness you know. DE: So can you talk about the role of sovereignty and in relationship I think to this unfairness that you're talking about or just in general to the Skull Valley situation. FC: Well sovereignty is like freedom to the Ameri-can citizens who talk about fighting and dying for freedom. American Indians have fought and died for sovereignty. Sovereignty existed here before the Europeans-Euro-Americans ever entered this continent. Indian nations were governing themselves and they had the full authority to do so. And the colonial governments dealt with In-dian nations accordingly because at the time they had to. The Indian nations were strong enough militarily to defend themselves and to wage costly wars against the colonials. And so the sovereignty that Indian people enjoy today was brought about as a consequence of war. In the State of Utah alone there were over 150 battles fought between all the tribes and the Mormon settlers. This was a bloody confrontation. People would have you believe otherwise but it's not true. There were lots of bloody confrontations here. One of the largest military encounters in the United States was the Bear River Massacre. And although it was in southern Idaho-just over the border-it involved Utah American Indians, the northwest band Shoshone. So sovereignty nowadays comes about as a result of war, which is based at the end of those wars, and then people surrendered certain rights in re-turn for agreements in exchange for land. Certain services were guaranteed by the U.S. government in exchange for peace and for those lands. And those services range from education to housing to health. And those agreements are still in force today because those treaties were considered international instruments of law and they are binding to this day. They have an international |