Native Americans on the South Fork of the Snake River

Today is Indigenous Peoples Day! One of the best ways to celebrate is to learn about the history of Native Americans in our area. These pages are scans from the book, Our Turn In Paradise: On the South Fork of the Snake River by Lynn Wiese.  Copies are available for sale. Contact us via email (svoldtimers@gmail.com) to get your very own copy.  It's a great book.

In this section, Lynn provides a lot of background information about the sentiments of the time regarding native Americans.  I've highlighted some keywords pertaining to Grand Valley for the Atlas of Drowned Towns because I'm still working on that project, telling a complete story of the people of Grand Valley before and after the land was claimed by government, both to gift to white settlers through the Homestead and Desert Lands Acts and later displacing them all for the Palisades Dam Project that flooded the farms, businesses, town-sites, schools, and unrecognized indigenous sites in 1958.

Although it wasn’t the Palisades Dam project that drove the Native Americans from Grand Valley, it was the Federal Government policies that privatized the lands and gave white settlers the ability to stake claim to the lands they historically hunted, fished and gathered from. Lynn Wiese tells a very fair story of the plight of Native Americans. I think there's an interesting parallel between the natives being driven from the lands they were the stewards of and the settlers being driven from the same lands by the same government.