The Small Shall Be Strong

Smaller American Indian tribes, including the Washoe, are only now receiving professional historical attention, yet all have instructive historical stories to tell. The Washoe, for example, used the legal system, including the Dawes Act (1887), to protect eighty thousand acres of their land. Like the Osage, who used the law to protect their oil, the Washoe utilized their treaties as lockboxes to protect their rights and cultures—and their language—a process that Matthew S. Makley describes as continuing to this day. Other small tribes, such as the Muckleshoots of western Washington (with about 2,500 people) have done the same. Their histories, of which Makley's is an outstanding example, are now emerging to complement the better-known histories of larger peoples. For several thousand years, the Washoes have occupied lands surrounding Lake Tahoe near the Sierra Nevada in a homeland extending along the eastern Sierra Nevada and the western Great Basin, the waters of which they hold sacred, and that have also become known around the world as a tourist destination

Archaeology · Ethnology · Geography · Homeland · Political science · Spear · Structural basin · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies · Geology · History · Law · Paleontology