Despite how small, remote, and economically challenged the village is, Durham sees the Homeland Act as a key player in the country’s environmental and cultural healing. Death Valley is the only case in which the U.S. government has returned park land to its Indigenous inhabitants. Much of the opposition to the Homeland Act was on the grounds that it could set a precedent according to which other tribes would demand the return of federally managed land. The future of the Homeland Act, therefore, matters not only to the residents of the village, or to the Death Valley region, but to the future of the entire National Park Service, whose director, Chuck Sams III, is the first Native American in that role.
And something even bigger is at stake. Death Valley is the largest federally designated wilderness in the lower 48 states. This makes it central to the new national climate strategy, which focuses on wilderness as a primary tool in climate change mitigation. In the era of Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous secretary of the interior, environmentalists are looking to native knowledges and Indigenous land use across the globe more than ever to fortify wilderness conservation strategies.
But the Timbisha need more than just the right to their ancestral land. Living in the hottest place on earth, they need active, ongoing help with stewardship. Durham was happiest during the Covid closure, with all the park staff and tourists gone—“I miss it,” she said. “It was like it must have been long ago, was when it was just us.” But at the same time, she hopes for more involvement from the park service in protecting the Timbisha way of life. For the past three summers, the temperature in Furnace Creek has reached 130 degrees. The pine nuts have been drying up earlier in the year than they used to, pushing the harvest into August rather than September. But August is too hot, and the migration has become too dangerous to continue without housing to protect from the heat. As a result, there has been no piñon harvest for three years. According to Durham, the Timbisha want to use the existing park service housing in the Panamint—uninhabitable after decades of standing empty—to live in during the hottest months, and they are waiting for the park service to fix up those homes. (Multiple requests for comment to the Park Service went unanswered.)