This Saturday, the inaugural Schnitzer Prize of the West will be awarded to Brad Parry, vice chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, at a ceremony at the Portland Art Museum.
Parry was one of nearly 100 people from 12 states nominated for the new award, which includes $50,000 and will be given annually by the High Desert Museum in Bend in partnership with the Jordan D. Schnitzer and the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation.
Parry is receiving the award because of his leadership of the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project, located on the site of the worst massacre of Native Americans by the U.S. military.
In 1863, a U.S. Army colonel led an attack on a campsite near the Bear River on the Idaho and Utah border, where the ancestors of the Northwestern Shoshone would gather in the winter. An estimated 400 people were murdered, including dozens of women, children and infants.
In 2018, the Northwestern Shoshone purchased the 350-acre property from private owners and began the painstaking process of restoring the site to what it looked like before the massacre.
That includes replacing roughly 400,000 invasive Russian olive trees with willows and native plants; creating 15 acres of wetlands; bringing back beavers, trout, and other native wildlife; and restoring a tributary of the Bear River to send an annual 10,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake.
Parry joins us to share the significance of winning this award and the lessons he’s learned that could apply to other conservation efforts in the West.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project. It’s happening on land in Idaho that was the site of the worst massacre of Native Americans by the U.S. military. That happened in 1863 when an estimated 400 people, including dozens of women, children, and infants, were murdered. Eight years ago, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation bought that land. In the years since they’ve been working to restore it both ecologically and spiritually. That work has been led by my next guest. Brad Parry is a vice chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. On Saturday at a ceremony at the Portland Art Museum, he’s going to be awarded the inaugural Schnitzer Prize of the West for this work. Brad Parry, congratulations and welcome.
Brad Parry: Hey, thanks so much. I appreciate it.
Miller: I want to start in the past. How was this land that you’re working to restore now used, lived on, experienced by Indigenous people before Euro-Americans arrived?
Parry: Yeah, so this particular place, we would call Sowo Gahni, meaning “home of the lungs,” because there were several natural hot springs in the area, kind of with a little salt in it. And so every winter, the Northwestern band would go there. And other Shoshone bands would come and winter there, and they would basically have a powwow for a while. I mean, it just wasn’t one day.
They called it the warm dance, which was meant to bring on the spring. And so you got to catch up with old friends, you usually met your mate at one of those situations. And it was very cold in that part of the valley and so the hot springs provided warmth and geothermal on the ground and so we traditionally use that for our winter olympics, our winter gatherings and basically everything that was provided for us, fish, deer, birds.
Miller: And then what happened on January 29, 1863?
Parry: Colonel Connor at Fort Douglas had planned an attack on our little Indian village, and on the 29th that was carried out in 1863. And the command that the soldier gave was “Kill them all and nits make lice.” And so they spared no one and completely decimated the tribe and burned all of the homes and just had really wanted to destroy us all and then left. And we gathered up our wounded and moved out of there and just left the dead lying upon the ground, and so they stay as they lay, basically.
Miller: What did you hear about the massacre from your own family members?
Parry: I heard quite a lot about it. My grandmother, Mae Timbimboo Parry, she was a storyteller and a historian here and always would make us read her stories or the things that she wrote, but she lived with her grandfather, who was a survivor of the massacre. He was about 14 years old, and with his grandmother, he laid on the ground and played dead and just kind of watched everything happen. And when they were moved into an ecclesiastical farming situation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she grew up around many survivors.
And so we were always told how Chief Sagwitch got away and how Jaeger got away and what they thought would happen is a negotiation, but the army had other plans. But yeah, I heard and have been shown the places where things happened and photos that she gave me, and on the back just kind of wrote, hey, this is where this happened, where this has happened. And so that was just part of my life.
Miller: I wanted to start with that land and tribal and familial history before we got into your own work story. You had a career, as I understand it, sort of moving up the federal workforce ladder at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and then you made a big switch. Why?
Parry: Yeah, so I grew up in the federal system at the Bureau of Reclamation and I was leaving there to join the USDA, as one of the assistant state conservationists. And then a week before I was supposed to go, I just went down there and said I can’t take this. My tribal family is calling me home. And so the tribe had reached out, because we had purchased the land and they knew what I did for a living and so I was asked, “Hey, could we convert this into something ecological?” and I said, “Oh yeah, we can do that.” And so the tribe asked me. And so, yeah, I left a really good career, a really safe career, to come to a place where they were, well, there’s no money for your program because it’s not a program underneath the BIA, so no grants, no jobs. So we’ve worked pretty hard for the grants we get.
Miller: Why did you do it? Why did you make that switch?
Parry: It’s just, it’s my family, it’s the tribe. When the tribal elders ask you to come and help, to me, that’s just what you do. I call it going home. I knew I had a vision and that I could actually do it. There’s just that feeling you get and then you come and you give back. I mean, they helped pay for my schooling. Contrary to popular belief, Indians don’t get free schooling everywhere. And so the tribe helped me out with my university studies and always supported me and so it’s my turn to come back.
Miller: When the tribe bought the parcel of land that we’re talking about, what were the plans for it?
Parry: We purchased it and we just kind of looked at it and didn’t really have any plans up front. The first plan was on site to build like an interpretive center, like a museum. And so people were fundraising for that and we got a design and everything done and through several location changes, we thought we had picked one, but then COVID came and no money was coming in. And I needed to start getting grants and so I just explained to the tribal council and to the tribal elders that this place is infested with invasive species, it’s just that we have the dirtiest water in the entire Bear River system, and it’s just dry grazing land. And so we just talked about it and I was asked to create a plan.
Miller: What are the overall goals of the Wuda Ogwa Restoration Project?
Parry: Yeah, and Wuda Ogwa just translates to “Bear River.” I mean, that’s our literal translation in our language.
Miller: It sits on the border of Utah and Idaho, essentially.
Parry: Yes, it’s like, it’s like eight to nine miles north of the Utah border. At the time the settlers there considered that they were in Utah, and so lines got drawn afterwards. So the goal of the project is really to take it back in time, back to when our people used to camp there and try and resonate that as best as possible. By doing that, it’s just our cultural practice, it’s our spiritual practice. That’s just what we do, we need to be stewards of the land.
And by making those changes and doing that ecological restoration, automatically, it’s climate adaptive, it’s drought resistant. You start cleaning the water and you get more water quantity, water quality. And you get native trees and things in there and you just make it kind of a wetlands beautiful place. It won’t be exactly what it looked like back then, but our hope is that our ancestors can look at it and recognize it, because I don’t think they recognize it right now.
Miller: How much can you restore the land to what it was pre-contact when fossil fuel emissions have changed the climate so much in the intervening time?
Parry: Yeah, so we looked at it and we just figured that we’re gonna use modern science, we’re gonna use the modern science techniques, biology, engineering and geology and those sorts of things, and weave that together with our cultural and spiritual know-how and heritage. And so we know what native plants were growing there and we’ve done studies on that and we understand how the water works and how it will move. And so one day, because of all the fossil fuel emissions and all that kind of stuff going on, one day this site, Mother Nature will just take over and we’ll take our hands off of it, and it’ll just thrive on its own and it should help continue to grow things downstream and around the area.
Miller: If you’re just tuning in, I’m talking right now with Brad Parry. He is the vice chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. On Saturday, he’s going to be awarded the inaugural Schnitzer Prize of the West for his work on the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project. I want to go back to something you mentioned briefly just now about water, because it seems like you’re doing a kind of magic trick. How are you able to restore wetlands and at the same time return an estimated 10,000 acre feet of water each year to Great Salt Lake?
Parry: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, that’s where my background with the Bureau of Reclamation came in because we did piping projects and other projects like that, that were meant for the same thing. But what we’re doing is, the creek used to be called Beaver Creek, and we camped all along it. There were many fingerlings to the creek. After the massacre, it was renamed to Battle Creek. And the farmers came in and phenomenal effort for the 1880s to take out a running creek and channelize it, make it go straight, and then cover the land and make it flat, so they could work it.
Water doesn’t like to go straight. It picks up sediment, it picks up other pollutants. Water needs to turn and naturally meander its way to the next point. And so we went through and looked at our water rights, what we had, and started looking at laterals and things. And so we used, we’ve put pipes in the ground where the water’s delivered so it’s not being lost into side hills and into evaporation and things. And that’s really helped our water quality and quantity. And when we move the river back, it’ll start to just branch out and water everything.
We won’t need sprinklers, we won’t need to flood irrigate, which is not an ideal way to irrigate and you lose a lot of water that way. And so what we’re doing is we’re just preventing water loss by running it from the head of the creek there to about a mile across our land. And so with those sorts of techniques, we’ll be able to continually do that. The wetlands will expand and the wetlands is just a water filter, it filters out all those things. It helps keep the native vegetation around there alive.
And the invasive species up there, the Russian olive trees, we calculated about 400,000 of them on our property, and they take upwards of 75 to 225 gallons of water out of the system a day because they hold the water. Whereas like a cottonwood tree will use what it uses and then return it to the river with oxygen. And so, based on the things that we’ve calculated, we just said, hey, here’s how much water we’re no longer gonna lose. And that’s our goal, and we have monitors all over the place to kind of make sure we hit that goal.
Miller: Rios Pacheco, a spiritual leader of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, has said that this is not just a project to restore land, but to restore the spirit of forgiveness. How do you do that?
Parry: You invite people to come up and volunteer, you invite people to come up and help, you invite people to come up and be part of the thing. And you go out into the community and talk with people and become friends. And for a long time we’ve all been very upset, bitter, mad, and it’s just time to be done. And we shouldn’t answer for the sins of our father.
And so we have created a place where people want to come and volunteer. I mean, pull weeds, plant trees, whatever sort of volunteering day we have, and it’s the community. And they’re so different. I mean, everyone from any sort of race that you can think of or ethnicity, they all come, and we all get together and we’re friends, and we’re bonding ourselves together to the land and so it’s hard not to forgive. You look at it and think, you know what, this is over. We’re gonna change, we’re gonna change the spirit of this place, we’re gonna change the narrative. And that, like Rios said, that’s with forgiveness, that’s how we do that.
Miller: What lessons have you learned from this project that you think could apply to other restoration or conservation initiatives in the West?
Parry: The first thing that I’ve learned is you need a lot of collaborators. We have so many, I won’t even go on to start to try and name them all. Western Rivers, that’s there in Portland and in Bend is one of our collaborators, those guys are the experts. And so you find who wants to work with you and apply for grants and just build a good team of people that can make ideas and suggestions so you don’t just get so short-sighted sometimes. And look, the other thing is that you can only have one boss. I mean, there’s one guy at the top because once other people think they’ve been delegated some sort of authority, things go out of the way, and I used to see that on projects I used to do.
Miller: But now you’re the boss.
Parry: Yeah, I’m the only guy. It’s me, and… I mean, we only have 350 acres to restore, that’s all we have. It’s not a very big project, but we’re doing as much as we can on it, and people don’t have to do that. I mean, we did it in phases. We said, well, let’s do this first, and that led to, hey, that means we could do this, and then that means we could do this, and so we just phased it out, and so that was really helpful. And so in the West, you kinda have to do that.
You kinda have to do everything in a little bit of a phase, one, for funding, it’s those federal funding quarters, you just kinda have to plan on them and not take too big a bite of the apple at first. But that’s what we’ve learned and the other thing is we’ve learned that the ground and Mother Nature will tell you what you can and can’t plant there, what you can and can’t do, and so you have to be quick to adapt and find another solution.
Miller: Brad, thanks very much.
Parry: Yeah, thank you very much for having me on.
Miller: Brad Parry is going to be on Saturday, the inaugural winner of the Schnitzer Prize of the West. The ceremony will be at the Portland Art Museum. He is vice chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and the leader of the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
