Traces of Peehee Mu'huh: Infrastructures of Sustainability and Sovereignty in Nevada's Quinn River Valley

Abstract: In 2020, the US government fast-tracked the permitting process for a subsidiary of a transnational mining corporation to develop an open pit mine and lithium-processing facility at a site in the McDermitt Caldera in Nevada. The site, known as Peehee Mu'huh, or Thacker Pass, is sacred for numerous tribes in the Great Basin and was the location of a massacre in 1865 of Paiute families by US federal soldiers. This essay examines the court case that challenged the mine, specifically the court's treatment of tribal plaintiffs and descendants. By contextualizing the massacre in a summer of violent territorialization and reexamining evidence submitted to the court, this essay argues that Thacker Pass's historical and contemporary connections show a recursive elimination in which the US settler state asserts its sovereignty through the original 1865 massacre, management of the site as public land, the federal court's denial of descendants' claims, and finally in the land disturbance. Which histories are ignored or dismissed in contemporary debates over the green energy transition risks turning renewable energy into yet another story of environmental injustice. Much of contemporary climate change rhetoric orients our vision toward the future, but the history of US colonization is crucial to debates over decarbonization. Without seriously reckoning with the histories of US settler colonialism, racial violence, and capitalism, generalized hopes of "a just transition" are made hollow and eclipsed by the business imperatives of an emerging renewable energy market.