Pyramid Lake Nevada
Pyramid Lake 1867 (photo Timothy O'Sullivan)
1976. An investigation into the lamentable state of a paiute reservation in the Nevada desert.


Comment: In this 1976 documentary film, the son of the great Red Cloud, chief of the Sioux Nation, repeated the words his father spoke on behalf of all Indians:
Now that you have been forced to surrender, you must put aside the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and ignore the hungry. And when your house is built, and your storerooms filled, you must look around for a neighbor to take advantage of and seize all he has. That is the way it is now, the way to get rich, the way of the white man.



Comment: The film continues looking into the Derby Dam water diversion that bled off water from the Truckee River flowing downstream into Pyramid Lake and Winnemucca Lake (dried up since the 1930's), along with its many Petroglyphs.

A History of Exploitation, Conflict, and Resolution
Post-European settler John C. Fremont first "discovered" Pyramid Lake in 1844, however the defining event in Pyramid Lake and Truckee River basin history was the Newland's Project, the nation's first major reclamation and interbasin water transfer project. The cornerstone of the Newland's Project was Derby Dam, constructed on the Truckee River in 1905 to divert river water to irrigate thousands of acres in the arid Carson Desert (Wagner and Lebo, 1996). Between 1918 and 1970, average net diversions from the Truckee River to the Newland's Project were approximately 250,000 acre-feet per year, or 50 percent of total flow for that period. During this time, two native fish species were severely affected: the cui-ui (genus Chamistes, pronounced "kwee wee"), a lake sucker found only in Pyramid Lake, and the Lahontan cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki henshawi), which became extinct in Pyramid Lake in the 1940s
From the film, and according to John Pilger, the last chairman of the Pyramid Lake Council, James Vidovich, had these stern words to say:
You are not content for the damage you have already done. So long as there is a lake, a stream, a forest, a grassland, you must manage it, you must dam it, channel it, forest it. Can you not leave one thing untouched? Can you not leave one people alone? Can you not honor one promise? Can you not respect even one stream? One nearly extinct breed of fish, and one natural Lake? We have rights too, rights to life that you cannot disturb because they were not yours to give. You would take even those from us.