Vox features Ph.D. student helping Shoshone restoration project
In a story about the Land Back movement and restoration and climate resilience projects conducted by Indigenous communities on land they reclaim, Vox interviewed Jason Brough, a Ph.D. student in anthropology and environmental policy at the University of Maine and tribal member of the Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation. Brough helped map over 500 acres of land bought back by Northwestern Shoshone in 2018 known as the Wuda Ogwa site, where the Bear River Massacre — likely the largest single-day massacre of Indigenous people in U.S. history — occurred. According to Vox, the band wants to help make the area more climate resilient through the planting of native trees and the restoration of a wetland complex, which will add an estimated 10,000 acre-feet of water or more to the disappearing Great Salt Lake. “We see time and time again, those places become productive ecologically,” Brough said of Indigenous projects on reclaimed land — meaning those lands “start having benefits for not just our own communities, but for everybody.”