"That’s really what this project’s about, just getting people excited about who we are, and where we’ve come from, and how we’ve survived," said Brad Parry, vice chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and the tribe’s natural resources officer.
He is also the first winner of the Schnitzer Prize of the West, an award from the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, created to recognize collaboration and innovation around environmental challenges in the American West.
“For people to recognize that, it means a lot to me," Parry said. "It’s very humbling.”
The award, presented to Parry on Saturday, May 16th at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, recognizes his leadership with the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project at the site of the Bear River Massacre near Preston, Idaho.
This is the place where, on January 29, 1863, more than 400 Northwestern Shoshone people were killed by U.S. troops in one of the deadliest massacres of Native Americans in U.S. history. Meaning this land is not only a restoration site.
“That's our Arlington Cemetery," Parry said. "People are buried there.”
For years, he said, going to the site felt heavy. But today, the tribe is changing what people experience there. Volunteers, students, universities, conservation groups, government agencies, and community partners are helping to restore the land.
“It's our way of honoring the lives that were lost there, and that are still in the ground there," Parry said. "It's our way of showing them that they haven't been forgotten.”
Right now, much of restoration work is physical: moving earth, rebuilding creek meanders, planting cottonwoods and other native plants, and trying to bring back wetlands and cleaner water. But Parry said that won’t always be the case.
“Our ultimate goal is just hands off, and Mother Nature takes over and the environment survives on its own," he said.
When he imagines the site 10 or 15 years from now, Parry sees a place transformed.
“I want to go up on a hill and look over and what I envision seeing is creeks running, beavers building dams, cottonwood trees all around,” he said.
For Parry, restoration here is not just about repairing a damaged landscape. It is about returning life to a place where his people were once nearly erased, and making sure that their memory has roots, water, and a future.
“We’re still here, and we have a story to tell," Parry said.
