Hearing Set on Motion to Block Nevada Gold Mine

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RENO, Nev. (AP) - A federal judge will hear arguments next week in Reno on a motion by a group of American Indians and an environmental group seeking to block a big gold mine already taking shape in northern Nevada.

U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks scheduled a hearing Monday on the motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction sought by members of the Western Shoshone and Great Basin Resource Watch against Barrick Gold Corp.'s Cortez Project in Crescent Valley.

Barrick, headquartered in Toronto, earlier this month received approval from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for the mine that the company has said will produce about 1 million ounces of gold a year in its first full five years of production.

Barrick also said it signed an agreement with several Western Shoshone leaders to help improve education, business and job opportunities for tribal members.

Underground mining is to start this year and the open-pit operation should start in late 2009 or early 2010.

But Western Shoshone critics, in a lawsuit filed last week, argue an environmental study was flawed and that the project will engulf and desecrate Mount Tenabo, a site used by the Shoshone for religious purposes.

Barrick spokesman Lou Schack has said the suit lacks merit and that mining in the region has occurred since the late 1800s.

Schack also argues the project will be good for Nevada's mining economy.

On Wednesday, critics of the mine gathered at the site for what they called a "day of resistance."

"Today we went to a war zone, a war zone against the trees by the Barrick Gold company," Carrie Dann, a Western Shoshone grandmother, said in a written statement issued Thursday.

"If people can eat or drink gold to sustain life, maybe we can call it a sacrifice of the life of trees, trees that gives us pine nuts and other medicinal uses," she said.

The Dann family has fought with the federal government for decades over public land management, mostly involving grazing issues.

In 2003, the BLM seized hundreds of horses from Dann and her sister, Mary, who died in 2005.

The roundup and removal of more than 500 horses came after the BLM said the sisters grazed the animals illegally for decades, to the detriment of the range and other ranchers who have permits to graze livestock in the region.

That roundup followed one a few months earlier, where the federal agency seized and sold 227 cattle belonging to the elderly grandmothers.

Throughout their legal battles, the Danns and some other tribal leaders have argued that the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley gave the tribe title to up to 93,750 square miles of ancestral lands sprawled across what is now part of Nevada, Utah, Idaho and California.

They raise the same argument in their current legal battle against the gold mine.

"Mount Tenabo is in the heart of Western Shoshone territory and is part of the ancestral lands that has been identified and recognized as Western Shoshone territory through the ratification of the Treaty of Ruby Valley between the Western Shoshone and the United States," the group said Thursday's statement.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)