The land that the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe identifies as its homeland is the same land, however changed, that the Spirit Cave Man’s community used.

The same mountains rise to the west.

The same desert stars appear at night.

The same seasonal rhythms — the cold winters, the hot summers, the brief spring when the desert blooms — organize the year.

The people who have maintained a relationship with this land across ten thousand years have not maintained it unchanged.

They have adapted — to the drying of the lake, to the changing of the climate, to the arrival of Europeans, to the transformation of the Great Basin by ranching, mining, and military use.

But they have maintained it.