Western Shoshone

A people

The General Grant Tree, a giant sequoia, rising above the surrounding forest in Grant Grove, Kings Canyon National Park.
Marty Aligata, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Background

The Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone calls its people descendants of a people once widespread whose name is Newe, and gives their country as southern Idaho, the central part of Nevada, portions of northwestern Utah and the Death Valley region of southern California. Before contact with white culture the Newe divided into small extended family groups who confined themselves to specific areas for hunting and gathering, and white settlers renamed them Shoshone during the 1820s. One of those groups was the Wells Band, whose members named themselves Kuiyudika after a desert plant used for food. Within that group the same tribe's page counts at least two other smaller groups, the Doyogadzu Newenee and the Waiha-Muta Newenee. Of the five peoples Sequoia and Kings Canyon name as the homelands the parks cover, the Western Shoshone are one.

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Parks on its homelands

The General Grant Tree, a giant sequoia, rising above the surrounding forest in Grant Grove, Kings Canyon National Park.Kings Canyon National Park

The Western Shoshone are counted by NPS among the five peoples whose homelands are Sequoia and Kings Canyon, and the park says the descendants of all five still steward and tend the land inside both boundaries. Source

The General Sherman Tree, a massive giant sequoia, rising among smaller conifers in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park.Sequoia National Park

The Big Pine Band of Owens Valley Paiute Shoshone Indians' own account of the seasonal round has ancestors taking pine nuts in the mountains in the fall and seeds, berries and roots on the valley floor in spring, with water the one variable nobody could predict. Source

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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