To the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, Wuda Ogwa is the name of what we call Bear River. During the winter in 1863, near where Preston, Idaho is located, between 400 and 450 tribal members were killed in one of the deadliest massacres of Native Americans in U.S. history.
Since 2018, when the tribe purchased the 350-acre site from private owners, it set in motion the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project, born of extraordinary collaboration, with twin goals in mind.
One goal encompasses environmental restoration on a multifaceted scale: returning the land to its natural state by putting the creek back in its historic path and removing what didn’t belong. The project has led to removing invasive species, planting more than 70,000 native plants, restoring wetlands, and ensuring that water from a Bear River tributary can flow more freely downstream, benefitting local farmers, neighboring communities, and ultimately the Great Salt Lake, where every 10,000 acre-feet of water will be needed to stave off its existential crisis.
The second goal of the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project is the reclamation of that tribal history by research methods focusing on principles of Indigenous Research Methods on respect, relationship, representation, relevance, responsibility, and reciprocity. With the assistance of staff from the University of Utah Marriott Library’s Special Collections, tribal elders and cultural leaders became familiarized with the archival process to tell their stories, as library staff have established methods for storing and digitizing tribal archives which adhere to the tribe’s ethical principles. The tribal digital collections and oral histories are now available in digital archives at Utah State University in Logan.
In the current moment when the Intermountain West region is beleaguered by an existential environmental crisis that alarmingly could worsen due to irresponsible decisions, one hopes for acts of restoring the natural environment that can reverse this dire course. One also can respect that reclaiming Indigenous history and culture can also help to heal nature and its lands by recognizing and respecting the ideal that each of us, to one extent or another, has sacred ground to which we are spiritually connected.
This week, Brad Parry, the vice chair of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation in Ogden and leader of the Wuda Ogwa Cultural and Land Restoration Project, will receive the inaugural Schnitzer Prize of the West. The $50,000 award, which will be presented May 16 by the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, is the first of its kind in the American West.
The prize’s timing could not have been more wisely chosen. Launched in partnership with Jordan D. Schnitzer and the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, the inaugural Schnitzer Prize of the West draws us to recognize that innovative collaborations, even with unlikely partners that we historically have been skeptical about or have outright not trusted, are still possible and impactful. More importantly, issues of sovereignty, ecological restoration and water security can feasibly intersect with each other, as stakeholders and communities learn more about the history of the site and its surroundings.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Parry said given “we didn’t have a winter and we continue to be in a really bad drought, working together with different people to bring projects to save the west and protect Mother Earth is more important than ever and this award could not have come at a better time to emphasize the point.”
Parry’s capacity to network is a marvelous case study. He is actively involved as a member of the Weber River Commission, the Bear River Commission, the Jordan River Commission, the Great Salt Lake Advisory and the University of Utah’s Board for Native Excellence and Tribal Engagement. He worked more than 16 years with the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, focusing on water quality improvement and Colorado River Basin salinity control. Growing up in Syracuse, Utah, near the Great Salt Lake, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah.
Parry has strengthened connections linking tribal elders and cultural leaders to local biologists, ecologists, engineers, as well as community groups including Youth Coalition for Great Salt Lake, Friends of Great Salt Lake, Tree Utah, governmental and public agencies, commercial enterprises and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of the most impressive examples come from newfound connections with academia, which Indigenous elders typically mistrusted because scholars resorted to extractive practices, and which involved “taking knowledge and advancing their own careers without returning benefits to the Native community,” as explained in a 2025 University of Utah Humanities feature dispatch by Sumiko Martinez and Danielle Endres.
The archival documentation requires enormous effort. “That’s really the biggest part of this: helping the tribe remember who they are and to be able to explain to people who we are. Information is the most valuable thing you can have,” Parry said, in an interview for the university news feature. Patrick Conner, the U.S. colonel who led the attacks against the tribe, was stationed at Fort Douglas, now part of the University of Utah and home to the environmental humanities program. While Mae Timbimboo Parry, who died in 2007, worked to preserve the oral and written accounts as historian and matriarch of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone, many of the tribe’s historical materials were lost in the massacre’s wake. As Katie McKellar noted in a 2025 Utah News Dispatch feature about the Bear River Massacre site, “‘This is a graveyard. This is our Arlington Cemetery,’” Parry said in a PBS documentary about the tribe’s restoration project. ‘This is where our people had to fight for their freedom to exist.’”
In addition to the collaboration with the university’s special collections staff at the Marriott Library on the history of the Bear River Massacre, the work has been supported through a National Science Foundation grant which Brian Codding, professor of anthropology, received for supporting the ecological restoration of the Bear River Massacre site. “These archives provide important baselines of what plant and animal communities looked like in the 1900s. We’re combining these with other sources like archaeology and field ecology to stitch together a more holistic picture of the environment that can help inform the restoration of Indigenous ecosystems and relationships with the land,” Codding said, in the 2025 university news feature.
Likewise, students in the university’s environmental humanities and environmental and sustainability studies programs visited the Wuda Ogwa, where they planted trees. During each visit, Rios Pacheco, tribal spiritual advisor, talked about the site’s historical significance and offered a blessing. In that same university news feature, Pacheco explained, “The blessing is not just on the land, but to the people who come to work, so they are connected to the spirit of the land and can have conversation that is like talking to your family.” As noted in last year’s Utah News Dispatch feature, project partners have planted and seeded about 69,000 native plants across 111 acres and by next year, they expect to plant an additional 130,000 covering 250 acres.
In a statement regarding the Schnitzer Prize, Pacheco amplified the significance of the collaboration: “How we view the restoration is a project not just of restoring the land, but restoring the spirit of forgiveness, and that starts with a small seed. We bring volunteers that come out to plant those seeds, and when they plant it, they bring new friends and family with them. Restoration brings brightness, hope, resilience, and remembrance, but most of all, it brings forgiveness of the past to continue forward in the future. And that’s what this project is.”
Parry said efforts continue to raise funds for a stone amphitheater and a Cultural Interpretive Center, which will memorialize the site’s history as a landmark to the Northwestern Shoshone’s resilience and their journey to federal recognition.
Parry was selected for the prize from nearly 100 nominees representing 12 states, by an advisory panel of 13 with backgrounds in tribal leadership, ranching and farming, water policy and river restoration, and prominent academic centers focused on the American West. In addition, four finalists will each receive a $2,500 prize during the Portland ceremony on May 16.
Nominations are already being accepted for the 2027 prize. More information on the Schnitzer Prize of the West, nominations, eligibility, and award cycles, can be found here.