Hey, you're listening to Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide.

I'm Nate Hedgy.

162 years ago, there was a massacre of indigenous people in present-day Idaho.

The U.S. Army killed hundreds of northwestern Shoshone men, women, and children.

And for many years, I would come here with my grandparents and my mother and our family, quite frankly.

And we would go down there, and every time we would get there, Grandma would start to cry.

This is Brian Perry.

He was speaking at the Bear River Massacre Commemoration Ceremony in 2021.

And I didn't really know why, except for the fact that there was a feeling of unrest in that

valley down there.

It was like the people that had died there were saying, this wasn't fair.

Places like these, sites of massacres, they hold a power.

An echo of tragedy, yeah.

But also maybe a potential for healing.

And I think that has pushed us as a tribe as much as anything else to try to get this land back, was to finally

put those spirits at rest.

In 2018, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation bought back over 500 acres of their ancestral land at the site of the massacre.

Joseph Lee, who's a freelance climate and indigenous affairs reporter, wrote about the land purchase.

They have embarked on this really ambitious project to not just reclaim the land and find some healing in this place where something really, really terrible happened, but actually work the land and do a lot of environmental restoration work.

The Bear River flows into the disappearing Great Salt Lake.

And so the restoration work the tribe is doing here in this section of Shoshone land is a pretty massive undertaking.

They're removing the water-guzzling trees planted by farmers and ranchers, and replacing them with native trees,

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