Indigenous Nevadans look for peace as well as quiet with bill to end sundown siren

By Hillary Davis (contact)

Friday, April 7, 2023 | 2 a.m.

Tatianna Jim commutes daily from her home in Dresslerville, a Washoe Tribe community, to Minden for work.

Every day, in the early evening, she hears the siren — a long, baleful howl that for more than 100 years warned the Indigenous people in this western nook of Nevada to leave Minden or face severe consequences.

“I am triggered by it every single time,” Jim said. “We grow up hearing horror stories of what that siren did to our people, our elders, our ancestors.”

For the second consecutive session, the Nevada Legislature is attempting to address that siren.

It passed a law two years ago to silence sirens that previously sounded in association with a requirement that people of a particular race or ancestry leave the area by a certain time — “sundown sirens,” so called for the time they would sound.

The law didn’t call out Minden by name, but that’s the community lawmakers had in mind.

Senate Bill 391, which the Senate Committee on Government Affairs heard Wednesday, removes the language about racial associations and replaces it with limits that local governments can only sound sirens to alert people to an emergency, to test the system, or to celebrate a legal holiday. Violations would be subject to fines.

“I’m embarrassed that we’re still doing this,” said state Sen. Dallas Harris, D-Las Vegas, the bill’s sponsor. “We’ve got to come down with a little heavier hand.”

The Douglas County Commission passed an ordinance in 1917 that Natives leave Minden, the county seat, and its twin town of Gardnerville by 6:30 p.m. The ordinance was repealed in 1974 but the siren, behind the firehouse on Highway 395, continued to sound at 6 p.m.

Minden officials argued before the 2021 bill passed that the siren was associated with fire service, so the siren still wails — at 5 p.m. instead, to honor firefighters who historically relied on the tornado siren-like call to know they were being summoned.

Frustrated lawmakers said they see this as the small rural town exploiting a loophole.

Patrick Burtt, vice chair of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, said the siren created “everlasting effects” on the Waší∙šiw people.

On paper, Natives caught in the sundown towns after 6:30 could be fined $25 and jailed for up to 10 days, but vigilante and extrajudicial justice were common, Burtt said.

Natives endured verbal, physical and sexual assaults for remaining in town in the evening. Men were beaten and their braids were cut off.

“Sometimes women just disappeared,” added tribal member Stacey Jim.

Tatianna Jim said the siren needs to be left in the past but not forgotten. She said she will tell her children about it.

Deonn John of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony is already doing that. With her daughter and niece accompanying her in their powwow princess crowns, she told lawmakers that the children asked why they had to be there.

“I have to sit here and explain to these children that in this day and age, they are not thought of as people, they are not thought of as human beings, because this siren is still going off to this day,” she said as she held the younger girl on her knee.

Dwight George, a young Paiute-Shoshone man, said he first heard the phrase “don’t let me catch you here after dark” in Minden, when he went there to support a Black Lives Matter demonstration. He didn’t understand why people would tell him that.

“When I found out why, I was angry and I was saddened but I was not shocked,” he said.

“It’s dangerous when you change a tool of hate into a nostalgic pleasure, because there are people that still see it as the same thing,” he added. “There are people that will always carry that hate with them.”

About 25 speakers urged passage of the bill. Many told of intergenerational pain.

Serrell Smokey, chairman of the Washoe Tribe and president of the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada, said his grandmother and great-grandmother told him of the abuse and murder of Washoe who didn’t leave town fast enough.

“The Washoe people have suffered trauma for over 100 years, all coming from the single sound of a siren,” he said.

Assemblyman Howard Watts, who sponsored the 2021 siren bill, said he thought his legislation was comprehensive but that he wrote it leaving openings to facilitate productive conversations between the Washoe Tribe and town government.

“Unfortunately, what we saw was that was not the case,” he said.

Smokey initially tried to work with Minden government. Now, he says, no time of day is acceptable to sound the siren.

Only two people opposed the bill.

Jim DeGraffenreid, a volunteer and paid firefighter of 25 years, said the siren had not really been a sundown siren for nearly a century, and that a local ordinance to make it a firefighter callout had long superseded Minden’s sundown regulation.

“I find it offensive that the Legislature in 2023 would again seek to silence a time-honored symbol of the fire service,” he said.

Republican state Sen. Pete Goicoechea, who represents a broad swath of rural eastern Nevada, did not defend the Minden siren, but did say that there are other historic small-town sirens with no racially associated past that would be affected by the bill.

He said lunchtime whistles in Fallon, Ely and Elko, and a 9 p.m. curfew siren in his boyhood home of Eureka, which reminds children that it is time to go home but isn’t enforced, would be caught up in “overreach.”

Harris suggested he direct his frustration to the town of Minden.

“Occasionally, sometimes people ruin it for all of us,” she said.