At the end of an unmarked dirt road, in the hills northwest of Yerington, Paiute tribal members drummed beside a construction site where bulldozers and construction equipment sat idle. A small fire burned under the late-morning sun Tuesday, just a few yards from the machinery.

Tobacco ties, prayer offerings of tobacco wrapped in colorful cloth, fluttered in a light breeze, tied around saplings planted in front of a hillside. They marked where tribal members had told construction crews to stop. Behind them, a bulldozed road cut up the slope.

The site has become a protest camp. Since Sept. 29, members of the Yerington Paiute Tribe and Walker River Paiute Tribe have stayed there, holding ceremony, to stop construction of Greenlink West. The tribes say that NV Energy's 350-mile transmission line from Las Vegas to Reno runs through land that holds their ancestors' graves. The camp sits on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), but tribal members were clear that it is Native land, part of their traditional homelands.  

Since the protest began, the bulldozers and excavators parked there haven't moved. No one from NV Energy or BLM has asked the group to leave and law enforcement hasn't come out. 

Read more: Final federal approval of massive NV Energy transmission project delayed again

The protest started after crews moved dirt at the site Sept. 28 without cultural monitors present, according to Joshua "Numu" Dini Sr., a Walker River Paiute member and founder of Prayer Horse, a Native nonprofit that supports tribes working to protect land and cultural sites. He said he got a call that day from a member of the American Indian Movement and drove out, where cultural monitors told him crews had done the work without them in the area, nearly damaging a grinding stone. Tribal members asked the crews to stop and the ceremony began the next day.

Cultural monitors are archaeologists and tribal members who watch construction crews to protect historic and cultural sites. The federal decision approving Greenlink West lists "archaeological and Tribal monitoring" among the ways the project must protect those sites, and says BLM worked with tribes to provide monitors. The project's treatment plan calls for monitors to be present whenever crews work within 30 meters of a known historic site. It's unclear who directly employs the tribal monitors on the project. 

On that first day, Vernon Rogers, a cultural specialist for the Yerington Paiute Tribe who has led the camp, walked the nearby ground that hadn't been disturbed and found about 10 more artifacts, Dini said. 

"If someone went to your cemetery and tore it up, what would you do?" Rogers said.

Tribal members said they believe crews have already cut through culturally significant ground. They pointed to a road bulldozed up the hillside, which they said was cut after they had placed the tobacco ties there as a stop sign. Instead of halting, crews routed the road around the markers and over the top of the hill. They said that might not have happened if the project's Native cultural monitors were from the area.

"All this is a cultural area. … We've got burials all through this whole valley," said Rogers.

Dini said the tribe should have had one of its members walking alongside the monitors and the surveyors.

"They should have a member here, and that didn't happen," he said. "If that was the case … then they would have known where they were going, what they were going through."

Federal land managers have already flagged finds along the transmission line. On Oct. 5, less than a week into the protest, BLM notified tribes that crews had made three "unanticipated discoveries" during Greenlink West construction, according to an email from Shannon Deep Connolly, a BLM energy and transmission line archaeologist. The Nevada Independent obtained the email from Rogers.

The email did not say what was found or where. It said all three discoveries were recommended as not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and that construction had paused within 30 meters of each one. 

BLM describes unanticipated discoveries as archaeological remains crews don't expect to find, from old house pits to human remains. Rogers believes the discoveries were human remains and that they were found in a different section of the line, across the valley from the camp, though he said he hasn't visited the sites and can't confirm them. Deep Connolly declined to comment on the discoveries, saying she could not share sensitive information, and BLM did not provide a comment by publication time.

Because of what had already been disturbed, tribal spiritual leaders plan to hold a ceremony to apologize to the ancestors for disturbing their resting place.

"The desecration of the land is one thing, but the burials are totally different," Rogers said.

In an Oct. 8 email reviewed by The Nevada Independent, Deep Connolly told Joseph Lent, interim tribal historic preservation officer for the Bridgeport Indian Colony, that the Wabuska area "is sensitive to many tribes." She said the agency was working with NV Energy's engineers, "tribal and archaeological monitors" and construction crews "to try and proceed with permitted work as cautiously as possible."

She said pre-construction work at the site, including cultural resources data recovery, was mostly complete.

According to Rogers, crews have kept working on other parts of the project nearby. Dini went to the crews himself to explain that the request to stop covered the whole area, not just the camp. It "still falls on deaf ears," he said.

"When we asked for the ceremony for this land, we meant the whole land," he said. "And when we asked to stop equipment, it was all equipment."

In a statement, NV Energy said it "respects the cultural significance this area may hold for tribal communities." The company said construction near the site northwest of Yerington was "voluntarily paused for a period of time" to address safety concerns, while work elsewhere continued as planned. It said work is proceeding under approved permits, with oversight from cultural resource specialists, "tribal monitors" and other experts.

Greenlink West is one half of NV Energy's roughly $4.2 billion Greenlink project, which the company says was envisioned more than a decade ago. With the goal of strengthening Nevada's power grid, the project has been in development since 2019. The roughly 350-mile line will run from Las Vegas through the Yerington area toward Reno. The Department of the Interior approved the transmission project in September 2024, and NV Energy expects it to be in service by May 2027. The other half, Greenlink North, would run from Ely to near Yerington and is still awaiting final federal approval.

By the afternoon, Rogers and Delmar Stevens, a Yerington Paiute tribal member who grew up on the reservation, had raised a canvas teepee next to an excavator.

Stevens said he brought the teepee, along with prayers, to make sure the protest was "solid and based in spirituality." The teepee represents home, he said, and its door faces east to welcome each new day.

"That is our symbol of freedom, of resistance," he explained.

The camp began as a seven-day ceremony organized with Dini's nonprofit. The group set aside a day each to honor fire, water, earth and wind, then three days for the land and people, ending with a healing ceremony. While the initial ceremony has passed, tribal members still gather around a fire each morning.

Rogers said he comes early, around 6 a.m., to build that fire before the sun rises. He offers it tobacco or cedar in exchange for its warmth, then blows on the embers to bring it to life.

To Rogers, the land itself is medicine. He held out a glass bottle of ebi, a white, chalky substance the tribe uses to treat stomach ailments.

"The land is not a resource. The land is a source of life," he said.

Each time tribal members gather from the land, they give something back first, whether a prayer, a song or a piece of hair, and take only what they need, Rogers said. He said the companies building in the valley don't share that understanding.

"They don't understand who we are as human beings, people of this land, people of this earth," he said. "If they got to know who we are, then maybe they would share that same concept."

At a meeting Oct. 14, the Yerington Paiute Tribal Council gave NV Energy and BLM officials "a good chewing out," Rogers said. Dini said NV Energy asked Rogers for a report on what has happened at the site since the protest began and agreed to pause construction for 30 days once it's submitted. Rogers said he has turned in the report and that the tribe is likely heading toward litigation.

The tribal council also approved letting the prayer camp continue indefinitely, Dini said, and the group is working on a cease-and-desist letter to stop work in the area. 

The camp will stay "until everything is said and done," according to Rogers. He framed the fight as about protecting cultural sites across the valley for the generations that come next.

"Our children depend on it," he said. "The future generations of our people depend on what we do here today."