Goshute and the Great Salt Lake They Sustained

The brine flies of the Great Salt Lake are so numerous in summer that their emergence from the water's edge can be mistaken, from a distance, for smoke. They rise from the shallow margins in clouds, lay their eggs, and die in drifts along the shore. For thousands of years, the Goshute people collected their pupae, dried them, and ground them into a high-protein food called kootsabe. It tasted, by various accounts, faintly of shrimp. The lake fed them in a desert that offered few other reliable proteins.

The Goshute, also spelled Gosiute, are a Great Basin people whose ancestral territory encompasses the western Great Salt Lake basin and the desert ranges around it. They are, among the Indigenous nations of the American West, among the most thoroughly adapted to extreme aridity: their traditional food system drew on insects, seeds, roots, small game, waterfowl, and the lake's invertebrates, and their material culture was structured around seasonal mobility through a landscape most outsiders found barren. Their adaptation was not poverty; it was precision.

Mormon colonization of the Salt Lake Valley beginning in eighteen forty-seven displaced Goshute communities from the lake's eastern and southern shores, occupying the springs and stream outlets that had been the most productive parts of the Goshute resource landscape. The lake today is shrinking, its brine fly and brine shrimp populations under stress from reduced salinity. The cultural and subsistence stakes of that collapse for the Goshute people are not part of the Great Salt Lake conservation narrative you are likely to encounter in mainstream coverage.

The Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation documents these stakes. The lake is still their lake in ways the entrance signs do not indicate.