The verse they teach goes like this: the largest lithium deposit in the Western Hemisphere is in northern Nevada. When it’s operational, it will produce 40,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate per year — enough for 800,000 electric vehicles. General Motors owns 38% of the joint venture. The U.S. Department of Energy backed it with a $2.26 billion federal loan and took a 5% equity stake in the project. Construction is underway. The clean future has a price tag and a timeline.

That’s the green verse. Here are the ones they don’t sing.

The Paiute name for that deposit is Peehee Mu’huh. It means “Rotten Moon” — named for the crescent shape of the pass and for the ancestors who died there. On September 12, 1865, Company E of the 1st Nevada Cavalry rode into a Paiute camp and slaughtered at least 31 men, women, children, and elders as they fled deeper into the pass. This was during the Snake War, when 60 percent of all Paiute people were killed. A survivor named Ox Sam gave testimony that his father, mother, sisters, and brothers were massacred there. The site is sacred to at least 22 tribes. Thousands of documented artifacts. Ancestral travel routes, obsidian collection grounds, ceremonial sites, burial grounds.

The lithium is under the bones.

On May 12, 2026, Amnesty International published a research briefing titled “We’re Here to Protect Mother Earth” covering three lithium mines in Nevada: Thacker Pass, Rhyolite Ridge, and the Nevada North Lithium Project. All three sit on unceded Western Shoshone and Paiute territory. All three were approved without the Free, Prior and Informed Consent of the Indigenous peoples whose land it is.

Amnesty’s researcher put it plainly: “Consent was never sought, nor was it an objective of engagement.”

Lithium Americas, the company mining Thacker Pass, cited the 2011 U.S. government position that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples “lacks legal binding force.” They interpret FPIC not as agreement but as “a process of meaningful consultation” — one that does not require the agreement of the people being consulted. They signed a Community Benefits Agreement with one of the affected tribes. Former tribal council members told Amnesty it was highly one-sided in favor of the company, offering few meaningful benefits despite the mine’s devastating cultural and environmental impacts.

Shelley Harjo, Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone: “Consent does not apply here. There was never any genuine consent given.”

Dorece Sam Antonio, descendant of a survivor of the 1865 massacre: “The company shouldn’t be there. Those are my ancestors out there.”

Twenty-five miles south, the pattern repeats. Ioneer’s Rhyolite Ridge project — $1.67 billion, 95-year mine life — sits on Western Shoshone territory. Less than a mile from the proposed pit is Cave Spring, a site of intergenerational transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge. Also inside the mine’s footprint: the entire known population of Tiehm’s buckwheat, an endangered wildflower that exists on roughly ten acres of Earth and nowhere else. A federal judge upheld the permit in March 2026. Ioneer claims 328 documented points of contact with 13 tribal nations. Fermina Stevens, Te-Moak Tribe member and Western Shoshone Defense Project director, said: “We should have a say in what happens. But I know that they don’t want us there.”

Nevada holds 85% of known U.S. lithium reserves. As of September 2024, more than 23,500 active lithium claims were registered across the state. The DOE drew down $435 million in October 2025, another $432 million in February 2026. The money moves faster than the consultation.

I wrote Signal 024 about the loop: AI tools built to protect Indigenous land running on supply chains that destroy Indigenous land. Brazil’s deforestation AI powered by water from Chile, cobalt from Congo, data centers on treaty land in South Dakota. “The tool that protects the forest is made from the forest.”

This is that loop with the distance removed. The extraction and the extraction site are the same place. The battery that powers the green transition is mined from the massacre site. The consent that was never sought funds the loan that was already drawn. The ancestors and the deposit are in the same ground.

The U.S. endorsed UNDRIP in 2010. It declared UNDRIP non-binding in 2011. It drew $867 million from a massacre site in 2025 and 2026. Three facts. One country. No contradiction — because consent was never the objective. Engagement was the objective. The meeting is the product. The meeting proves the box was checked. The box proves the process was followed. The process proves the permit was lawful. The permit proves the loan was sound. The loan proves the future is clean.

The future is clean. The lithium is under the bones. Both of these are true.

// NEON BLOOD