SKULL VALLEY, Utah - The Goshute Indians are not mighty in number, financial capital or political clout. With only about 120 members, their tribe has mostly been a footnote in the long saga of American Indian history in the West.
Their reservation, just slightly bigger than Manhattan, is mostly empty - a windswept land of sage and scrub 50 miles west of Salt Lake City.
But over the last eight years the Goshutes (formally the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes) have outlasted, outwitted and outplayed powerful forces arrayed against them, as they have sought to build what would be the nation's biggest bunker for the storage of highly radioactive waste.
Some tribal members say such a facility would give them an economic boost in an area of the state where Indians have had few environmentally friendly options.
The State of Utah, backed by environmental groups from around the West, has argued that a storage dump would be a catastrophe-in-waiting - too close to a major population center, too dependent on the movement of highly dangerous waste by rail, too vulnerable to terrorists.
A governor who strongly opposed the plan, Michael O. Leavitt, came and went. Legislators and lawyers have filed in and out like players on a stage. And the Goshutes have soldiered on, winning at just about every turn.
"This isn't their backyard, it's our backyard," said Leon D. Bear, the tribe's chairman, in an interview on the reservation where he had stopped by the tribe's gravel mining business one recent morning.
On Feb. 24, a panel of administrative law judges handed the tribe yet another victory, concluding that concrete casks containing spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants could withstand a direct hit from a crashing jet. That ruling opened the door for a decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant a license for the facility, though that would certainly only begin more legal skirmishing.
"It could happen as soon as a month," said Mike Lee, the general counsel to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., referring to a regulatory commission license. "We're fighting it from every angle that we can."
This is no simple David and Goliath tale, however much the Goshutes may seem to be the little tribe that could. Tribal leaders admit that they have big backers for their plan and that the utility industry consortium that wants to build the $3 billion plant, called Private Fuel Storage, has bankrolled the legal fight.
State officials, meanwhile, say they have had to walk a narrow diplomatic line in fighting the proposal. As much as they might attack the utility industry for its goals here, they say, they must affirm the rights of the Goshutes to govern their own affairs.
A legacy of suspicion and mistrust colors the effort on both sides. Tribal leaders say that the state has never respected the Goshutes, and that their reservation has been encircled for decades by environmentally bad neighbors that the tribe had no say or veto power over.
A military nerve gas storage facility sits just to the east of the reservation. A coal-fired power plant is to the south.
"The band was never consulted or asked its opinion of the placement of these industries on what was once traditional Goshute territory," reads a display at the Pony Express Store and gas station on the reservation. The state's financial support for dissidents within the tribe - more than $500,000 in legal bills paid to support challenges to the storage plan - has also backfired, as tribal leaders have portrayed the relationship as one more example of state meddling.
State officials say the environmental record in this part of the West scares them, too, and reinforces their resolve to fight the Goshutes. Nuclear testing in the 1950's in Nevada is blamed for high rates of cancer in some parts of western Utah. The topic still touches a nerve, compounded all the more by the fact that Utah has no nuclear plants and so no waste of its own to store.
"It goes back to a lack of trust," said Dianne R. Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. "The lies that people were told and the suffering and death it created are not lessons that anybody in Utah is forgetting - and they shouldn't."
Meanwhile, energy experts say the political ground beneath the Goshute debate has shifted. When the Private Fuel Storage project was proposed in the late 1990's, a permanent home for the nation's nuclear waste, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, seemed largely on track for completion by 2010. But delays and questions about geological safety have thrown that schedule into disarray.
At the same time, a renewed interest in nuclear energy has raised the possibility that more nuclear power plants could be built around the nation, bringing more waste with it.
State officials say they worry that "temporary" would become permanent, either because Yucca Mountain never opens, or because there is so much waste that both facilities are needed.
Within the tribe there is no shortage of disarray, either. Mr. Bear was indicted by a federal grand jury in December on charges that he improperly used tribal funds. Three members of a tribal faction that opposes Mr. Bear's leadership are also facing trial, on bank fraud charges.
All the parties have pleaded not guilty; their respective trials are scheduled to begin this spring.
And while part of the debate within the tribe involves who should rightfully lead, the deeper question, tribe members say, concerns the effects of the storage plan on tribal culture and economic life.
Mr. Bear argues that because the environmental degradation in this part of Utah is already endemic from businesses and military facilities, tribes have been closed off from tourism and other environmentally clean sorts of economic development.
Nuclear waste storage, he added, might sound bad but would provide an economic base that could help the Goshutes maintain their culture and identity for generations.
"You can't go back," he said. "Our traditions will stay alive with our children. I'm only making a foundation for them."
Some opponents of the storage plan say Mr. Bear, who grew up off the reservation but returned as an adult, is ignoring the power of Goshute traditions, and the spiritual connection to the land that they say could be destroyed by storing nuclear waste here.
"He's trying to justify what he's doing, using economic development as a shield to put the waste wherever he wants," said Margene Bullcreek, a tribe member who opposes the storage plan. "We're concerned with health, but it's also the land we believe in. I think this could destroy whatever sacredness is there."
Supporters of the storage plan say that changes to the land can be positive, like new homes and community buildings constructed in the last few years in part with money flowing from the project's backers.
"In the past two years, I've seen a big change here - a community building, a ballpark, a playfield," said Garth Bear Jr., who is Leon Bear's nephew and supports the storage project. "These are the first new buildings on the reservation since I was in elementary school 30 years ago," he said.
"I'm a traditionalist, and I know the sun dance ways," he added. "But I've never seen anybody live off being a traditionalist; you can't do that."