Shoshone Indians Sue to Stop Barrick's Nevada Gold Mine Five tribal and public interest parties filed a lawsuit in Nevada Federal Court on Thursday, seeking an immediate injunction to stop one of the largest open pit cyanide heap leach gold mines in the United States - the Cortez Hills Expansion Project on Mt. Tenabo. Canadian Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold mining company, plans to construct and operate the mine in an area that the lawsuit states is "located entirely within the territory of the Western Shoshone Nation." The permit was granted on November 12, and the $500 million mine construction project could begin as early as this week. "After years of determined opposition from Western Shoshone, the U.S. Department of Interior, through its Bureau of Land Management approved one of the largest open pit cyanide heap leach gold mines in the United States on the flank of Mount Tenabo," the plaintiffs said in a joint statement. The Shoshone maintain that Mt. Tenabo and its environs are part of the ancestral land of the Western Shoshone, which has never been legally ceded to the federal government. Nevertheless, U.S. politicians and multinational corporations ignore the 1863 treaty between the U.S. government and the Western Shoshone, treating sacred land as a public resource to be mined for gold, the tribe says....