Indigenous activist Mary Dann has also died at her home in Nevada. Along with her sister she helped represent the Western Shoshone nation in its fight to reclaim twenty four million acres of their ancestral land in Nevada, California, Idaho and Utah. The sisters accused the government of illegally seizing the land in 1863. Two decades ago the U.S. government awarded the Western Shoshones twenty six million dollars for the lost land. However the Western Shoshone nation has never agreed to whether it should accept the money–which has grown to more than one hundred forty million dollars. Mary Dann and her sister refused to accept the payment maintaining that the land still belonged to the Western Shoshone people. In 2002 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled that U.S. claims to the ancestral lands of the Western Shoshone nation was illegal under international law. According to the Indian Law Resource Center, the commission’s ruling marked the first time that the United States has been found in violation of international human rights laws in its treatment of indigenous people.