Darren Parry panned his camera over the northern Utah desert, where sagebrush and cheatgrass have rooted deep into the sand and the Hansel Mountains mark the horizon like a jagged picture frame.

Then he zoomed in on a spot that might not otherwise stand out: A small mound of black rocks that the plants have grown up around.

He moved his camera to show another mound, then another. There were at least seven piles atop the flat, silty terrain.

Those mounds, Parry believes, mark the graves of his Native American ancestors who died in this place some 500 years ago.

Now, Parry, a former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation who spoke on his own behalf, said he is worried that what he considers potential sacred burial sites could be trampled and paved over with the hyperscale data center proposed near this area of Box Elder County.

“For those of you who think there’s nothing out here, life is out here and death is out here,” Parry said in his video, posted online shortly after Box Elder’s commissioners earlier this month greenlit plans that the state’s Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, presented.

The head developer of the project is O’Leary Digital, owned by Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor and “Shark Tank” star. He has dubbed the multibillion-dollar effort the Stratos Project; it is expected to cover 40,000 acres when fully built while needing 9 gigawatts of power to operate — more than double the electricity currently used by the entirety of Utah.

The controversial project has raised alarm among scientists, environmentalists and many residents across the state over its potential water demands near the shrinking Great Salt Lake amid already heightened drought conditions in Utah.

Parry, a resident of Perry, Utah, in Box Elder County, has joined that criticism. The energy needs and projected air pollution from carbon emissions are among his deepest concerns.

What he believes to be burial sites are another of “hundreds of reasons to slow down on this,” he said.

The potential burial sites he showed in his video technically sit just outside of the footprint for the data center, which largely consists of private land that ranchers and other owners sold, as well as some state trust lands and federal Department of Defense property. But they are close: about a quarter of a mile to the southwest, near Locomotive Springs.

A rancher had told Parry about what he had suspected were burial sites a few years ago, Parry said. Seeing the rock mounds for himself earlier this month confirmed it for him, the former chairman said.

“We found it today,” he says in the two-minute clip he posted online during his visit to the area to check it out.

Parry believes, based on the proximity, that there could be more burials within the center’s footprint. He plans to check at least one area soon, on invitation from another farmer in Snowville, he said.

“It would make sense that there are other graves,” Parry told The Salt Lake Tribune.

A tribal travel corridor

The area around the proposed data center, Parry said, was a frequent travel corridor for the Fremont tribe and later his Shoshone ancestors.

Those peoples would stop at the springs for water. The Hansel Valley area was also a prime spot to hunt for antelope and rabbits and gather pine nuts, Parry said.

“That area was probably used because of the fresh waters for hundreds and hundreds of years, if not thousands,” he added. “They would’ve known from oral history where the fresh water was located.”

Parry said the land was also used as a resting spot, and that’s why people could have been buried there.

The rock mounds are more typical of winter burials for tribes, Parry said, when it’s harder to dig into the frozen ground without modern mechanized equipment.

“I think they would try to protect them as much as possible,” he said about the potential burial sites.

That type of burial was common among tribes across the U.S., including tribes in Iowa, for instance. The Effigy Mounds there are a national monument. The tribal members shaped those like animals, including birds and bears.

Parry visited the Hansel Valley site with a scientist friend, who noted that lichen had grown on the rocks. That helped them date the likely burials back about 500 years, Parry said.

One of the rock mounds in the video is larger than the others, which Parry said could indicate there may be more than one individual there.

The area, he said, has a feeling of reverence.

“We seem to want to destroy it in the name of progress.” he added. “I hope cooler heads prevail.”

A tribal fight in Canada over another data center

It’s unclear, though, if the possibility of burial sites in Utah would prompt any pause for the proposed project.

O’Leary has been behind another similar push for a 7.5-gigawatt data center campus, called Wonder Valley, in his home country of Canada. That project has similarly faced pushback from locals, including leaders from the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation.

The proposed site in Alberta overlaps with the tribe’s traditional territory. A treaty from 1899 requires “free, prior, and informed consent for a project of this scale,” Chief Sheldon Sunshine said in a statement, but he said that consultation has not occurred.

The nation was also unsuccessful in appealing a water license for a roughly 4,900-acre-foot annual withdrawal from the Smoky River, with the appeals board saying the tribe did not provide enough evidence its people would be adversely affected.

Now, CBC News in Canada reports that Alberta’s government is allowing the project to move forward without an environmental impact assessment.

“To not have a provincial environmental assessment is just, it’s ludicrous,” Chief Sunshine responded, according to CBC News.

Utah’s project likely can’t be stopped for cultural preservation concerns alone. That’s because it is largely on private land.

In a statement to The Tribune, the Utah State Historic Preservation Office said because of that, “we have not identified any factors that trigger SHPO’s compliance or oversight authority.”

Chris Merritt, the state’s appointed preservation officer, added in a statement, though, that he has been in communication with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation’s vice chairman, Brad Parry, and intends to “maintain an open dialogue.”

In an email, Brad Parry, who is a cousin of Darren Parry’s, said the tribe hasn’t yet met with “any local, city, county, state, or federal officials” about the possibility of gravesites.

He added in a statement from the tribe: “We will work within the confines of our government-to-government relationships. Until we have had those meetings we have no comments.”

The tribe has previously won, though, an agreement to preserve a Native archaeological site within a military project’s perimeter.

That’s at an expansion of Camp Williams in Bluffdale, where artifacts believed to be from the Shoshone people were found during an impact study. The Shoshone tribe had a historically wide range, stretching from southern Idaho to central Utah.

Brad Parry consulted with the Utah National Guard then, and in an agreement signed in 2024, the Native site — which takes up about a 3-foot by 3-foot square — will be preserved. The plan is to keep it buried, but to mark it with a garden of Indigenous plants and a historical marker.

At the time, the Army Reserve and Utah National Guard said they developed new protocols, too, should Native sites be discovered during construction for any future expansions.

‘Awakened a sleeping giant’

Darren Parry said he feels the land in northern Utah where his people historically lived and migrated should be treasured.

The rock mounds are just one piece of that. To him, the potential burial sites are unassuming and beautiful, a quiet reminder, he believes, that his people were here.

Already, he has led similar tribal efforts to build out a recognized memorial at the site of the 1863 Bear River Massacre, one of the deadliest killings of Native Americans in U.S. history. The tribe paid $1.8 million to acquire that land, roughly 550 acres near Preston, Idaho.

Under the tribal council’s direction, with staff and contractors, students at Utah State University have also been replanting native willows and other plants there. And the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation plans to add 500 stone grave markers to mark the massacre at the hands of volunteer U.S. military soldiers, who marched north from Fort Douglas in Utah. Many people, Parry says, don’t know about it and are not taught about it.

The tribe and Brad Parry also recently won recognition for its efforts to revive wetlands along a tributary of the Great Salt Lake.

Darren Parry worries that moving forward with the data center stands to bulldoze the history of Native Americans and their efforts to preserve the land.

“It has awakened a sleeping giant,” Parry said. “So many people are united now.”