RETURNING THE LAND: NATIVE AMERICANS AND NATIONAL PARKS.

• Author: Roberts, Brett G.

The best things we experience, the best things we know are immaterial things. They're ideas or emotions... if you look at the earth, there are certain places that seem to have power, and we don't know what kind of power it is except you have a different feeling, you feel energized .... How do you approach that, take something that's larger in yourself and create a vehicle whereby you can be in communion with it?... I think the various tribes located these various places. --Vine Deloria, Jr. (1) INTRODUCTION

On April 12, 2021, The Atlantic published an article entitled "Return the National Parks to the Tribes." (2) The article makes a case that the return of the National Parks to Native American Nations "ensure[s] unfettered access to tribal homelands" for Native people, is a form of "deeply meaningful... restitution," and "would be good not just for Natives, but for the parks as well" since "Indian communities have become adept at the art of governance." (3) Such governance has been in the face of "legal, political, and physical struggle," and a "[transfer of] the parks to the tribes would protect them from partisan back-and-forth in Washington." (4) David Treuer, the author of the article, (5) notes that "[t]he federal government should continue to offer some financial support for park maintenance, in order to keep fees low for visitors...." (6) Still, this hint at the real difficulties of aforementioned restitution is a brush upon the legal, historical, and cultural intricacies of his proposal. These difficulties far exceed monetary concerns and are so complex that the author could not have possibly hoped to detail them in one Atlantic piece. (7) Some questions include:

[H]ow did the relative power held by the NPS [National Park Service], local governments, Indian tribes, and conservationists change? When and why? Do morality and holding power affect environmental tactics, and how do politics and ethics influence governmental decisions, regulations, and obligations? In what areas are Indians and the general public in agreement over common interests? Where do they face inherent conflicts? What ideals and imperatives drive the NPS, tribes, and environmentalists?... What attitudes, myths, and stereotypes influence our values about land, government, and ethnic minorities? Who is an ethnic minority, and what makes a bureaucracy tick? (8) To spelunk through that cave of problems, it is pertinent to understand what Native Nations share with National Parks. In 1832, George Catlin, the former lawyer turned adventurist and realist painter, (9) wished for conservation of the American West and the American Indian. (10) Yet, the landscape of North America, the wildlife, and Native Nations were all on the brink of destruction in the late nineteenth century. (11) From that historical tipping point, connections with National Parks grew in abundance. Now, Native Nations control 56 million acres of American land, and the National Parks account for 85 million acres. (12) Parks, like reservations, were created mainly by presidential executive orders. (13) Indians and parks share federal supervision (14) under the same branch of government, leaving both at risk to potential conflicts of interest, as well as susceptibility to the whims of the Department of Interior's development plans. (15) Native Nations face problems today, including the shortest life expectancy, the highest rates of violence, suicide, unemployment, and much more. (16) Similarly, the National Parks are afflicted by mismanagement, excessive tourism, traffic concerns, and pollution. (17) Native Nations typically receive little monetary help from Congress, and the National Park Service (18) "receives an even smaller percentage of the federal budget." (19)

Until 1998, almost no literature linked these two facets of life and culture in America. (20) In what was the first of its kind, authors Robert Keller and Michael Turek collected many of these connections between Native Nations and Parks into American Indians and National Parks. (21) They discovered a large scope and variety of relationships between Native Nations and Parks (22) because, for all of their parallels, Native Nations and Parks can often be at odds with one another. (23)

Catlin imagined a harmony "by some great protecting policy of government... a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elk and buffalo." (24) Aside from the goal of viewing a colonized stereotype of Native Americans, it took 150 years for the government even to adopt a "park policy toward native people," all the while still overlooking tribal welfare and much less lacking a congenial Native adapted to life within a park. (25) Catlin was spot on with Indians being intimate with National Parks, despite disparate needs. (26) In 1916, Congress created the NPS, placing it within the Department of the Interior and making it a next-door neighbor of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (27)

Federal Indian policy began many years prior, ostensibly with the transfer of the Indian Office from the War Department to the Department of Interior in 1849. (28) Along the way, there came a shift in the Federal approach with Natives--from promoting trade with them, to seeking their outright removal from the path of the expansive desires of colonizers. (29) With this new attitude came the idea of reservations, an official policy of "protecting" Indians and their welfare by relocating them to faraway lands. (30)

Meanwhile, the National Parks were created with Yosemite and Yellowstone in 1864 and 1872, respectively. (31) After inheriting land surrendered by Natives in bloodshed, (32) President Lincoln created Yosemite and gave it to California to manage; it represented the worst outcome for Native/white relations and made it "difficult for any park to build a worse record." (33) In 1890, 40 years after the Mariposa Indian War that preceded Yosemite's founding in 1864, dozens of Natives who still wandered Yosemite's vast lands petitioned Congress for a million dollars in gold for victimization, tyranny, and oppression. (34) The petition was futile, and still, "[t]oday Indians at Yosemite demand that their story be told accurately and their culture be recognized." (35) Less bloody was the founding of Yellowstone, America's first national park; (36) except, not only were Natives unwelcome in the park, (37) the Nez Perce incident (38) in 1877 rewrote the record to exclude Native connection to Yellowstone altogether. (39) Such problems persisted in other park foundations as well. (40) Even today in Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP), Indian welfare is a neglected afterthought in the shadow of a sinister foundation. As Sarah Krakoff writes:

The GCNP as a whole is ringed by industrial landscapes (uranium mines, coal-fired power plants, and coal strip mines) that make possible the West's metropolises of Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. The Havasupai, Hualapai, Hopi, and eight other American Indian Tribes were violently displaced from their aboriginal lands in order to create "public" land that became the basis for the National Park, even as their resources were recruited to build up the West's cities and suburbs. Within the Park, racial and gender hierarchies play out in ways that belie the notion that wild places are ever truly separate from human frames, even when we establish them with the goal of being so. (41) To further understand the National Park Service's mismanagement of Indian Nations, it should be noted that the NPS inherited distortions and ignorance about Native history, (42) perhaps without the necessary resources to set the record straight. (43) The whole point of creating the NPS was to clean up some of the mismanagement that resulted from the fast land-grabbing of the Antiquities Act of 1906. (44) Still, the NPS is looked fondly upon today, though it is one of the only federal agencies that strictly costs taxpayers money. (45) Perhaps the trust lies in the nature of the NPS and its mission, (46) whereas the BIA seems to experience the opposite sentiment. (47) Nonetheless, NPS admiration is not universal. (48) Park supervisors have faced criticism for "naive" and "superficial" knowledge of Native Nations while attempting to fulfill their interests. (49) Questions endure about the effectiveness of the NPS, successes or failures aside. (50)

Considering all of this, Treuer's proposition in The Atlantic (51) appears more than relevant. However, upon analyzing the history of Tribal-Park relationships, alongside their likenesses and divisions, one may find that Treuer's proposition rests on shaky ground. The hazardous restraint on Native Nations today is not necessarily the DOI, BIA, or NPS themselves, but the disjointed matrimony between the federal government and Native Nations--the trust responsibility. (52) This relationship, born out of the colonial expansion, is a web of confusion and has historically done more harm than good. (53) Recently, Adam Crepelle (54) described the trust responsibility succinctly:

Soon after the nation's inception, the United States implemented a series of laws governing Indian trade. The laws were supposedly designed to protect Indians from unscrupulous dealings with non-Indians because Indians were deemed incompetent. In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the United States owned the Indians' land and the Indians merely occupied it. The Supreme Court later built upon this principle to classify tribes as "domestic dependent nations" rather than full sovereigns and named the United States guardian of the Indian wards. Indians lost their freedom. (55) Thus, approaching Indian Law issues requires an understanding that the "[l]egal history of the indigenous peoples of the United States influences every new problem in Indian Country that arises for...