National Parks and Native Americans
One bit of news that I found particularly distressing during the past pandemic year was about the trashing of America’s national parks by heedless people who were desperate to be outdoors. Already severely underfunded and under onslaught from wildfires, borer beetles, and other climate-change calamities, the national park system has for years been eroding into another “tragedy of the commons.”
I’ve been to many of these amazing places on both cross-country and East Coast trips. One of my earliest concessions to aging, in fact, was acquiring a Golden Eagle pass, available at the time of my purchase for $80 to people 62 and older. It grants me lifetime free admission to all national parks and monuments — which Wallace Stegner called “the best idea we ever had” (“Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst") — and I use it pretty actively.
I’ve been to Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly (prehistoric rock art), and twice hiked in and out of the Grand Canyon (full moon shining off the rock-face). I’ve spent precious hours in California’s Redwood National Park (hushed and utterly awesome), Death Valley (heat distortion in all directions) and Yosemite (giant sequoias). I have hitchhiked through Colorado’s Mesa Verde (ancient apartment houses) and Rocky Mountain (bighorn sheep). I’ve walked on boardwalks in Florida’s Everglades (birds! more birds!) and shimmied down Indiana’s Dunes (on the oceanic Lake Michigan). I’ve fought mosquitoes the size of birds in Maine’s Acadia, and seen grizzly bears in Montana’s Glacier. I’ve camped among bull snakes and buffalo in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt.
I’ve also been to South Carolina’s Congaree (cypress swamp); South Dakota’s Badlands (lunar landscape with the Crazy Horse Monument) and Wind Cave (a thousand miles of underground cavern); Utah’s Bryce Canyon (hoodoos), Zion (tunnel entryway built by the WPA), and Canyonlands (cowboy movie backdrops); Virginia’s Shenandoah (the Blue Ridge Mountains); Wyoming’s Yellowstone (Old Faithful) and Grand Teton (very shapely mountains). These and other sites are engraved like lovers in my memory, and they call to me every few years to pack up the car and step on the gas. Like, Now, before it’s too late.
Redwood National Park
An April article in the Atlantic argued that our national parks should be placed under the control of the various indigenous peoples for whom these places were, for centuries, tribal lands. “The national parks,” writes David Treuer, the son of an Ojibwe woman and an Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivor, “are the closest thing America has to sacred lands . . . More than just America’s ‘best idea,’ the parks are the best of America, the jewels of its landscape.
“Placing these lands under collective Native control,” he continues, “would be good not just for Natives, but for the parks as well. In addition to our deep and abiding reverence for wild spaces, tribes have a long history of administering to widely dispersed holdings and dealing with layers of bureaucracy. . . . Through hard practice — and in the face of centuries of legal, political, and physical struggle — Indian communities have become adept at the art of governance. And tribes have a hard-earned understanding of the ways in which land empowers the people it sustains.
“Transferring the parks to the tribes would protect them from partisan back-and-forth in Washington. And the transfer should be subject to binding covenants guaranteeing a standard of conservation that is at least as stringent as what the park system enforces today, so that the parks’ ecological health would be preserved — and improved — long into the future. The federal government should continue to offer some financial support for park maintenance, in order to keep fees low for visitors, and the tribes would continue to allow universal access to the parks in perpetuity.”
Sounds like a great idea to me. Indigenous people are actually stepping up all around the world to halt stop the rape of our planet (just in the past two months I’ve read articles about this in National Geographic, Smithsonian, and half a dozen other magazines). It would be a bold step forward into a sane environmental future to place the stewardship of America’s national parks into Native hands.
—Lawrence Bush for ALTE: Getting Old Together