Hi friends,
It’s National Park Week. As a person with a poor sense of occasion, I tend to struggle with the urge to roll my eyes when confronted with a day or week or a month set aside to celebrate something that is of real value all the time (Black History, trees, mothers, etc.) I am a devotee of every-day appreciation. My experience with National Parks, however, has been confined to special weeks, probably countable on my two hands. I have extraordinary memories from Grand Canyon, Zion, Yosemite, and Denali, among others. And still, these places are valuable all the time.
David Treuer’s “Return the National Parks to the Tribes” suggests a proper celebration of this week, with the context of history that many of us do not know:
The national parks are sometimes called “America’s best idea,” and there is much to recommend them. They are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, as Native Americans like me would be the first to tell you. But all of them were founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly, sometimes by an invading army and other times following a treaty we’d signed under duress. When describing the simultaneous creation of the parks and Native American reservations, the Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk noted darkly that the United States “made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller.”
Treuer points out that many Indigenous people live near the National Park lands, from which they have been dispossessed. His thesis is straightforward:
We live in a time of historical reconsideration, as more and more people recognize that the sins of the past still haunt the present. For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land.
Returning the land that comprises the National Park System to the stewardship of Indigenous people would be more than symbolic, even though it is a small portion of what independent gold rushers and land grabbers, and the US government stole by ‘treaty’ or by force. It would not qualify as reparations. It would be good for the parks and for Native people, who have deep ties to the land and experience contending with the federal bureaucracy.
Treuer points out that similar land transfers have taken place in Australia and New Zealand. The US transferred control of the Panama Canal to Panama in the last century.
He also quietly committed his administration to an ambitious conservation goal—to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and coastal seas by 2030.
That target, referred to as “30 by 30” by the conservation community, is backed by scientists who argue that reaching it is critical both to fighting climate change and to protecting the estimated one million species at risk of going extinct.
Additional lands, “twice the size of Texas,” will have to be conserved in order to meet that goal. Identifying, transferring, and managing these lands is an ambitious project.
Here’s a readymade action to let Interior Secretary Deb Haaland know that we support efforts to transfer control of National Parks to Indigenous stewards and that we are awaiting details of the 30 by 30 initiative.
with love,
L