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In new book, CU Boulder scholar Brooke Neely explores pathways to uphold Native sovereignty in U.S. national parks

Since Yellowstone became the United States’ first national park in 1872, these parks have existed in a dual space—praised, per author Wallace Stegner, as “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst," while existing on Native lands.

National parks “have a fraught history in the United States and globally with respect to Indigenous lands. The creation of U.S. national parks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was part of a broader project to dispossess Native peoples of their homelands,” writes Brooke Neely, a research fellow in the University of Colorado Boulder Center of the American West, and her co-editors  and in , a recently published collection of case studies and interviews exploring pathways for collaboration that uphold tribal sovereignty.

Brooke Neely, a research fellow in the University of Colorado Boulder Center of the American West, co-edited National Parks, Native Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration.

“There’s a tension between the ugly history of U.S. national parks and the ongoing efforts to assert Native peoples’ sovereign rights to these lands,” Neely explains. “A goal with this book is to rethink relationships between national parks and tribal nations, especially in light of shifts in federal policies over the past 20 years. It’s helpful to think that not everyone is going to come to the table with the same goals or interests, but we can find some room for collaboration.

“So, there are some discrepancies in terms of how the park service understands its job and the land resources, how it separates cultural resources versus natural resources, and the perspectives of tribes who may not distinguish between the two because they see the whole landscape as important or meaningful.”

Perspective of the tribes

Neely became interested in U.S. national parks and Native peoples in graduate school, when she studied Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Both sites exist on Native land, “so I was looking at how they grapple with this contested history,” Neely says. “How do national park sites work to include more people and tell a broader story?”

During the time Neely was doing her PhD research, Gerard Baker, a member of the Mandan-Hidatsa Tribe of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, became superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial—the first Native American to earn the position. “I got interested in what he was working to do there,” Neely says, “bringing in the perspectives of the tribes, creating exhibits, bringing in Native speakers.”

In 2016, Neely was one of several researchers from the Center of the American West and the CU Boulder Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies to begin working with representatives from Rocky Mountain National Park and members of area tribes to expand interpretive programs and build collaborative relationships with the tribes.

Through this work and research she previously conducted for the 2014 sesquicentennial of the Sand Creek Massacre, Neely met Christina Gish Hill, an associate professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at Iowa State University, and Matthew Hill, an applied anthropologist who was principal investigator for two National Park Service projects focused on early American treaty-making and the Black Hills as a contested heritage landscape, her co-editors on National Parks, Native Sovereignty.

National Parks, Native Sovereignty presents case studies and interviews exploring pathways for collaboration in national parks that uphold tribal sovereignty.

Between 2016 and 2019, the researchers worked together on an ethnographic overview and assessment of Mount Rushmore for the National Park Service, seeking to understand the meaning of Mount Rushmore for Native people.

Talking about history

The idea for National Parks, Native Sovereignty came, in part, from a desire to highlight case studies from National Park Services sites, focusing on contemporary efforts to address the colonial history of U.S. national parks through research, outreach and collaborative partnerships with tribal nations, Neely says. It includes interviews with Gerard Baker and Max Bear, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, among others, as well as research and commentary from scholars and historians.

“Our goal was to represent a wide range of folks and the kind of work that’s being done currently,” Neely says. “There’s a federal mandate to consult with tribal nations, and it’s a unique mandate because tribes have sovereignty, so these interactions are government-to-government, and consultation can vary considerably across park sites.

“We focused on efforts over the last 15, 20 years to broaden that consultation and engagement. We wanted to look at what parks are doing to build relationships, to establish co-stewardship or co-management or some steps toward that.”

Neely and her co-editors chose interviews and scholarship that represent a range of national parks, “some of them in very emergent stages of exploring this kind of work, all the way to ones that have some kind of co-management relationship with tribes,” Neely says.

For example, Natasha Myhal, who earned her PhD in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies, wrote about indigenous connections at Rocky Mountain National Park, and Clint Carroll, an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, focused on Cherokee medicine keepers and the making of a plant-gathering agreement at Buffalo National River in Arkansas.

“There are 574 federally recognized tribal nations with different views on how they want to engage with public land agencies,” Neely says. “We consider the painful histories, the lands that have been taken illegally, the customs and traditions that existed for centuries before the parks were established. So, this book looks at the push and pull of this conflict and collaboration, and at the way we educate and talk about our shared history and shared landscapes in this country.”

CU Boulder scholar documents plant-gathering agreement

In April 2022, the Cherokee Nation and the National Park Service to designate a 1,000-acre site along the in Arkansas as the Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers Preserve.

Under the agreement, the National Park Service will issue an annual permit to the Cherokee Nation to gather 76 types of plants within the national river area, and the Cherokee Nation agrees to provide a list of those who will be gathering plants.

For Clint Carroll, an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, the agreement was a significant moment in his longtime work and research with the Cherokee people in Oklahoma on issues of land conservation and the perpetuation of land-based knowledge and ways of life.

Clint Carroll, an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, collaborated with Cherokee Medicine Keepers and research colleagues to study the desirability and feasibility of a plant-gathering agreement in Buffalo National River.

In most situations, taking plants from national park land is against federal law, but a protected plant gathering by members of federally recognized tribes. The Cherokee Medicine Keepers, with whom Carroll closely works, contributed “their expertise on land-based knowledge and stewardship practices that provided the basis for such a landmark agreement,” .

The Cherokee Medicine Keepers also were the experts with whom Carroll and his co-researchers—Richard Stoffle, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, and Michael Evans, a cultural anthropologist with the National Park Service—partnered while studying the desirability and feasibility of the Buffalo National River agreement, which research they detailed in “Returning to Gather: Cherokee Medicine Keepers, the National Park Service and the Making of a Plant-Gathering Agreement at Buffalo National River” for the book .

“It was a multiyear collaboration that entailed multiple visits to the park and meetings with the elders,” Carroll explains. “One visit was to make sure the places elders would be gathering were safe and had amenities for them. The next visit entailed an ethnobotanical study, where a team of researchers from the University of Arizona interviewed the elders during a two-day event at Buffalo National River, asking them about the plants that would make up the list that is now represented through the agreement.”

Plants such as wild onion, sage, bloodroot, wild indigo and river cane have long been important to citizens of the Cherokee Nation for food, medicine, art and other purposes, Carroll explains. However, patchwork land divisions with differing ownership, as well as habitat loss related to climate change, have made some of these plants harder to access and harder to find.

In fact, many tribes still feel the effects of the , which divided communally held tribal lands into individually owned private property, so lands where Cherokee people had long gathered plants “can be private property, state land, other types of lands that Cherokee people simply don’t have access to anymore,” Carroll says.

“It’s an issue of not only limited access to land, but those places where Cherokee people were gathering, the plants they were seeking were less prevalent. So, it was these compounding factors that led to thinking about what else can we do to ensure that Cherokee people can continue to gather into generations beyond this one.”

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