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Oglala Sioux Just Might Reclaim Southern Half of Badlands National Park

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Badlands National Park. Photo by Colin Faulkingham via Wikipedia Commons.

A General Management Plan for the South Unit of Badlands National Park in South Dakota is now being prepared.

One possible outcome of the process is that the Oglala Sioux Tribe (OST) might regain exclusive control of 133,000 acres of tribal land that was converted to military use during World War II, incorporated into the national park in the 1960s, and placed under joint management with the National Park Service 30 years ago. If this land were to be returned to the tribe and entirely removed from the national park, it would establish a major precedent.

Native American interests are a hot button issue in the National Park System at the moment:

* At Everglades National Park an Indian recently demanded that the Park Service allow him to build a house on park land.

* Paiute Indians are fussing at Yosemite National Park officials, arguing that it was their Paiute forebears, not the Miwoks, who were the original stewards of the Yosemite country.

* At Death Valley National Park, the Park Service has had to agree to close some areas of the park at certain times to respect the privacy of Timbisha Shoshone Indians who are engaging in traditional cultural practices and religious activities. The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe owns five tracts of land in and near the park, and there are complaints that the tribe is wasting its precious water allocation by growing truck crops in the middle of a desert.

* At Grand Canyon National Park, the Park Service must cope with sensitive cultural issues and complex economic and legal issues in its dealings with Native Americans living near the park. The Havasupai and six other Indian tribes in this region (including the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Southern Paiute, and the Navajo) have sacred or ceremonial connections to the Grand Canyon, and their traditional folkways, religious practices, and other cultural values must be respected and nurtured. The Havasupai, whose reservation is surrounded by the park, consider the canyon to be sacred as well as part of their homeland.

* At Arizona’s Canyon de Chelley National Monument, the Park Service jointly manages the park with the Navajo Nation, not only to protect historical/cultural and natural resources, but also to sustain a Navajo community that resides in the sandstone canyon and has strong historical and spiritual ties to it. The monument is comprised entirely of Navajo Tribal Trust Land that the Navajo Nation now wants back.

Issues involving native peoples are not confined to the Lower 48 or to American Indians, either. On the island of Maui, native Hawaiians are engaged in a bitter struggle to prevent the construction of a giant telescope atop their sacred mountain in Haleakala National Park. Native organizations have also complained that aboriginal sacred sites are being treated disrespectfully in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and other national parks on the Big Island.

There are other examples, but these suffice to illustrate that issues involving people descended from the original inhabitants of the land now in national park status affect the Park System on a geographically widespread basis, involve difficult political, cultural, and environmental questions, and have important implications.

One of the most controversial and portentous of the American Indian issues is the one coming to a head at Badlands National Park, where the GMP for the park’s South Unit is in preparation. The Oglala Sioux want their half of the park back, and it looks like they could get it.

Even the most cursory examination of the facts will show that the federal government has bum-rapped the Oglala Sioux at Badlands. This is really a matter of dealing with the fallout of a managerial snafu that has taken decades to build to its present unfortunate state.

In the 1960s, the gunnery and bombing range that had been established on OST land in 1942 was declared excess and closed. The land was then returned to the Oglala Sioux Tribe with the provision that it be part of the expanded Badlands National Monument. A Memorandum of Agreement stipulated that the OST-owned land was to be managed by the National Park Service.

The OST land within the national park consists of two tracts (the Stronghold and Palmer Creek Units) lying entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. For park administration purposes the reservation tracts are collectively referred to as the South Unit. The South Unit accounts for a little over half of the park’s total area of 244,000 acres. (For map orientation, see this site.)

In 1976, the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the National Park Service reached a new agreement regarding the governance of the South Unit. Under these terms, the Park Service and the Oglala Sioux Tribe would henceforth jointly administer the South Unit.

Two years later, on November 10, 1978, Congress redesignated the monument as Badlands National Park, citing outstanding scenic, cultural, and scientific values. Few who have visited Badlands would argue with this characterization of the place.

The rub is this. It is the Oglala Sioux Tribe that owns the South Unit of Badlands, not the federal government. There has never been any argument about that basic fact, nor does anyone dispute that the federal government evicted Indians from this land in a most high-handed manner and has since failed to live up to its promises. (Does this sound familiar?)

America was on a war footing in 1942 when the federal government decided that the tribal land at Badlands National Monument should be used for a bombing and gunnery range. The military gave the Indians -- more than 800 of them -- one week to move out. One week. Subsequent decades of U.S. Air Force bombing and gunnery left the targeted areas of tribal land crater-pocked and littered with unexploded ordnance.

The administration of tribal land within Badlands National Park has not exactly pleased the Indians, either. Most conspicuously, a promised new visitor center and road improvements have never materialized. The northern section of the park has a paved road and a nice visitor center. In the remote South Unit, which lies about 40 miles southwest of Rapid City, the road system is substandard and the visitor center is still housed in a converted trailer – open only seasonally -- at the intersection of highways 2 and 27.

There are other issues involved here, such as the Park Service’s considerably less than careful management of the massive fossil deposits and valuable wildlife resources on tribal land. The Indians insist that they can take better care of these resources, which include extensive grasslands, the world’s richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds (but no dinosaur fossils) and some federally listed endangered species, including the black-footed ferret.

What’s going to happen next is an exceedingly interesting question. It doesn’t seem likely that present joint administration of the Badlands tribal land will be left to limp along in its present unsatisfactory configuration, though that remains a possibility.

The superintendent of Badlands National Park is Dr. Paige Baker, a Mandan/Hidatsa Indian from North Dakota who took charge of the park in 2006. Supt. Baker has vigorously argued for a change in the South Unit’s managerial arrangements. The GMP process currently under way offers an objective basis for making decisions with appropriate input by all stakeholders.

Supt. Baker has said that top officials in the Interior Department have promised to abide by his recommendations in seeking congressional approval for recommended changes.

In Badlands Newsletter #1 (Winter 2008), which was written in both English and Lakota (the official Sioux language) and published in February, Supt. Baker explained the GMP process for the South Unit of Badlands and specified four concepts that have been identified as a basis for discussion and debate:

Concept 1: The NPS would continue to manage the South Unit as one of two units of Badlands National Park. All the laws, regulations and policies pertaining to units of the National Park System would remain in effect, as would the specific enabling legislation that established the park. In addition, the 1976 Memorandum of Agreement between the NPS and the OST would remain in effect.

Concept 2: Management of the South Unit of Badlands National Park would be shared by the NPS and the OST. The NPS and OST would work together to manage resource protection and visitor use in the South Unit. The laws, regulations, and policies pertaining to units of the National Park System would remain in effect, as would the specific enabling legislation that established the park and any appropriate OST ordinances and resolutions. The NPS and ST would renegotiate the 1976 Memorandum of Agreement to reflect the changed relationship between the two parties. The NPS and the OST would each contribute funding and staff for management of the South Unit.

Concept 3: The South Unit of Badlands National Park would be managed by the OST with technical assistance provided by the NPS. The primary management responsibility for the unit would rest with the OST, while NPS could assist the OST with technical guidance in resource management and visitor use as requested, or as required by authorizing legislation. This concept could be implemented by recreating the South Unit as an affiliated area of the National Park System or by establishing a separate new unit of the National Park System. In either instance, all the laws and policies pertaining to units of the National Park System would remain in effect. The mechanism for funding varies depending on whether the South Unit would remain within the Natiol Park System or become an affiliated area

Concept 4: The lands of the South Unit would be managed by OST as a Tribal Park/Preservation Area or in some other manner determined by the Tribe, in accordance with Tribal ordinances and resolutions. Staffing and funding would be the responsibility of the Tribe. This concept would deauthorize the South Unit of Badlands National Park and end NPS management there.

Fourteen public hearings were held in April, including three on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Additional public input was invited. The planning team will hold a week-long meeting in July to sort through comments and identify leading alternatives. This winnowing process will lead to the final recommendations.

Deauthorizing the South Unit is by far the most dramatic possible outcome of the GMP process. While Congress has decommissioned nearly two dozen park units since 1930, no national park component has ever been turned over to an Indian tribe (or returned, as it were), with no strings attached.

The Oglala Sioux would not find it easy to decide what to do with their land if deauthorization of the South Unit were to occur. Some members of the tribe have said they want the land given to the descendants of the original owners to do with as they please. Others want the land to be administered by the tribe and developed for fossil-based tourism, ranching, residential needs, and related development. Some others want to see the land preserved as is, perhaps operated as a brand new national park owned and managed by the tribe. But where would the money and staffing come from?

The Navajo Nation is carefully watching events unfold at Badlands. The disposition of the South Unit might have important implications for the future ownership of the land that now comprises Canyon de Chelley National Monument.

Comments

Lone Hiker: You forgot to mention that your "noble" natives tortured and killed their own in mass slaughter, buried the dead in mass graves.
They now defile the land with casinos, spray paint "native pride" on the rocks on the rez, destroy the brand new, government housing we pay taxes for.
Noble people? I don't think so.


Defiling the land with casinos was instituted by Native traditions, eh? I guess you've never heard of such little communities as Las Vegas, Atlantic City, the Chicago-metro area, St. Louis, Blackhwawk (CO), Biloxi.......how many more do you want me to name?

Spray painting rocks on the "rez"? Explain to me how that's less dignified than spray painting the tenements, freight trains, garage doors, highway overpasses, store fronts, mass transit vehicles, traffic signs and anything else that's available in urban society, if you have a reasonable explanation into such behaviors. Which I doubt.

Speaking of destruction of housing, ever visited a low-income public housing unit in a major metropolis, or is your lily-white suburb all you see and know about life in America?

Ah yes, the inevitable killing and torture of one's own. Show me a society that doesn't have that little black mark on their family eschuteon, again, if you can. European society has been SO civilized throughout the course of history, and continues to exhibit those model behaviors of total self-control to the present date, as have and do the Asians, Africans, South Americans and Australians, right amigo?

Careful when you point your finger that you're not inadvertently standing in front of a mirror.


Bob Janiskee,

A fine article on a challenging & historic topic.

Here in the Pacific Northwest & Olympic Peninsula, the drama is a familiar one, and few any longer have much doubt of the long-range trend & outcome, viz the Native Tribes and the U.S. Government.

In 1974, the (Judge) "Boldt Decision" affirmed the right of the Tribes to half the fish in the waters of Washington State.

Mid-nineteenth century Treaties partly compensated the Tribes for giving up their claims to the lands they lived on, by stipulating "The right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations, is further secured to said Indians in common with all citizens of the Territory."

"In common" means half-and-half, and that's what the Natives get, these days.

Formerly, Washington State systematically pooh-poohed the Treaty. The Fed sued the State.

In recent times, the salmon runs have been weak and unprofitable, some endangered. But we are working to restore them, and one day I don't doubt our river-mouths will be seething with salmon, again.

Half of the windfall harvests will belong to the tribes. They will be wealthy, and powerful.

In recent years, the Makah Tribe, on the far northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, reasserted their traditional whale-hunt. Each season, helicopters pound back & forth over my beach-side home, news-choppers running the coastline from all the big-city television stations over in Puget Sound, out to Cape Flattery for footage to decorate the News Hour.

Beyond the Treaty-language, there awaits an array of other Tribes-related issues, and the National Parks will often figure prominently in them. Practically all of our western Parks were used by the Tribes, and archaeological & ecological study is documenting the extent & particulars.

Lake Mills, Elwha River, Olympic National Park

The Elwha Tribe is involved with Olympic National Park in rehabilitating the Elwha River watershed. Dams on the river extinguished all salmon runs, but will soon be removed.

None of the Park-territories were "pristine" ecosystems. Not only were they human habitat - they were modified human habitat.


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