National Parks Traveler

Op-Ed | The Nation's Parks Are At A Crossroads

By Frank Buono

The United States Senate will soon consider the nominee to be director of the National Park Service. America's Best Idea - the National Park System - is at a crossroads. Return The National Parks To The Tribes demanded an article in Atlantic Magazine on April 12, 2021. The curious title presumes that tribes once had national parks. “Returning the parks” would end the “National Park System.” Here are three reasons why.

1. The first attribute lost would be the “national” nature of the parks. There are 574 Native American tribes and/or Alaska villages in the contiguous United States and Alaska (See 85 Federal Register (FR) 5462). Many tribes can honestly claim that a park lies within their aboriginal homelands. A park rarely has a single claimant. Most often, several tribes can claim a deep relationship with a single park, for example Chaco Culture or Grand Canyon. The half-baked Atlantic article ignores the salient question - “Which Tribe?” Perhaps a consortium of tribes would obtain ownership over such parks. Ignorance of inter-tribal relations would lead to a nightmare of contending and conflicting goals. While tribal conflicts may have been accelerated by the arrival of Europeans in North America, struggles between tribes pre-date that arrival. We need not go back as far to the Comanche and Lipan Apache or the Navajo and the Hopi to find conflicts. Go only to the recent dispute over taking bald eagles on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming where the Northern Arapaho and the Shoshone have sharply divergent views. Tribes, or their members, are not monolithic. This is the first lesson. Thinking that Native Americans or tribes are, smacks of paternalistic racism.

2. “Parks” would not be “parks.” Tribes, or consortia of tribes, could move quickly to occupy the lands, harvest the wildlife (or perhaps allow high-paying non-tribal members to do the same), unless the transfer were rigidly conditioned in any statute conveying the land. Tribes would also likely move “to exclude all access but their own” to vast swaths of lands that are sacred, a warning given by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in the 1988 Supreme Court decision Lyng vs Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association.

3. “System-wide” coherent management would end. Any pretense that these federal park lands would compose a unified “system” is absurd. The National Park System focuses on preserving scenery, historic objects, and wildlife for future generations. Allowing each tribe (or group of tribes) to manage individual parks would thwart the goal of a nationwide network of lands to be managed as one entity. Science would often be an afterthought, if consulted at all. Instead, non-scientific folk wisdom, called “traditional ecological knowledge” would be ascendant.

Historic Sites

Another question - historic sites? Who gets them? The National Park System is far more than great chunks of roadless lands in the Western mountains. We have battlefields. Some, like Little Bighorn National Monument would go to to a tribe. But who gets Medgar and Myrlie Evers home – certainly not a tribe. Maybe the State of Mississippi chapter of the NAACP. Franklin D. Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park? The Statute of Liberty? Certainly these parts of the system would not be given to tribes. But to whom then? Maybe a remnant, much-reduced NPS would remain to curate the small historic sites, or the Smithsonian. In fact, we may no longer need an NPS. One less government bureaucracy.

Can Tribes Manage Parks?

It is a waste of time to debate whether 574 tribes have the ability, experience, and inclination to manage what are now the national parks as prescribed by the Organic Act of 1916 “to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Nothing about this says that tribes do not possess valid scientific resource stewardship credentials (a qualification deemed racist by some). Some tribes do. But that is not the issue. No tribe is equipped to manage the parks under the Organic Act mission of 1916. Some tribes may not even want to.

For all of its historic faults, (such as eliminating predators) and continuing errors (such as elevating commercial agriculture over native wildlife), the NPS has arrived at a delicate, and often imperfect, model that balances preservation and natural process functions and allows visitors to enjoy them. Tribes may not even recognize these as valid concerns. Rather, they may see consumptive uses (recreational, traditional or commercial) as part of “their natural balance” or, in the current lingo, “their truth.”

“Land Back” Is A Radical Fringe

Arguments that the tribes possess innate wisdom to manage parks to preserve their character are similar to the Sagebrush Rebels of the 1980s who argued that who knows better how to care for the range than the livestock grazers? Who knows better how to manage timber than the lumber companies? Who knows better how to provide the illusion of enjoyment than Disney? Bogus libertarian notions were rampant in the 1980s. These are quasi-religious beliefs. So is the belief in the wisdom of tribal ownership of parks. But why stop at the national parks. Most of the unreserved public lands, wildlife refuges, and national forests, are, like the national parks, on lands that were occupied and used by Native American tribes. Return it ALL to the tribes. Why visit our morally magnanimous generosity only upon the parks? Further still, what about returning all the lands taken from tribes and given to States, railroads, mining companies, and “colonizing” homesteaders?

Sovereignty

The advocates for park or land transfers to tribes point out that ranchers, grazers, and the "colonizers," whether Nebraska corn farmers or High Country ranchers, lack “Tribal Sovereignty” and do not have the same merit as tribes. True enough. But there is also another tier of government in our federal system possessing explicit sovereignty – the 50 States. An Atlantic article that stated “Let's Return the National Parks to the States” would be met with fiery opposition (except perhaps from Utah, Wyoming, and some other states). The April Atlantic article deserves no less. When the NPS now veers from a reasonable course, we may sue them. Try that with a Native American tribe possessing limited sovereignty. Public interest groups would have zero recourse in court.

Conclusion

On March 1, 1872, America established a park on a high, wind-swept, remote corner in the Wyoming Territory. Congress named it “Yellowstone.” America celebrates that date. This act served as a model for the world. Upon that foundation, America erected a collection of superlative natural and historical features united by a common purpose into a National Park System. The parks are a “cumulative expression of a single national heritage.” (84 Stat. 825). The parks belong to and have inspired all Americans, from members of Native American tribes to the newly minted citizen from a distant land. The parks exclude no one.

Yellowstone was created from lands visited for eons by Native American tribal members during the more tolerable months. But that does not make Yellowstone, and subsequent parks, the creation of racism or injustice. Every acre of land in the USA was once occupied or used by aboriginal peoples. Unless we are willing to say that the American experience itself is a tragic mistake, then HANDS OFF THE PARKS. Surely we can think of other things to “return” to the tribes. I suggest that we return to the tribes Martha's Vineyard or Manhattan Island. This is far more lucrative a proposition. “Ridiculous” you may say? Returning the parks to the tribes is no less so. The motive for this campaign is not to improve the quality of the environment for all Americans. It is to assuage guilt-soaked moralizers who compensate for thoughtlessness with self-righteousness.

The coming fight over our parks is only a small piece of “the blind man and the elephant” fable. If America is now only a gaggle of aggrieved peoples, who share nothing in common, then more than the nation's parks are in danger. We must fight for the “Best Idea We Ever Had.” And not cede the moral high ground.

Did we actually believe that removing statutes of Robert E. Lee would satisfy this fringe ideology? That was only their appetizer. Nor can we count on the conservation or parks advocacy groups to speak up this time as they did when the deeps of the Grand Canyon were threatened by dams at Marble or Bridge Canyons. Those organizations now reek of enlightened sanctimony. Like vocalizing cicadas, they repeat mantra-like slogans.

So keep the parks as they are – a “Refuge for All Americans.”

Frank Buono is a former NPS employee who began his career as backcountry ranger in 1972, and retired from Joshua Tree National Park as deputy superintendent. He instructed NPS employees in resources and law for decades after retirement. He received the National Parks Conservation Association's Stephen Mather award in 1994 for his work advancing the protection of the California Desert.  A strong advocate of both parks and the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, he brought the landmark federal court decisions involving the Mojave Cross.