A recent article in The Atlantic made a dramatic proposal: As a remedy for the United States’ theft of land from Native Americans, the country could turn over the national parks — often the most sacred areas for the displaced tribes — to the indigenous people. The parks would remain open to all Americans, but they would be managed by people whose respect of the land was always foremost in their minds.
Many Americans familiar only with the old westerns are not fully aware of the history of broken treaties and deception that took place in the 1800s. The native tribes that had been forced to move onto reservations found themselves further split up under the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, which granted small parcels of land to individual Native Americans, beginning in 1887, while opening at least 90 million “surplus” acres of communal land to white settlers. Thomas Morgan, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1890, admitted that the goal was “to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens.”
Those 90 million acres that were taken away from the tribes are roughly equal to the 85 million acres that now comprise America’s 423 national-park sites.
The land that would become Glacier National Park was obtained through the efforts of George Bird Grinnell, the founder of the Audubon Society of New York, who had been part of George Armstrong Custer’s 1874 expedition in search of gold in the Black Hills — a trip that was in direct violation of a treaty guaranteeing that the Black Hills would remain in native control. As the article points out, “Grinnell was often called a ‘friend of the Indian,’ but he once wrote that Natives have ‘the mind of a child in the body of an adult.’ In 1911, a year after Congress approved the creation of Glacier, Montana ceded jurisdiction of the park to the U.S. government.”
The article continues, “To be entrusted with the stewardship of America’s most precious landscapes would be a deeply meaningful form of restitution. Alongside the feelings of awe that Americans experience while contemplating the god-rock of Yosemite and other places like it, we could take inspiration in having done right by one another.”
The author suggested, “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. Bikers and toddlers, Instagram models and Tony Hawk — all would be welcome. We would govern these beautiful places for ourselves, but also for all Americans.”
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