Chase Iron Eyes’ shoes crunched on the rocky trail earlier this week as he walked a trail through Bear Butte State Park in South Dakota, a place he’s visited regularly since he was a boy growing up on the Standing Rock Reservation.
Iron Eyes, a 46-year-old lawyer and indigenous rights activist, was taught the tradition by a medicine man when he was nine years old and has continued to follow it ever since., The site was created following the tribe’s annual Sun Dance ceremony in the park, and marked by towering igneous rocks, the site remains sacred to several tribes, including the Lakota and Cheyenne.
“Many different tribes hold fasting ceremonies and vision-seeking ceremonies here,” Iron Eyes told me by phone as we walked. “My grandmother brought me here when I was a little girl.”
Similarly, the lands that are now the country’s national parks have histories as Native American homelands and sacred sites, Iron Eyes said. As summer tourists head out to explore places like Yellowstone, Devils Tower and the Grand Canyon, the Lakota People’s Law Project, which Iron Eyes represents, has begun efforts to compensate tribes with long ties to these places.
“All of our national parks are on Native American land,” says Brooke Neely, a research associate at the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder. “The very creation of our national parks was part of a larger plan to remove Native Americans from their lands and take their land away from them.”
According to the legal project, the Sacred Defense National Parks and Monuments Initiative would work like this: Visitors, or anyone who wishes to donate, could donate on the project’s website and nominate specific park or monument locations. Funds would then be distributed annually to participating tribes with historical ties to those locations.
Project leaders hope the funding will help Indigenous peoples share their stories on the land, expand public awareness of their historic tribal connections and promote their conservation.
“When you visit this place called Devil’s Tower or Matotipila, our “We don’t want people to just read a page in a Wyoming landmarks video on the initiative’s website,” Iron Eyes said. “We want people to experience these sacred places, sacred grounds and sacred waters as we do.”
More than 325 million people visited our national parks and monuments last year, and the surrounding areas are expected to enjoy an economic benefit of $50 billion in 2022 and support more than 378,000 jobs.
How the Sacred Defense Initiative works
The Sacred Defense initiative will begin with 14 U.S. facilities, with more to be added in the future, and Iron Eyes says all donated funds will be distributed annually to participating tribal nations.
In addition to Yellowstone, Devils Tower, and the Grand Canyon, the list includes:
Learn more:From Acadia to Zion: What Travelers Need to Know About America’s National Parks
“National parks are often landscapes of extraordinary awe and wonder, so it makes sense that indigenous peoples understood the power of those landscapes long before Europeans or people of European descent set foot on them,” says Christine Gish Hill, associate professor of American Indian studies at Iowa State University, Ames.
Project leaders have been in contact with more than 90 tribes with ties to these sites, and as of this week, nine had signed on as beneficiaries. In Yellowstone alone, which spans three states, there are about 30 tribes involved.
“We would be very happy if we could get five tribes at each of the 14 locations we initially selected,” Iron Eyes said.
While there are no strict rules about how the funds will be spent, Iron Eyes said the project will promote awareness and conservation efforts. He imagines, for example, visitors receiving a pop-up notification on their phone when they arrive, informing them of the ancestral origins of the land they’re standing on, such as, “This is Lakota Native American land.”
Efforts to give tribal nations more say in the park’s future
The project says that while figures from the late 19th century such as John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt are celebrated for their role in protecting places like Yosemite and Yellowstone, Indigenous people are often left out of these stories, despite being the original stewards of these lands.
Project leaders also hope the donated funds will enable tribes to work more closely with federal and state agencies that oversee the sites to thwart development and mining activities that are deemed harmful to Native Americans.
“There’s a rich ecosystem here and we have a duty to protect it,” Iron Eyes says. “Can we put resources into it and develop it? Yes, but responsibly.”
Iowa State University’s Hill said that because many tribes have been displaced far from their homelands, helping tribal members travel to those sites to participate in ceremonies, gather culturally significant resources and take part in government discussions and decision-making is a worthy goal.
“It makes sense that the Lakota People’s Law Project is saying there is a financial need to maintain a relationship with these lands,” said Hill, who co-edited with Neely the recently published book “National Parks, Native Sovereignty: An Experiment in Collaboration.”
Iron Eyes said the project also allows tribes to better assert their cultural heritage at these sites. For example, if a tribe wants to hold a sacred ceremony at Devils Tower but park rangers tell them doing so would mean losing $300,000 in revenue, “we can say, we have the money, go ahead and do what you need to do,” he said.
These efforts are moving in the direction of justice
Dina Gillio Whitaker, a lecturer in American Indian studies at California State University, San Marcos, said the project is an “interesting and innovative approach” based on calls for reparations for losses suffered by tribal communities through a history of genocide and land dispossession. Such measures could include land trusts or co-management agreements between government agencies and tribal nations.
“These frameworks are at least moving in the direction of justice,” said Giglio Whitaker, a descendant of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in northeastern Washington state and author of As Long as the Grass Grows: Indigenous Struggle for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock.
She said the Lakota People’s Law Project’s work is similar to what’s known as a voluntary land tax, a framework that’s been adopted by efforts such as Seattle’s Real Rent Duwamish Initiative, which encourages city residents to pay “rent” to benefit social, educational, cultural and health services for the Duwamish people.
“Tribes have yet to receive fair compensation for their lands, resources and livelihoods,” the program’s website states. “You can do something today to stand in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of this land by paying real rent.”
Another project in California calls on non-Native people living in the area now known as the East Bay to fund efforts to return land to Native people, preserve Native languages, and build urban gardens and ceremonial spaces.
“These efforts speak to the conscience of people of good will who want to recognize the injustices upon which our nation was founded and actively work toward reconciliation,” Giglio Whitaker said.
Darren Runco, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maine, noted that Native Americans are already holding influential positions, including U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is from the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, and National Park Service Director Charles Sams, who is from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon.
“Not only do we have Native Americans running the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, but now there’s an opportunity for the public to get involved in land justice,” he said.
Iron Eyes said believers in ancient cultural myths and “pre-contact ceremonial practices” may be disheartened by the presence of millions of tourists who don’t understand the underlying fundamentals of Indigenous peoples’ relationships with national park lands, but he believes there is an appetite among the public to know more.
For now, the project is relying on online marketing and promotion by the tribes themselves, but leaders hope to partner with environmental groups and outdoor brands to educate the public about the effort and ultimately increase their appreciation for the landscape they enjoy, he said.
“Our job as Indigenous peoples is to make it more than just recreation,” he said. “People are looking for deeper experiences and meaning,” he said. “Mountain bikers, hikers, people looking to be outdoors — that spirit represents a quality of relief to the modern, mechanized experience of life that so many of us are trying to escape. We want to be part of it, partly because we’ve been left behind, but partly because we have so much to share.”
