National Park Service calls for more shared stewardship with Indigenous communities
The National Park Service is operationalizing its commitment to co-stewarding lands with Indigenous tribes and communities through a new policy that sets collaboration as the expectation across parks.
"All national parks are located on Indigenous ancestral lands and this policy will help ensure tribal governments have an equal voice in the planning and management of them," NPS Director Chuck Sams said in a statement Tuesday, before sitting down with USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Among other things, the nine-page policy memorandum calls for working directly with Native tribes, Alaska Native entities and Native Hawaiian groups on plans and activities that impact their interests, practices or traditional use areas, and seeking "regular, meaningful and timely" Native input.
"I know this will empower our staff to be able to go out and have stronger, less transactional and more transformational relationships with tribes and tribal governments and tribal communities on how they can use traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, and to better manage these resources not just for ourselves, but for our children's children," Sams told USA TODAY.
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NPS defines co-stewardship as an umbrella encompassing co-management with decision-making legal authority, self-governance agreements and other types of collaborative and cooperative management.
There are already more than 80 existing co-stewardship agreements between NPS and various Indigenous Tribes and communities in places like Acadia National Park and Grand Portage National Monument. Sams said another 40 to 50 more are getting ready to hit the ground. Beyond building upon those, the policy urges park leaders everywhere to create new partnerships.
"Go out and meet the tribes where they're at," Sams said. "Do not expect them to come to you go out and be proactive in this consultation. Talk to them ... so that we ensure that the tribes understand that they are not only welcomed into their homelands, into the parks, but they actually have a seat at the table in the management practices."
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The policy specifically includes "nonfederally recognized tribes, relocated Indigenous people with a historic link to an area, and other traditionally associated peoples."
"We know that they have a longstanding history within the homelands that are now the United States," Sams said. "They've stewarded these places since time immemorial, and they have major contributions that they can provide so that we better steward these lands."
He said park superintendents and staff in the field are "very hungry" to have stronger relationships with tribal communities and to welcome them back to their homelands.
However Sams understands that some Native community members may have doubts, having heard similar promises before.
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This time, he said, they have an Interior secretary and National Park Service director who've worked on their side.
Sams is Cayuse and Walla Walla and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. He began advocating for co-stewardship decades before he became the first Native American to head the National Park Service. Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary and first Native American woman to serve in Congress, is an enrolled citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna Native American tribe in New Mexico.
"We know, coming from that side, what this really does mean and how it can be applied in a way that better represents our trust responsibility and how we have to fulfill that trust responsibility as a federal agency," he said.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management also released co-stewardship policies.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why National Park Service wants more Native co-stewardship of lands