American Indians and National Parks

Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek

(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997)

“In late August of 1877, five years after President Ulysses S. Grant signaled legislation creating Yellowstone as America’s first national park, two small parties from Radersburg and Helena, Montana, journeyed through the area. Each group encountered Chief Joseph’s band of Nez Perce Indians, who were retreating before the U.S. Army. A confrontation on the Firehole River resulted in the wounding of two Radersburg tourists; others were held overnight and then released unharmed. Two days later a small force of young Nez Perce warriors intercepted the Helena party near Yellowstone Falls, wounding several and killing two. The events marked an ill-omened beginning for the relationship between the national parks and American Indians (p. xi).”

So begins the Preface to American Indians and National Parks by Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek. Published by the University of Arizona Press in 1998, ten years later this book is still the landmark work on the subject. The relationship between American Indians and the National Park Service (NPS) is long (beginning as early as 1832), convoluted, and controversial. American Indians and National Parks, unlike any other book, provides a straightforward, concise, and readable presentation to this important part of American Indian – U.S. government relations.

Most visitors to Yosemite National Park have no idea that by the time Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Act in 1864, most of the Park’s indigenous people had been brutally removed, or that a different tribe, the Paiute, remained inside the park for another sixty years. Nor do many people know that in 1832, when George Catlin conceived of the idea of preserving the West in its “pristine beauty and wildness” by creating “a Nation’s Park,” he had hoped to protect the culture of Plains Indians as well as to preserve the area’s environment and ecology. In North American Indians (1832) he wrote, “One imagines… by some great protecting policy of government… a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elk and buffalo.”

National parks and American Indians have much in common besides Catlin’s proposal, and Keller and Turek discuss much of this in their standard-setting book. For example, as Keller and Turek discuss by the late nineteenth century American Indians, like the original landscape and wildlife, seemed destined to vanish – a prospect that finally motivated reform and protection in both cases. As a result, tribes today retain approximately fifty million acres. The same form of public consciousness was also applied to the vast lands and wild areas of America resulting in today’s National Park Service and its control of approximately eighty million acres. Furthermore, Keller and Turek note the important fact that many parks and monuments, as was true of many reservations, were created not by acts of Congress but by presidential exectuvie orders. Similarly, American Indians and Parks are both supervised by complex but weak federal bureaucracies: the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the National Park Service (NPS), located in the same branch of the federal government, the Department of Interior.

Being situated under Interior places American Indians and Parks at risk whenever they attempt to resist dams, mines, irrigation projects, cattle grazing, or other developments favored by that department. Early parks and American Indian reservations were originally created out of “worthless lands” seemingly devoid of commercial value; when those areas later became valuable, parks and reservations faced economic pressures that overrode “inviolable” promises and earlier “misguided generosity.” As a result, each National Park has a unique history when it comes to dealing with American Indians.

Although in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and elsewhere a relationship between parks and American Indians may seem obvious, the story remains untold. One can find thousands of books about American Indians, a considerable body of literature about national parks, but almost nothing linking the two. The two monumental works on government Indian policy, Felix Cohen’s Federal Indian Law and Francis Paul Prucha’s The Great Father, between them contain one passing reference to national parks. The Smithsonian’s Handbook on Indian/White Relations does not mention parks. Similarly, John Ise’s lengthy 1961 study, Our National Park Policy, had only two references to the BIA and one comment on the Nez Perce in Yellowstone; Ise mentioned Navajo Mountain, Navajo Bridge, and Navajo National Monument, but not the Navajo Indians. Books published since continue the pattern. It is for this reason, on the nearing of American Indians and National Park’s tenth anniversary that the book remains the seminal work in the field.

Buy on Amazon