Tribes Flip the Script
Closing out the conquest of the West, America turned expropriated tribal landscapes into Indigenous-free parks and monuments. Now tribes are turning the tables to their own restorative purposes.
Mount Rushmore is the perfect example. The mountain, known as the Six Grandfathers (in Lakota Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe), sits in the Black Hills, land guaranteed to the Lakota nation in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. But when gold was discovered there only a few years later, the federal government reneged. One nasty thing led to another, including Custer’s disaster on the Little Bighorn, until the Lakotas lost the war and control of the Black Hills. Prospectors and settlers moved in, and, among other outrages, the Six Grandfathers were sculpted into headshots of four U.S. presidents. Rarely has settler colonialism been made so graphically obvious.
Not that that was the last word on the subject. Decades of litigation led to United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, a 1980 Supreme Court decision holding that the Black Hills seizure violated the Fort Laramie Treaty and awarding the Lakotas $106 million in compensation. The tribe refused the money — now swollen by compounding interest to more than $1 billion — because taking it would void their ongoing claim to get the land back. They’re still waiting.
The story of Mount Rushmore typifies how America used national parks and monuments to elevate conquest built on wars, broken treaties, dispossession, and even genocide into something seemingly sublime and certainly Indigenous-free. Ojibwe novelist David Treuer summarizes this in one sentence: “The American West began with war but concluded with parks.”
Now something basic has changed, not in the shameful past but for the present and the future. At its heart lies Bears Ears, a region of Southeast Utah considered sacred by five tribes — the Hopis, Dinés, Uintah and Ouray Utes, Ute Mountain Utes, and Zunis, all federally recognized tribal nations that enjoy sovereign relations with the federal government. In summer 2015, the five tribes formed the Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition to create a proposal for turning 1.9 million acres of public, formerly tribal lands into Bears Ears National Monument. On October 15, 2015, BEITC put the proposal on President Barack Obama’s desk.
That document broke new ground, declaring right at the top:
Tribes have never before petitioned for a presidentially declared national monument, much less one of the size and scope we propose here…. The rampant looting and destruction of the villages, structures, rock markings, and gravesites within the Bears Ears landscape saddened and sickened our ancestors, and that sense of loss and outrage continues today.
By declaring Bears Ears a national monument, the president “would honor the worldviews of our ancestors, and Tribes today, and their relationships with this landscape.”
To deliver on this unique purpose, the proposal offered something novel:
[The] monument must be managed under a sensible, entirely workable regime of true Federal-Tribal Collaborative Management … that accounts for both Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge.
Fourteen months later, in the closing days of his second term, Obama issued an executive proclamation declaring Bears Ears National Monument under the Antiquities Act. At 1.35 million acres, Bears Ears was smaller than what the tribes had proposed, but the proclamation did lay the foundation for a tribal-federal partnership in managing the monument.
Beholden to gas and oil interests turning their greedy eyes on the monument, Donald Trump couldn’t let that go forward. He slashed Bears Ears to only a little more than 200,000 acres, divided it into two disconnected units, and diluted tribal say on management to a token. The five BEITC tribes saw this as the insult it was meant to be and called it out publicly.
Joe Biden set things aright in October 2021, restoring Bears Ears’ original boundaries, adding 11,000 acres, and ensuring tribal participation in managing the monument. The details are being worked out now.
There’s more good news: Bears Ears National Monument has opened the door for a wave of tribal good ideas.
In March 2023, President Biden set aside more than 500,000 acres of sacred and wild lands at the southern tip of Nevada as Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. Beginning in the 1990s, ten Yuman-speaking tribes along the Colorado River as well as the Hopis and the Chemehuevi Paiutes built a coalition to advance the national monument proposal, forming alliances with three towns in the area, the Nevada state legislature, recreation and tourism interests, and conservation organizations.
In August 2023 Biden proclaimed yet another tribally inspired national monument as Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints Grand Canyon. Covering approximately 1 million acres in Arizona north and south of Grand Canyon National Park, the monument protects a major section of the Colorado River watershed from future uranium mining. The coalition that developed the national monument proposal over decades of work includes the Havasupai Tribe, the Hopi Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, Kaibab Paiute Tribe, Las Vegas Band of Paiute Tribe, Moapa Band of Paiutes, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Navajo Nation, San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, Yavapai-Apache Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, and the Colorado River Indian Tribes.
Then just over a month ago, Pres. Biden issued proclamations expanding two California national monuments at the behest of the tribal nations whose ancestral homelands they are. The San Gabriel Mountains National Monument gained almost 106,000 wild acres close to the nature-needy Los Angeles metro area, and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument in the rural reaches of the mountains west of the Sacramento Valley was expanded by nearly 14,000 acres.
The significance of such actions was captured well by Carleton Bowekaty (Zuni Tribe of the Zuni Indian Reservation), then BEITC co-chair, when he hailed Biden’s restoration of Bears Ears before the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources:
Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them and plan for their resilient future. Instead of continuing with a policy to erase our language and way of life, we are being asked to apply our traditional knowledge to the ecological challenges ... daily becoming more prominent and unavoidable.
Restorative justice has this way of making things better — for everyone.
Learn more about Native California
A celebration of Indigenous arts and culture happens at Berkeley’s Ohlone Park, Saturday, June 22, under the sponsorship of the California Institute of Community, Art, & Nature. Details on the CalICAN website.
Cast out of Eden Heads to Livermore
I’ll be reading from the book, taking questions and comments, and signing copies on Sunday, June 23, 2 p.m., at the Livermore Civic Center Library, 1188 South Livermore Ave., Livermore CA. In person, no advance registration required, free and open to all.