Alaska Subsistence A National Park Service Management History

Native Americans throughout the United States have had a long and complex history of interacting with the National Park Service and with those, both in Washington, D.C. and in the various parklands, who have been entrusted to carry out the agency's policies. In this chapter, an attempt is made to briefly illustrate how NPS policy toward subsistence activities historically developed in non-Alaskan venues. To some extent, the agency's attitude toward subsistence activities has been one facet of how Native Americans and the NPS have related with each other over the years. Three recently-published studies—by Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, by Mark David Spence, and by Philip Burnham—have ably addressed NPS-Native American relationships in areas outside of Alaska, and they have been repeatedly used as source materials. Those interested in this larger question, therefore, would be advised to consult these or other sources. It should be emphasized that both Natives and non-Natives have engaged in subsistence uses in the vicinity of NPS units. As noted at the conclusion of this chapter, these practices continue to the present day. Most of the chapter, however, pertains to actions and policies taken prior to the mid-1970s, when NPS planners began developing a subsistence policy that would be applied to Alaska park units.

A. Early Policies Toward Native Americans and Subsistence

As historian Roderick Nash and others have noted, one of the philosophical progenitors of the national park idea was a proposal by George Catlin, a Philadelphia-based artist and writer. Nine years earlier, Catlin had traveled up the Missouri River to Fort Pierre, in present-day South Dakota. He had been horrified by the fort's influence on the lives of Plains Indian people; conversely, however, he was impressed by the Indians' character and by the area's large animal populations. In an 1841 publication, Catlin asked his readers to imagine them

as they might in the future be seen ... preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in 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 elks and buffaloes. What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty!

Catlin envisioned that such a park would encompass the entire Great Plains, all from way from the Mexican to the Canadian border. Noble as Catlin's idea may have been, however, it ran diametrically opposite to U.S. government policy at the time. As ecologist Raymond Dasmann has poignantly noted, "[h]alf of Catlin's dream was realized. The animals were given the first national park. The Indians had a different appointment with destiny." [1]

When Congress created the first national park in 1872, to protect the geysers and other natural features in the Yellowstone country, the nation was less than a century old. Although a transcontinental railroad between the various midwestern and Pacific states was an accomplished reality, the vast country of the desert and intermountain west was still largely unsettled by non-Natives. As the U.S. Census Bureau indicated, there was an unbroken line in the western Great Plains beyond which the frontier was still alive and well—the frontier being defined as an area in which the density of population (both Native and non-Native) did not exceed two persons per square mile. Although many Native American groups, by 1872, were confined to reservations, many others were not: among those who had not yet been subjugated were various Sioux and Cheyenne tribes (the Battle of the Little Bighorn was four years in the future), along with a number of Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Apache, and other groups. Most of the NPS's "crown jewels"—Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain national parks—were inhabited by Indians, primarily if not exclusively, when Yellowstone National Park was established. [2]

Because the National Park Service would not come into existence for more than four decades after Yellowstone became a reality, the policies of the early national parks—as they pertained to American Indians as well as a host of other subjects—can best be discerned from language contained in the various enabling acts and from contemporary accounts that detail the nature of early park management.

Yellowstone, like virtually all of the early national parks, had a long history of Native use prior to the 1870s. Bands of Plains Shoshones were perhaps the main residents, but the nearby Crow and Blackfeet Indians commonly traveled through the area on hunting, trading, or war-making trips. The famous Washburn exploring party of 1870, which was one of several early non-Native groups to explore the area within the present-day park, encountered various abandoned Indian camps and relied on a number of well-used Indian trails. Paradoxically, however, members of the Washburn expedition later claimed that the proposed park was a primeval wilderness that was "never trodden by human footsteps." [3] The park's enabling act, perhaps operating from that spurious assumption, ominously noted that the Interior Secretary "shall provide against wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park [and] shall also cause all persons trespassing upon the same after the passage of this act to be removed therefrom...." [4] The park act, however, did not generally ban hunting and fishing, and despite the ban on "wanton destruction," depredations continued by non-Native hide-hunters, poachers and others for a decade or more. [5] During the next few years, many Shoshones began to retreat from contact; the Treaty of Fort Bridger, signed in 1868, was one reason for their gradual relocation from the Yellowstone country, although a growth in the number of non-Native visitors may have also spurred their disappearance. By the late 1870s, many Shoshones had been relocated to Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation; and the Nez Perce, who passed through the park in 1877, were later captured by U.S. troops and similarly transferred to a reservation. By 1880, Superintendent Philetus Norris was demanding that all Indians leave Yellowstone. He gave three reasons for his action. First, Norris stated that "Yellowstone is not Indian country and no natives lived in the park." Second, "Indian fear of geysers kept them out of the park" (he quoted a Shoshone who had told him that the geysers were "heap, heap bad"), and finally, Norris claimed that "Yellowstone is for the use and enjoyment of all Americans." Thus, it appears that a combination of faulty anthropology, a skewed (and incorrect) notion of Natives' belief systems, and a narrowly-defined concept of "Americans" justified the Natives' expulsion. [6] Then, in 1894, Congress passed a new law stating that "all hunting ... at any time of any bird or wild animal ... is prohibited within the limits of said park; nor shall any fish be taken out of the waters of the park by means of seines, nets, traps ... or in any other way than by hook and line...." The law's primary intention was to solidify the park's stature as a game reserve, but it also underlined Congress's interest in keeping Indians, as well as other nearby residents, out of the park. Given those attitudes, which were not unusual among policymakers at that time, Natives were excluded from the park and its resources for decades afterward. As late as 1935, the U.S. government denied a petition from nearby Crow Indians to regain access. [7]

Congress established Yosemite as a national park in 1890; 36 years earlier, however, Abraham Lincoln had reserved Yosemite Valley and assigned it to the State of California. Here, the Natives' lot was dramatically different than at Yellowstone. Initial contacts were unfortunate; in 1852, area gold miners killed several of the area's Miwok inhabitants and drove away the remainder. Not long afterward, however, the Miwoks returned on either a seasonal or year-round basis. For the next several decades, the State of California nominally administered the area, though they had little interest in active management. During this period, tourists considered the Miwoks "one of the many attractive features of Yosemite;" but Helen Hunt Jackson, the well-known Indian sympathizer, ironically called them "filthy" and "uncouth." John Muir, who played a major role in establishing the national park, similarly found them "mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous," and he felt that they had "no right place in the landscape." In 1890, Yosemite's boundaries dramatically enlarged when the area became the country's second national park. Fifty-two Indians, in response, petitioned Congress for compensation for "the overbearing tyranny and oppression of the white gold hunters" who had destroyed their previous way of life. Their petition was ignored, however, and the U.S. Army, which began administering the area surrounding Yosemite Valley, exerted an increasing amount of pressure to limit Native hunting activities. The administrators of Yosemite Valley, however, were far more tolerant toward the area's Natives than their Yellowstone counterparts, and for several decades into the twentieth century, Yosemite Valley boasted an "Indian village," where several Native American park employees resided along with their families. [8]

Mount Rainier National Park, established in 1899, gave new evidence of how Native Americans and their culture were treated within parks. Here, as at the other early parks, Indian place names were common, and the concessioner employed Indians to provide a sense of atmosphere and to sell curios to tourists. But tourists to Mount Rainier learned little about the area's Native American history, about the local groups or about prominent Native American individuals. Local Yakimas, [9] prior to the park's establishment, had hunted at a site southwest of the mountain that is still known as Indian Henry's Hunting Ground, and just east of the mountain a Yakima band had often hunted at Yakima Park (now known as the Sunrise area). After NPS officials began administering the park they found evidence, in 1915, of ongoing hunting activity in Yakima Park. An Interior Department Solicitor's opinion that year upheld the Natives' right to continue their traditional activity so long as it did not impinge upon the park's stated purposes. The Department, however, made no move to establish regulations that would have implemented that opinion. Then, less than a year later, Congress stepped in. On June 30, 1916, it passed an act which accepted the State of Washington's cession of exclusive jurisdiction over lands within the park. That act, among its other provisions, gave the NPS the right of exclusive jurisdiction over the park, and NPS officials on the local level, as a result, moved to ban subsistence hunting in the park. To test that right, a Yakima hunting party re-entered the park in October 1916. The park supervisor, in response, sought counsel from an NPS official in Washington. He urged that the Yakimas be arrested. By the time local rangers could act, however, the hunters had left the park with their game. The following October, Native hunters entered the park again. Alerted of their presence, the park supervisor and two other officials drove to Yakima Park and arrested six Indians who were in possession of freshly skinned deer hides. All pleaded guilty and were given small fines. The case made it clear that the new agency lacked a definite policy regarding subsistence hunting by Natives, and it set a precedent that would be used at other parks for years afterward. As an ironic coda, it should be noted that while the NPS was zealous in its enforcement of laws prohibiting hunting at Mount Rainier National Park, it had no problem with Native Americans' use of the park for berry picking or spear fishing. Officials sensed, correctly or not, that both activities were carried on only occasionally (and thus had few long-term impacts on park resources). Spear fishing, moreover, was tolerated and even encouraged because of its inclusion in Yakima interpretive demonstrations. [10]

Many motives have been ascribed for the rise of the national park movement, but as the examples of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and other early parks made clear, they did not include a role for Indians. This state of affairs was due, in part, to the fact that most of the early parks were located in the raw, unsettled west; and although the western frontier was becoming a popular subject for dime novels and wild west shows, it was still too recent and too dangerous for most policymakers and potential park visitors. As noted in Chapter 1, large numbers of white Americans, beginning in the 1880s, sympathized with the Natives' plight and recognized that they had often been treated unjustly. But their attitudes, which were heavily influenced by ideas dating back to the Enlightenment, demanded that Native Americans be "civilized" rather than respected for their lifeways and belief systems. And a byproduct of those attitudes, at the various national parks, was that there was little direct interaction between Native Americans and non-Native tourists. Most park visitors, rightly or wrongly, either ignored Native Americans or perceived them as a vague, sullen, largely invisible threat. [11] Indeed, some white Americans (and particularly those who lived in the western states and territories) openly discriminated against Native Americans. Attitudes such as these remained for years afterward and had a strong impact on early NPS policies toward Native Americans.

B. Establishing an NPS Management Policy, 1916-1933

The National Park Service came into being on August 25, 1916, primarily because the 36 parks and monuments then in existence had grown into a "hodgepodge of areas inconsistently managed and inadequately protected." [12] The new agency's first two leaders, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, were members of a so-alled "college-educated managerial elite" that were in positions of power in several federal conservation agencies at that time. Perhaps because of their educational level and field experience, both Mather and Albright had a genuine interest in archaeology and Native artifacts; they also had a genuine concern for Indians and could defend Native interests as they understood them, and they recognized that tribes had a historic, inherent relationship with parks. Their knowledge of living Indians, however, bordered on being superficial and naive. Correctly or not, Mather and Albright perceived that national park visitors preferred romantic stereotypes and "picturesque" misconceptions rather than the realities of Indian life. And, like most Americans at that time, elements of racism surfaced in their descriptions of Indians and their cultures. Both the stereotypes and the misconceptions are apparent in a book that Albright wrote in 1928, where he stated that visiting the various western national parks gave the visitor the opportunity to find "Real, live Indians! the kind that wear feathers, don war paint, make their clothes and moccasins of skins.... The best place for the Dude to see the Indian in his natural state is in some of the national parks." [13]

The brevity of the Congressional act that established the NPS demanded that additional, detailed guidance be provided to help direct park management policy. Interior Secretary Franklin Lane provided the general orientation of that policy in a May 1918 letter to Director Mather. (Lane's letter, in actuality, was probably written by Horace Albright after discussions with Mather.) The letter was unequivocal in his attitude toward hunting—"hunting will not be permitted in any national park"—but as to fishing, the letter noted that "mountain climbing ... boating, and fishing will ever be the favorite sports." It made no statement about non-recreational fishing. (It can only be assumed that officials were opposed to the activity, although it probably did not loom as a major issue.) Regarding the parks' botanical resources, Lane's letter urged the prohibition of tree-cutting except for certain specified uses (none of which related to subsistence), and the letter's other statements about botanical matters were similarly irrelevant to subsistence concerns because they pertained primarily to grazing and the collecting of museum specimens. [14]

During the next several decadest—hat is, from the agency's inception until the 1960s—the National Park Service was often insensitive to the needs of Native Americans that lived on the margins of the various NPS areas. At many park units, agency personnel and Native Americans rarely if ever came into conflict. But in virtually all of the "crown jewel" parks and in many other large western park units, Native Americans and the NPS clashed repeatedly over a variety of issues, including subsistence. In part, these conflicts stemmed from the fact that the NPS during this period was "fixed on growth as necessary for agency survival," and in order to satisfy the dictates of Congress and to please park visitors, "it demonstrated little genuine concern for Native rights." [15] And the fact that the NPS emerged victorious from many of its disagreements with its Indian neighbors stems, in part, from the hierarchy of governmental agencies. The National Park Service, in comparison with many other government agencies, traditionally ranked poorly in budgets and visibility because it lacked scientific or military prestige and because its programs—bent on retaining the status quo—neither produced dollars nor protected potential wealth. But compared with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, another Interior Department agency, the NPS ranked high. This is because the BIA had virtually no lobby, no public popularity, no tourist industry, and few avid Congressional supporters. [16] Case-by-case specifics about the nature of those conflicts, and the evolution of NPS policy toward subsistence, are described below.

The area included within today's Glacier National Park, in northern Montana, was once home to members of the Blackfeet confederacy. But as in other parts of the west, the coming of the white man had whittled down the Blackfeet's domain. Their legal dealings with the Federal government had begun in 1851, when a treaty (in which they had not participated) allotted them a large swath of the northern plains. But beginning in 1868, new agreements reduced the size of that allotment, and in 1895 the U.S. government finagled the Blackfeet into selling a twenty-mile-wide "mineral strip" for $1.5 million. This 800,000-acre expanse included the eastern half of present-day Glacier Park, along with additional lands to the south. The Blackfeet were firm in their conviction that the land sale would not affect their ability to hunt, fish, graze, or cut timber on the "mineral strip," and the agreement that Congress approved reflected those concerns. [17] But when Congress began considering the area as a national park, no Blackfeet or other Indians were invited to make their views known, and when the park became a reality in May 1910, the enabling act contained no provisions for hunting, fishing, or timber rights. A number of Blackfeet ignored the law, and in response, they were either jailed or removed, and their guns, traps, and game were confiscated. Perhaps based on those incidents, a 1914 law confirmed the obvious: that all hunting was prohibited in the park, along with all fishing except by hook and line. NPS officials, who soon recognized that the area's megafauna migrated between the park and the nearby Blackfeet Reservation, tried in the interests of wildlife conservation to purchase an additional six-mile-wide strip east of the park. Both the BIA and the Blackfeet rejected the Service's entreaties, however, and throughout the 1920s Indian hunting continued inside the park as well as on reservation land. In 1924, a Blackfeet leader went so far as to circulate a petition calling for recognition of Indian rights in the park. But the petition went nowhere, and in 1925 the Blackfeet and others filed a lawsuit based, in part, on the NPS's policy of actively prohibiting subsistence activities in the park. This lawsuit dragged on for ten years; meanwhile, the NPS made a renewed attempt to buy the six-mile strip east of the park's eastern border. During the late 1940s the NPS, for ecological reasons, belatedly recognized that it made little sense to purchase Blackfeet land. The Indians, for their part, pressed their case throughout this period for harvesting the park's game, fish, and timber resources; they have continued to do so, thus far without success. [18]

Grand Canyon is another example of an area that was reserved by the Federal government prior to the establishment of the National Park Service, although many activities related to Native use had taken place after the agency's creation. The canyon and the surrounding rimlands were designated as a forest reserve in the early 1890s, and in 1906 the area was reclassified as a game reserve; it became a national monument in 1908, and in 1919 Congress declared the area as Grand Canyon National Park. Here, as elsewhere, Natives had been living in the area long before Spanish explorers visited the area in 1540. These Natives, primarily Havasupai and Navajo Indians, remained in the area until American settlers began to arrive during the 1880s. Legally, they disappeared soon afterward; Federal agencies ignored their land rights and their prior occupation as they created the various conservation withdrawals, and NPS reports for many years after the park's 1919 establishment paid virtually no attention to area Indians. The Havasupai and Navajo, however, had not left. A few Havasupais continued to reside at Indian Garden, along the Bright Angel Trail, until the agency evicted them in 1928. Others continued to live within the park boundaries for years afterward; some hunted along the South Rim, and some worked in the park, either as NPS employees or for concessioners. By the late 1920s, the NPS had set aside a small area for the Havasupais, called Supai Camp, near Grand Canyon Village. Managing Supai Camp would cause NPS officials much vexation for decades to come. [19]

The NPS and local Indians had few if any recorded use conflicts over Grand Canyon National Park land. But before long, difficulties arose when the agency attempted to expand its boundaries. As early as 1919, NPS Director Stephen Mather mulled over the idea of building a road from the El Tovar Hotel to Cataract Canyon, near Supai Village. (Park land, at that time, extended all the way west to the rim above Cataract Canyon, while the Havasupai Indian Reservation was small—less than one square mile—and located entirely below the rim.) The road would have been built had the construction cost (some $2 million) not been so high, and in 1930 the NPS proposed purchasing Indian land in the area, an action for which it was heavily criticized. Somewhat later, during the mid-1950s, Havasupais living at Supai Camp began to assert their right to hunt deer in the park, actions that resulted in arrests and a partially-successful NPS campaign to close Supai Camp. At Grand Canyon, as elsewhere in the NPS system, agency officials had little sympathy toward allowing Natives to carry on activities that Congress had not specifically provided them. (This lack of sympathy, as noted later in this chapter, would abruptly change during the 1970s. As one aspect of those changed sympathies, Congress in 1975 transferred 169,000 acres of Park Service and Forest Service land along the canyon's south rim to the Havasupai tribe.) [20]

A third example of how the NPS and adjacent Natives coexisted is that of Mesa Verde National Park, established in June 1906. The Mesa Verde country, in southwestern Colorado, had long been a Ute homeland. But miners and other settlers began filtering into the area in the 1860s, and by the 1880s a series of treaties had relegated the Utes to a 15-mile-wide sliver of territory north of the Colorado-New Mexico border. The Mesa Verde legislation had further reduced the Ute Mountain Utes' reservation by 42,000 acres; and a subsequent boundary adjustment, necessitated by a surveying error, increased the park by an additional 175,000 acres, much of it gained at the Indians' expense. Less than a year later, a field inspection revealed that many of the best ruins were still outside of the new park's boundaries, so the Interior Department proposed trading land on nearby Ute Mountain for the land in question. The Utes initially refused to bargain, but using overtly coercive tactics, a land swap was implemented in May 1911; 19,500 acres on Ute Mountain was traded for 10,000 acres adjacent to the new national park. Yet another surveying error caused 1,320 additional acres to be transferred from Bureau of Indian Affairs to Interior Department jurisdiction, an action that was taken in 1913 without the Utes' knowledge or consent. [21] When the NPS inherited the park in 1916, officials with the new agency quickly learned that the Utes were still smarting over the strong-armed tactics that had been used five years earlier. Perhaps as a result, the Utes had no qualms about hunting, grazing livestock, cutting timber, or otherwise using park lands. The NPS took no immediate action in such cases; what it did show an interest in was additional land, in adjacent Mancos Canyon, that was "rich in cliff dwellings and archaeological material." Off and on for more than fifty years, NPS tried to acquire Mancos Canyon land. But no deal was ever completed. Not until 1970 did the agency drop its quest for Ute land. [22]

C. Shifting Policies Toward Native Americans, 1933-1963

As the NPS grew and matured, it began to adopt new paradigms toward Natives that resided on lands adjacent to newly-designated park units. Part of this change in attitude took place because the Franklin Roosevelt administration, during the mid-1930s, declared an "Indian New Deal," and the ramifications of the changed status of Indians in the Federal hierarchy had the practical effect of producing a rough stalemate between Natives and various land management bureaus. [23] Three examples of the shift in the agency's behavior during the creation of new park units (at Olympic and Everglades national parks and Grand Portage National Monument) are described below, and illustrations are provided showing a gradual loosening of strictures pertaining to subsistence uses.

Olympic National Park, located in northwestern Washington, was established by Congress in 1938. The process that created that park, however, was a half-century in the making. The idea of a national park—to protect the Roosevelt elk, other game and non-game animals, and several ancient stands of fir, spruce, and cedar—was first proposed by Judge James Wickersham in 1890. (Wickersham, then living in Tacoma, moved to Alaska in 1900 and spent some forty years there as a lawyer, judge, and Congressional delegate.) The Olympic Peninsula, at the time, was home to ten tribal or band groups, most of whom lived in coastal villages. Wickersham, however, felt that designating a park would cause no dislocation to area Natives. These groups, he claimed, stayed close to the coast because they were frightened by legends of mountain spirits and by savage gods that practiced cannibalism. [24]

Here, as elsewhere, the Federal government reserved much of the peninsula without regard to Native uses or claims. President Grover Cleveland reserved some 2.1 million acres there in 1897, but his successor, William McKinley, lopped off huge chunks of it to timber interests. By 1904, a proposal for an "Elk National Park" had arisen. That effort failed, but five years later, Theodore Roosevelt withdrew some 600,000 acres on the peninsula to establish Olympic National Monument. Woodrow Wilson stripped away most of the forested lands from the newly established monument. Twenty years later, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt played a key role in the campaign for a national park. The park bill that Roosevelt signed in 1938 was notable in that Indian treaty rights were explicitly protected [25], although Native issues had played no role in the park campaign and no Natives were consulted. Two years later, the NPS acquired a remarkable strip of land along the wild Pacific shoreline. Considering the complexity of the Native population and the variety of resource issues, relations between the NPS and area Natives during the next several decades were remarkably amicable. Part of that amicability, it appears, was based on the fact that local Indians, by and large, were invisible to the agency. A direct result of that invisibility was that park rangers did not overreact when they heard about occasional, illegal Indian elk or deer hunts. [26]

Everglades National Park, in southern Florida, was the subject of a long, agonizing birthing process; Congress authorized the park in 1934 but the NPS did not begin to administer it until 1947. This "river of grass" had long been home to the Seminole Indians, but few paid attention to them until the early twentieth century, when growing concerns about both their way of life and preserving the dwindling wildlife populations brought about the creation of a 100,000-acre Indian reservation and game preserve. The Florida land boom of the 1920s brought huge new threats to the Everglades, and in response to the sharp increases in ecological degradation, Robert T. Morris and Ernest F. Coe founded the Tropic Everglades Park Association. For the next two decades, Morris and Coe's organization fought for a park against local politicians and sport hunters. [27]

But before a park could be established, the Seminole Indians—who depended on the proposed parklands for subsistence—would also need to be considered. When the NPS first discussed the area, in 1930, officials discovered that the Seminoles' reservation, which was key to the proposed park, could legally be cancelled because the affected Indians hunted on their land but did not live there. But the BIA, which was also conducting an area study, declared that there was "an intimate connection between the Indians and the park" and that the Seminoles had to retain hunting rights in any future park proposal. Conservationists involved in the project likewise did not relish a Seminole removal from the areas being proposed for the park, so when Congress passed the Everglades National Park Act in 1934—which authorized a park but provided no land—the lives of local Natives were unaffected. Federal officials hoped that the park would become a reality through state and private land donations. [28]

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who helped organize support for the park, was a maverick administrator who, unlike others, felt that the local Indians enjoyed a special status. In a March 1935 radio address, he spoke of the historic injustices to Indians that had often accompanied the establishment of new parks, and he further declared that "the Seminoles ought to have the right of subsistence hunting and fishing within the proposed park." [29] Ickes had thus thrown a moral dimension into the fight for the Everglades, a factor that heretofore had never been considered; and as a practical matter, he had found a way, at least theoretically, to marry the ideas of Native use and wildlife preservation into the park proposal. BIA chief John Collier responded to Ickes's address by proposing a new sentence into the 1934 park act, which read "[Nothing] in this Act shall be construed to lessen any existing rights of the Seminole Indians which are not in conflict with the purposes [of] Everglades National Park." Ernest Coe, however, was furious at its inclusion, and in response to his criticism, NPS officials (and later Ickes, too) softened their stance. By 1936, Coe had been reassured that Indians had "no special rights or privileges within national parks." [30]

The following year, several Seminoles spoke out about the issue; in remarks to the press, they vowed never to leave the Everglades and would continue to hunt there regardless of how federal decision makers resolved the matter. Federal officials, perhaps in response, quietly agreed on a long-term plan to remove the affected Indians to sites north of the proposed park, but they indefinitely postponed the implementation of that plan; and throughout this period, Seminoles continued to hunt, trap, and fish in that area. (Major species harvested included alligators and frogs as well as various fish species.) By 1947, land donations and funds for additional land acquisition began to turn the park from an idea to a reality, and a Fish and Wildlife Service officer, Daniel Beard, was assigned to help write a refuge management plan. Beard, sensitive to the realities of Indian life, allowed several bands to reside within park boundaries. He hoped to include Natives as park rangers, and he also proposed that Native use of the area be a major interpretive theme. As to subsistence, however, he demanded that frogging be prohibited and that hunting be restricted to specific park areas. Once the park was established, however, NPS officials let it be known that those prohibitions would not be enforced. Indians, to this day, continue to live on leased land within park boundaries, but they seldom use the park except for traditional burials. [31]

At Grand Portage, in northeastern Minnesota, the agency showed a new willingness to work with Native groups on what was targeted as a mutually-beneficial park area. This 710-acre parcel, which was declared a national historic site in 1951 and a national monument in 1958, included within its boundaries a long-established Chippewa village, and it indirectly commemorated the role of American Indians as well as non-Native trappers in the northern fur trade. In order to establish the park unit, the Chippewa donated almost half of the monument's land, and in return, the NPS guaranteed the tribe free access across the monument, job preferences, the stimulation of handicraft sales, and other advantages. It was perhaps the first time in which agency personnel had worked together with Native representatives on a park proposal. Indeed, the stipulations of a tribal resolution formed the backbone of the enabling legislation. [32]

As noted above, Secretary Franklin Lane had recommended in 1918 that the NPS adopt a policy prohibiting hunting in the national parks, and seven years later, Secretary Hubert Work reiterated that policy and expanded it to monuments as well as parks. The government's first Code of Federal Regulations, published in 1938, noted that "the destruction ... or disturbance of ... any animal, bird, or other wildlife ... is prohibited," and it more specifically it stated that

The parks and monuments are sanctuaries for wildlife of every sort, and all hunting, or the killing, wounding, frightening, capturing, or attempting to capture at any time of any wild bird or animal, ... is prohibited within the limits of the parks and monuments. [33]

The policy's primary effect was to protect wildlife populations by stopping sport hunting. An unfortunate byproduct of this policy was that Native Americans, who often had few nutritional alternatives, were severely impacted by the ban. But as the examples above (all of which date from the pre-1960 period) have suggested, the agency's prohibition against hunting was something less than ironclad. [34]

Consider the following examples. At Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, Glacier and Grand Canyon, the NPS vigorously enforced anti-hunting laws; and with the possible exception of Glacier, the agency apparently succeeded in both driving subsistence users away and preventing them from returning. But at Mesa Verde, Olympic, and Everglades, and probably at a number of other national parks as well, park officials were less than zealous in their enforcement efforts, knowing full well that subsistence activities occasionally took place. In these latter parks, NPS officials tacitly condoned subsistence harvests so long as they remained both small in scale and away from the public view. In addition to the above parks, either hunting or sheep grazing took place at several park units in the Four Corners area. These activities were openly allowed in both Navajo and Canyon de Chelly national monuments (primarily because the units were on Navajo tribal land), but NPS pressure eventually forced Natives to abandon these activities at Chaco Canyon National Monument (now Chaco Culture National Historical Park) and Wupatki National Monument. [35] Hunting on an informal basis—officially illegal, but tolerated—also took place in Hawaii National Park (where hunting helped control the booming feral goat population), at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, at Virgin Islands National Park, and doubtless at a number of other park units. [36]

The parks that condoned subsistence hunting during this period were by no means the only units in the NPS system where hunting took place. As Richard Sellars's excellent history of NPS natural resource management has described, officials in Grand Teton National Park in 1950 bowed to public pressure and began allowing recreational sportsmen to hunt elk in Jackson Hole as a means of culling an overstocked herd. In addition, the agency often authorized hunting in national park units to control predators. Most of this hunting was done by NPS rangers, but outside hunters were occasionally brought in. (This activity, quite common during the Mather era, began to decline during the 1930s but did not cease until years later.) And beginning in the mid-1930s, the agency had responded to Americans' increasing recreational needs by establishing the first national recreation areas. These units, which during this period were primarily based on reservoirs, often allowed a broad range of activities, including hunting, that were not generally authorized in national parks or monuments. [37]

In addition to the relatively small number of park units where hunting took place, scattered other park units allowed other subsistence activities on either a legalized or informal basis. If it is assumed that the definition of "subsistence uses" as applied in the Alaska Lands Act is used here—to include hunting, fishing, and collecting—then twenty or more park units that were established prior to 1965 supported subsistence activities. (See Table 2-1, following page.) Several parks, as described above, allowed hunting, and at least two national parks formally allowed subsistence fishing—both located at the time in U.S. territories—while other units condoned the activity on an informal basis.

Table 2-1. Known Subsistence Uses in Non-Alaskan NPS Units That Were Established Prior to 1976

Fishing in the National Park system, according to federal rules, was either prohibited entirely or was open only to recreational sportsmen. NPS regulations stated that "Fishing with nets, seines, traps, ... or for merchandise or profit, or in any other way than with hook and line, the rod or line being held in hand, is prohibited," and they further stated that "The canning or curing of fish for the purpose of transporting them out of a national park or monument is prohibited." [38] The only exceptions to these regulations applied at Fort Jefferson and Glacier Bay national monuments, where commercial fishing was allowed, and at Hawaii and Virgin Islands national parks (see below), where personal-use (i.e., subsistence) fishing was allowed to continue. At all four units, fishing was tightly regulated by user, gear type, and season. A few additional park units, primarily in the southeastern or southcentral states, allowed fishing with trot and throw lines (i.e., fishing lines with multiple hooks) while a few others allowed small seines to be used on bait fish such as minnows and crawfish. [39]

Perhaps the most well known example of legalized subsistence fishing in a national park unit is Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which was established as Hawaii National Park in 1916. In June 1938, Congress expanded the park's boundaries along the Kalapana coast, and the language in the bill gave explicit permission for the "Native Hawaiian residents" in the extension area to fish along the coast above the high tide line and also to collect limpets, locally called opihi. [40] Subsistence fishing is also legally allowed in Virgin Islands National Park. The bill establishing the park, which passed Congress in 1956, specifically provided for fishing "by traditional means;" local residents had a long history of subsistence fishing using traps. [41] At Georgia's Fort Pulaski National Monument, and perhaps at other NPS units, "protein fishing" (i.e., fishing by indigent local residents) has long taken place; though not specifically sanctioned, officials condone the practice because it does not impair overall park values and because it provides opportunities for area residents to visit the park. [42]

Far more numerous are instances in which park units (all of which were established prior to 1963) allowed the collection, by local residents, of either plant materials (for nutritional, construction, or craft purposes) or various materials for ceremonial purposes. Agency regulations, first issued in 1938, discouraged any such practices; they bluntly stated that "the destruction, ... removal, or disturbance in any way of ... any tree, flower, [or] vegetation ... is prohibited." There were only two general exceptions to this rule. First, "flowers may be gathered in small quantities when, in the judgment of the superintendent or custodian, their removal will not impair the beauty of the park or monument." In addition, allowances were made for "collections for scientific or educational purposes." Both of these activities required a written permit from a superintendent or custodian. [43] By 1943, the regulations remained restrictive, and they further noted that "the unauthorized possession of any flower or other vegetation in any park or monument is prohibited." [44] But by the 1960s, regulations presented a mixed message. On the one hand, they noted that

the possession ... removal or disturbance in any manner of any animal and plant matter and direct or indirect products thereof, including but not limited to petrified wood, flower, cone or other fruit, egg, nest, or nesting site ... is prohibited, except as otherwise provided in this section or in special regulations for a park area.

A later paragraph in those regulations, however, provided for personal use gathering under certain circumstances:

The gathering or possession for personal consumption or use, of only such fruits and berries as the Superintendent may designate is permitted. All such fruits and berries shall be picked by hand. The gathering or collecting of such objects for the purpose of sale is prohibited. [45]

The only park-specific exception mentioned in the 1938 regulations was at Hawaii National Park, where visitors "may, with the permission of the park superintendent, pick and eat, or carry away, such fruits as the superintendent may designate." Based on that provision, visitors to the park (primarily that portion of the park that became Haleakala National Park in 1960) have a long history of collecting a'kala (native raspberries), and under specified conditions, locals have long taken certain native plant materials for traditional uses. [46] Elsewhere, plant materials have been collected at many other park units, including the following:

Badlands NP (S.D.), where the Lakota Sioux harvest prairie turnip [47]

Death Valley NP (Calif.), where the Timbisha Shoshone collect pinyon nuts [48]

Grand Canyon NP (Ariz.), where Natives collect both pinyon nuts and salt [49]

Great Sand Dunes NP (Colo.), where local residents collect pinyon nuts [50]

Great Smoky Mountains NP (N.C./Tenn.), where the Cherokee collect ramps (wild leeks) and all local residents collect nuts and berries [51]

Organ Pipe Cactus NM (Ariz.), where the Tohono O'odham gather cactus fruit [52]

Rocky Mountain NP (Colo.), where Natives collect nuts [53]

Saguaro NP (Ariz.), where the Tohono O'odham gather cactus fruit [54]

Walnut Canyon NM (Ariz.), where pinyon nuts and elderberry flowers are collected [55]

Yosemite NP (Calif.), where the Miwok and Paiute collect mushrooms, elderberries, and black oak acorns for food, and bracken fern root, sedge root and willow shoots for basket making [56]

Of these activities, only the cactus fruit collecting practiced by the Tohono O'odham has gained specific legal sanction, either by provisions in the enabling legislation or via special use permits. Activities in the other park units have been conducted on an informal basis. Pinyon nut collecting may well have taken place in a number of other units in the southwestern states than those listed here. [57]

Ceremonial collecting was also tolerated, though less evidence has been gathered in this regard. It is known, for example, that material for ceremonial purposes has long been collected at both Rocky Mountain NP (Colo.) and Bandelier NM (N.M.). [58] Similar activities may well have taken place at a number of other park units.

D. Emergence of New NPS Policies, 1963-Present

Beginning in the early 1960s, the NPS began to adopt new attitudes toward Native Americans. A number of reasons probably lay behind the agency's change of perspective. Part of the change was caused by an increased sympathy toward Native causes by society as a whole; part was doubtless caused by an increased sensitivity toward Natives among agency employees; and part was probably caused by increased militancy among Native groups that either lived adjacent to existing park units or were involved in agency attempts to establish new park units. For each of these reasons, the NPS by the early 1970s was significantly more respectful of Native viewpoints, and NPS employees responded by allowing greater Native uses of existing parks, by making Native themes an increased part of park interpretive programs, by including Native concerns in the planning of new parks, and by similar measures. This increased recognition in the role of Native Americans in the parks has continued to the present day.

One way in which the NPS has shown its sensitivity toward Native Americans has been in its increased willingness to establish new units based upon Indian historical themes or units in which Natives were consulted as part of the proposal process. In that context, the year 1965 looms as significant. In May of that year, Congress established the Nez Perce National Historical Park to commemorate the lifeways as well as the historical struggle of the Nez Perce people. The park, though headquartered in Spalding, Idaho, is spread across 38 sites in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. This model "partnership park" has been managed by the Nez Perce tribe ever since; only five of the 38 sites are owned by the NPS. [59] Three months later, Congress established Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. The site, established to commemorate historical trading activities between Navajos and non-Native traders, is located in the midst of the Navajo Indian Reservation and has long depended on Native staff and interpretive themes. [60] Later that decade, the NPS began working with the Pima Indians toward establishing another partnership park at Snaketown, an archeological site located on the Gila River reservation south of Phoenix, Arizona. Congress went so far as to authorize a park, but the Pimas blocked the process and prevented its implementation. [61]

Five years after the Nez Perce and Hubbell Trading Post units were established, Congress created Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin. This unit is significant because the process by which it was established marked a significant change in how Native groups were able to mold park legislation that directly affected their interests. The idea of protecting the twenty-two Apostle Islands in an NPS unit had been initially proposed in the early 1930s. That effort had failed, but a second attempt in the mid-1950s had resulted in the establishment of a state forest on three of the islands. By the early 1960s, conservationists recognized that the islands were being threatened by summer home construction as well as by potential logging operations. Preserving the islands clearly demanded a federal effort. Complicating the effort, however, were the Bad River and Red Cliff Chippewa; both bands had reservations in the area, and both depended on area resources for hunting, fishing, trapping, and wild rice harvesting. But the initial Congressional bill to emerge on the issue proposed that the federal government purchase all lands on the two reservations, both tribal lands and individual allotments, in favor of new lands that the Interior Department would provide away from the proposed park. But within months of the bill's emergence, the Chippewa support for the bill had winnowed away. Despite that opposition, park backers pushed ahead, and a park bill passed the U.S. Senate in early 1967. That July, however, negotiations reached a standstill because the two Indian bands—who were backed by newly-empowered, Washington-based Native rights organizations—collectively agreed that any new park should not infringe on Indian lands or tribal rights. Some park backers, given that position, reluctantly agreed to push for a bill that included no reservation land. But others, most notably the NPS and the Interior Department, fought the idea. The testimony of the latter two parties, however, ultimately proved unpersuasive, and in a landmark victory for Native rights, the bill that passed Congress and became law in September 1970 did not include Indian lands. Rights to Indian hunting, trapping, fishing, and rice harvesting within the newly created national lakeshore were also protected. [62]

The 1960s were also notable because the NPS began to make internal organizational changes on the behalf of Native American interests. In 1963, the agency's Southwest Region commenced its Indian Assistance Program (IAP), a novel effort headed by archeologist Leland Abel. That program, a cooperative arrangement between the NPS and BIA, provided cultural resource management, maintenance and design, and archeological assistance to Indian tribes throughout the region. To increase accessibility to the tribal officials with whom they worked, IAP staff were located in Phoenix, Arizona and Gallup, New Mexico as well as in Santa Fe. The program expanded in popularity and, backed by NPS officials at both the regional and Washington level, it remained active for almost twenty years. Another organizational change that the NPS implemented that decade occurred in 1968 when the Southwest Region created a special Navajo Lands Group, headed by John E. Cook, to help manage Navajo-area sites. [63] Shortly afterward, NPS Director George Hartzog—at the behest of new Interior Secretary Walter Hickel—asked Cook to head an Indian Economy Task Force, which entailed a nationwide survey regarding how Natives and the NPS could work together on issues of mutual concern. [64]

During the 1970s, Indian tribes became increasingly aggressive in pursuing their interests, and in the face of new resistance to NPS policies, the agency became increasingly sensitive to Native issues. In this decade, as in the previous one, the Southwest Region was at the forefront. But on a national level, no real progress took place until the late 1970s. Work on a servicewide Indian relations policy began in 1978 (using principles that had first been espoused by Chief Historian Verne Chatelain back in the 1930s), and after almost a decade of effort the agency issued a completed Native American Relationships Management Policy. This document, distributed in 1987, stated in unequivocal terms that the agency, more than just tolerating Native presence in and around parks, would respect and promote tribal cultures as an active park component. [65] The NPS also signaled its interest in Native affairs when Director Russell Dickenson, in 1982, appointed Bill Fields as the agency's first tribal liaison. Fields, a Cherokee who had grown up on the Navajo reservation, was an old NPS hand; at the time of his appointment, had worked for years in the Southwest Region's Indian Assistance Program and had headed the program since 1979. [66]

The 1960s also marked a watershed period because the agency began to broaden the types of uses that would be allowed in both new and existing parks. The agency, during this period, was justifiably proud of its successes, over the years, in preventing the incursions of unwanted activities in the parks, both in the "crown jewels" and elsewhere. But in its mission to make the agency more relevant to minority and other urban residents, NPS Director Hartzog instituted a expansionist and activist park policy as part of President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" program, and between 1964 and 1972, sixty-nine new NPS units came into being. Several new units were national recreation areas located near large urban centers, and several more were national seashores or lakeshores; only five of the sixty-nine were national parks. Most of the new national recreation areas, national seashores and national lakeshores allowed hunting, although the activity was typically prohibited in urban-based units. [67]

The other major way in which the NPS began to change its organizational habits during the mid-1960s, as they related to Native Americans and other local residents, was to incorporate the concerns of those groups in the various new NPS units. Most new parks, to be sure, did not focus on Native or local-resident themes, but the new park units—regardless of theme—did differ from previously-created park units in that they took pains to incorporate local lifeways (Native or non-Native) into the park planning process. And this process of incorporation often resulted in local land uses, that in an earlier period would have been prohibited, being legitimized in the newly-established park units.

The following parks, all of which were established between 1963 and 1972, illustrate the range of allowed uses:

Badlands NP (S.D.) — Oglala Sioux can hunt, etc. in the newly-designated South Unit, [68]

Buffalo NR (Ark.) — local residents still utilize area resources [69]

Lake Chelan NRA (Wash.) — Stehekin residents can gather wood and other local materials [70]

Point Reyes NS (Calif.) — Hispanic ranch hands pick berries [71]

Redwood NP (Calif.) — Natives can collect maidenhair ferns for baskets [72]

Voyageurs NP (Minn.) — Ojibwe can harvest wild rice and pick berries [73]

Many parks that have been established since 1972 have also made special provisions for the local residents' needs, but inasmuch as they are not the primary focus of this report they will not be discussed here. [74] One major change, however, was the agency's decision to create a new park category, and in October 1974 the first two "national preserves" came into being. This category, the process that brought it into being, and the category's applicability to the various Alaska park proposals will be discussed in Chapter 4.

This change of attitude has also affected a number of the existing parks. Although generalization is difficult due to the small number of parks for which data are available, it appears that a general trend has emerged in recent years to either allow subsistence activities by local residents, so long as that activity is compatible with overall park goals, or to officially permit and codify various subsistence activities that previously had been allowed on only an informal or surreptitious basis. [75]

Perhaps at the expense of overgeneralization, it appears that during the early years of the national parks, both before and after the formation of the National Park Service in 1916, there was a strong tendency to suppress existing subsistence activities, often through law enforcement actions. Legislation creating new parks and monuments, moreover, generally forbade subsistence activities because it was perceived that such activities ran counter to the NPS Organic Act goal of "conserv[ing] the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein." But even in the early days, there were a few parks where subsistence activities (either fishing or collecting) were legally allowed. In addition, there were other parks where informal subsistence activities—hunting included—were condoned, either because of political sensitivities or because there was a recognition on the part of NPS officials that these activities were causing no long-term harm to the resource base. The tendency to allow subsistence activities in new and existing park units, on either a legal or informal basis, began to increase after 1963, and a recognition of local lifeways has become, in recent years, an important part of park planning efforts. The following chapter will investigate how the agency's changing attitude toward subsistence has been applied to the various Alaska park units that were established prior to the 1970s.

Notes — Chapter 2

¹ Raymond Fredric Dasmann, "National Parks, Nature Conservation, and 'Future Primitive'," unpub. paper presented at the South Pacific Conference on National Parks, Wellington, N.Z., February 24-27, 1975, in Theodor R. Swem Collection, Conservation Library, Western History Collection, Denver Public Library. Also see Philip Burnham, Indian Country, God's Country; Native Americans and the National Parks (Covelo, Calif., Island Press, 2000), 15-16, 325; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, third edition (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982), 100-01, 350; and Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks; A History (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997), 293.

² Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1998), 19.

³ Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness; Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 42-43; David Rains Wallace, Yellowstone, a Natural and Human History, Official National Park Handbook (Harpers Ferry, WV, NPS, c. 1999), 40-41.

⁴ Lary M. Dilsaver, ed., America's National Park System; the Critical Documents (Lanham, Md.; Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 28-29.

⁵ Wallace, Yellowstone, a Natural and Human History, 65; Philip Burnham, Indian Country, God's Country; Native Americans and the National Parks (Covelo, CA, Island Press, 2000), 24-25. Also see Timothy Rawson, Changing Tracks; Predators and Politics in Mt. McKinley National Park (Fairbanks, Univ. of Alaska Press, 2001), 58.

⁶ Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 55-58; Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 23-24; Wallace, Yellowstone, a Natural and Human History, 41, 46.

⁷ Dilsaver, ed., America's National Park System, 36; Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 24.

⁸ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 20-22; Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 102, 106-13. Muir, who admitted that he knew little about the valley's Native residents, remarked that "the worst thing about them is their uncleanliness" but he quickly added that "nothing truly wild is unclean." Burnham, Indian Country, God's Country, 20-21.

⁹ This tribe is now known as the Yakamas.

¹⁰ Theodore Catton, Wonderland; An Administrative History of Mount Rainier National Park (Seattle, NPS, May 1996), 14-20; Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 25-26.

¹¹ Keller and Turek, American Indians and the National Parks, 232-33.

¹² Ibid., 27. The quote is from John C. Miles's Guardians of the Parks (Washington, Taylor and Francis, 1995), 1.

¹³ Keller and Turek, American Indians and the National Parks, 28, 232. The quotes are from Albright's Oh, Ranger! (Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1928), 81-96.

¹⁴ Dilsaver, ed., America's National Park System, 48-50, 62-65. In 1925, Interior Secretary Hubert Work issued a revised Statement of National Park Policy, which reiterated the prohibition toward hunting in both parks and monuments. The single exception to the prohibition described in 1925 was the case of Mount McKinley National Park, which is discussed in Chapter 3.

¹⁵ Keller and Turek, American Indians and the National Parks, 233.

¹⁶ Ibid., 26-27.

¹⁷ Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 77-83; Keller and Turek, American Indians and the National Parks, 43-50.

¹⁸ Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 88-96; Keller and Turek, American Indians and the National Parks, 50-61; Christopher S. Ashby, The Blackfeet Agreement of 1895 and Glacier National Park: A Case History, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Montana, 1985, Chapter 5.

¹⁹ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 131-36, 138-39, 157.

²⁰ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 136-37, 140, 157, 164; Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 135.

²¹ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 31-38.

²² Ibid., 39-41.

²³ Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 134.

²⁴ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 93-94; Evangeline Atwood and Robert N. DeArmond, comp., Who's Who in Alaskan Politics (Portland, Binford and Mort, 1977), 106. Atwood's biography of the controversial leader is Frontier Politics; Alaska's James Wickersham (Portland, Binford and Mort), 1979.

²⁵ Keller and Turek (p. 122) noted that the Olympic's enabling legislation, H.R. 10024, provided that "nothing herein shall affect any valid existing claim ... nor the rights reserved by treaty to the Indians of any tribes."

²⁶ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 91, 99, 107-08, 122-23, 127-28. As noted on p. 122, Natives were apparently no more guilty of occasional poaching than non-Natives.

²⁷ Ibid., 219-21.

²⁸ Ibid., 221-22.

²⁹ Ibid., 225. The use of the term "subsistence" is unusual at such an early date; as noted in a Chapter 4 endnote, subsistence as commonly used today was not applied in Alaska until 1969, when Congress was debating the proposed Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

³⁰ Ibid., 225-26.

³¹ Ibid., 227-31; Devi Sharp interview, August 7, 2001.

³² Tim Cochrane (Supt. GRPO) to author, email, February 12 and 13, 2002; Ron Cockrell, Grand Portage National Monument, Minnesota: An Administrative History (Omaha, NPS, 1983), 1, 3-5.

³³ Code of Federal Regulations (1938), Title 36, Sections 2.2(a) and 2.8(a). Nearly identical language appeared in the 1943 CFR, sections 2.2(a) and 2.9(a).

³⁴ One manifestation of the change in attitude between Indians and the federal government was a proposal by Lakota Sioux writer Iktomi Lila Sica for the creation of national "Indian-wild life sanctuaries" that would encompass lands surrounding Yellowstone, Glacier, and Wind Cave national parks as well as Badlands National Monument. These "wilderness area[s] for Indians and wild life" were a throwback to ideas espoused by George Catlin a century before, and more recently to Black Elk, a contemporary Sioux leader. Congress did not seriously consider this to be a "forcefully stated protest" (as quoted by historian Mark Spence), though it served "as a strong counterpoint to more popular concerns about wilderness preservation and management." Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 134.

³⁵ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 187-91, 194, 207, 211.

³⁶ Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks; a History (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997), 259-60; Frederic H. Wagner, et al., Wildlife Policies in the U.S. National Parks (Washington, D.C., Island Press, 1995), 82; Ries Collier email, July 22, 1998.

³⁷ Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 72-75, 139, 180, 196-200; Dilsaver, America's National Park System, 87-88. As Barry Mackintosh noted in The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, NPS, 1985), pp. 62-63, national recreation areas were technically excluded from the National Park System because of fears that they would degrade park standards. This exclusion was overcome by a 1968 Congressional directive.

³⁸ Code of Federal Regulations (1938), Title 36, Section 2.9(a) and Section 2.10(b) and (h).

³⁹ See, for example, 36 CFR (1943), Title 36, Section 7.36(a). In 1992, Fort Jefferson National Monument was renamed Dry Tortugas National Park.

⁴⁰ Gary Somers interview, July 23, 1998; G. Bryan Harry, interview by Sande Faulkner, February 10, 1995; 36 CFR (1943), Section 7:25(d); 36 CFR (1988), Section 7:25(a)(3). The 1938 act, and the subsequent regulations, did not define the term "Native Hawaiian," and they were also silent on how to define "residents of the Kalapana extension area." Enforcing these provisions brought headaches to NPS officials. One problem was overcome, many years later, when a "Native Hawaiian" was defined as "any descendent of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778." The problem of how to precisely define a Kalapana resident has still not been solved; it became murkier, in fact, in 1990, when Kalapana's population was forced to flee in the face of an oncoming lava flow.

⁴¹ Ries Collier email, July 22, 1998.

⁴² Lance Hatten email, July 21 and 22, 1998.

⁴³ Code of Federal Regulations (1938), Title 36, sections 2.2(a) and (d).

⁴⁴ 36 CFR (1943), Title 36, sections 2.2(e); also see sections 2.2(a) and 2.15.

⁴⁵ 36 CFR (1967), Section 2.20 (a)(1) and (2).

⁴⁶ Code of Federal Regulations (1938), Title 36, Section 2.2(f); 36 CFR (1943), Title 36, Sections 2.2(d); Ron Nagata email, November 12, 1999.

⁴⁷ Email from Marianne Mills, July 21, 1998 and Jennie Vasarhelyi, July 22, 1998.

⁴⁸ Blair Davenport email, July 22, 1998.

⁴⁹ Email from Gary Cummins, July 21, 1998; Doug Brown, July 21, 1998; and Helen Fairley, August 3, 1998.

⁵⁰ Fred Bunch email, July 23 and August 6, 1998.

⁵¹ Janet Rock email, November 4, 1999.

⁵² Email from G. Frank Williss, July 15, 1998; Karren Brown, July 20, 1998; and William Wellman, July 23, 1998.

⁵³ Jeff Connor email, July 23, 1998.

⁵⁴ Email from G. Frank Williss, July 15, 1998; William Wellman, July 23, 1998; and Alexa Roberts, August 21, 1998.

⁵⁵ Email from Mary Blasing, July 23, 1998 and Helen Fairley, August 3, 1998.

⁵⁶ Craig Bates email, August 10, 1998.

⁵⁷ Fred Bunch email, August 6, 1998.

⁵⁸ Email from Chris Judson, July 21, 1998 and Jeff Connor, July 23, 1998.

⁵⁹ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 13, 29; NPS, The National Parks: Index 1997-1999 (Washington, NPS, 1997), 43, 59, 73, 92.

⁶⁰ NPS, The National Parks: Index 1997-1999, 22.

⁶¹ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 29.

⁶² Ibid., 6-14.

⁶³ Ted Birkedal interview, November 2, 1999; Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 234.

⁶⁴ John E. Cook interview, April 18, 2001; John E. Cook to author, email, May 17, 2001.

⁶⁵ Just a year later, this policy was superceded by the NPS Management Policies (December 1988), in which Native American issues and concerns were included in numerous parts of the agency's overall policies. This policy, in turn, has been superceded by Management Policies 2001, published by the agency in December 2000.

⁶⁶ Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 234; Ted Birkedal interview, November 2, 1999.

⁶⁷ Mackintosh, The National Parks: Shaping the System, 62, 68-71, 76-78.

⁶⁸ Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 135; Memorandum of Agreement between Oglala Sioux and NPS, January 2, 1976, in Sande Anderson files, AKSO; Marianne Mills email, July 21, 1998.

⁶⁹ Email from Karen Rogal, July 21, 1998 and Alexa Roberts, July 21, 1998.

⁷⁰ David Louter, Contested Terrain; North Cascades National Park Service Complex, An Administrative History (Seattle, NPS, 1998), 52-53, 137; David Louter email, July 21 and July 22, 1998.

⁷¹ Sara Koenig email, July 22, 1998.

⁷² Jean Rodeck email, July 23, 1998.

⁷³ Email from Julie Athman, July 20, 1998 and Jim Benedict, July 23, 1998.

⁷⁴ An informal query submitted to NPS interpretive specialists revealed that a number of non-Alaskan park units that were established after 1972 support subsistence activities, among them El Malpais NM (N.M.), Great Basin NP (Nev.), the Barataria Unit of Jean Lafitte NHP and Preserve (La.), Kalaupapa NHP (Hawaii), NP of American Samoa, and New River Gorge NR (W.V.).

⁷⁵ As evidence of this trend, Yosemite National Park and the American Indian Council of Mariposa County, in the fall of 1997, signed a Memorandum of Understanding about the use of the park for various "traditional" activities; several NPS units in southern Utah have recently adopted an MOU with the Southern Paiutes to formalize subsistence and other traditional activities that occur on NPS lands; the Blackfeet now have a good working relationship with Glacier National Park officials; and in February 1999, the Interior Department struck a deal with the Timbesha Shoshone to manage lands in and around Death Valley National Park. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 137-39; Craig Bates email, August 10, 1998; Lee Kreutzer email, August 12, 1998; and Anchorage Daily News, February 26, 1999, B-3.