For decades, Native Americans were not a part of the broader story of Yellowstone National Park, even though they have deep historical connections to the region dating back more than 10,000 years.

That’s changed incrementally as the Park Service has removed place names from locations associated with bigoted historic figures, encouraged tribal demonstrations and tours and participated in consultation with Native Americans over managing bison hunts and transferring live bison to tribes.

This spring, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official announced tribes would be consulted regarding a petition to list bison as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Changing perspectives

Such tribal engagement, and even co-stewardship at other federal sites, is “changing the perspective and understanding of the history of public lands,” said Monte Mills, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington.

The transition has been aided by the Biden administration’s appointment of the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland. The change can also be seen at the local level as the Custer Gallatin National Forest hired its first tribal liaison.

Mills said it will benefit government land managers to listen to tribes because of their profound ties to and understanding of the natural world.

“Tribal nations, as a general matter, have millennia of connections and understanding of public lands,” he said. “They were, and remain, deeply connected to many of these areas.”

Problems arise

This evolution in public lands management hasn’t been without its problems. The Park Service was recently chastised by a bison advocacy group for its statement acknowledging the birth of a white buffalo calf inside Yellowstone this spring.

“They once again display the reflexive impulse that asserts Euro-American knowledge over Indigenous knowledge ways and generations-long relationships with the sacred buffalo,” the Buffalo Field Campaign asserted in a news release.

In the harsh winter of 2021-22, tribes participating in hunts were criticized for killing more than 1,000 bison that had migrated out of Yellowstone. George Wuerthner, an environmentalist and president of the Montana Wild Bison Restoration Council, questioned in his online posts whether tribes such as the Nez Perce had treaty rights to hunt in the Gardiner Basin, just north of the park boundary. He argued the tribe was restricted to territory it had ceded in its treaty with the U.S. government.

Mills, who formerly taught law at the University of Montana, disagreed about the context of Wuerthner’s arguments.

“Under the law, the more appropriate context is: How would the tribes have understood these rights, and to the extent that there’s nothing in the treaties that would suggest the tribe has given up a right, then the tribe retains those rights,” Mills explained.

That’s the reserved rights doctrine the U.S. Supreme Court has followed since its decision in a 1905 case, he said.

In the Stevens treaties, negotiated in the 1800s with tribes in what is now Washington, Native Americans reserved the right to hunt on open and unclaimed land.

“It didn’t say: Only where they’ve used that land exclusively, or only where they had used and occupied that area,” Mills said.

The foundational rules of treaties would say the tribes were seeking to protect what they had been doing, Mills added. For thousands of years, their people had “the run of the place,” and unless specifically expressed, they never gave up those rights.

Expiration date

Wuerthner also pointed to the 1855 Lame Bull Treaty with the Blackfeet that had, among its many provisions, one that created a hunting zone open to all regional tribes. That treaty had a termination date of 99 years.

“So again, this would negate say the Nez Perce as well as other tribes from hunting bison by Gardiner,” Wuerthner wrote in an email.

Mills said the treaty applied to the specific communal hunting ground where the tribes shared the resource. It didn’t say the tribes right to hunt disappears after 99 years.

Any ambiguous language has to be interpreted in favor of the tribes, he added.

One of the exceptions to hunting rights in the region can be found in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks where Congress has outlawed killing wildlife to protect species like bison that were nearly exterminated. Mills said Congress, based on judicial interpretations, abrogated tribal hunting rights in the parks.

Looking ahead

In 2021, Ojibwe writer David Treuer wrote an article for Atlantic magazine calling for the return of national parks to tribal people as a form of restitution.

“Our planet is calling for the return of Indigenous stewardship, now more than ever,” said Chase Iron Eyes, director of the Lakota People’s Law Project. “Rather than continuing the slow genocide against the original caretakers of the land, government agencies should see and hear us — and they finally are.”

Iron Eyes was quoted in a press release announcing a new intertribal initiative asking visitors to national parks and monuments to donate to tribes via lakotalaw.org/parks as compensation for visiting Indigenous lands.

Co-stewardship, on the other hand, involves the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into federal land management. That doesn’t mean the tribes are taking over or the agency is giving up its responsibilities.

“The co part of co-stewardship is collaborative,” Mills said. “It’s a shared decision-making process … within the federal scheme.”

He sees that already playing out in the Interagency Bison Management Plan, where the Park Service, other state and federal agency managers, along with tribal representatives, gather twice a year to discuss Yellowstone bison populations, hunting and the problems that can arise from firing lines along the park’s northern border.

“The bison at Yellowstone — one because it’s bison, two because it’s Yellowstone, three because it’s so complicated — that is one of the primary places in which some of these questions and issues should really be figured out,” Mills said. “It is definitely one of the more high-profile issues where these questions about Indigenous knowledge, co-stewardship and treaty rights are being worked through.”

Optimism

The gradual changes incorporating tribal people and Indigenous knowledge in federal decisions doesn’t gloss over the past, when Native Americans were forced onto reservations and their long-term relationships with traditional landscapes like Yellowstone were nearly erased, Mills said.

Yet he remains optimistic.

“It does make for a much brighter future both for public lands and the relationship with tribes and, sort of, our understanding of what our history has been,” Mills said.

“It’s been really interesting to see the ways in which these discussions are proceeding, largely because of the tribes advocating and pushing forward their interest,” he added. “In some ways you can think about this as an opportunity for really reshaping how public land and resources will be managed in the future.”

Science vs. spiritualism

The challenges that lie ahead are numerous.

For example, the white buffalo calf was celebrated by Native Americans who see its birth as a blessing and also a warning. Yellowstone, in its press release, tended to focus on the biological/scientific side of the event.

“The birth of a white bison calf may reflect the presence of a natural genetic legacy that was preserved in Yellowstone’s bison, which has revealed itself because of the successful recovery of a wild bison population of 3,000-6,000 animals,” the Park Service noted.

“The birth of a white bison calf in the wild is believed to occur in 1 in 1 million births or even less frequently,” the agency added.

The wording angered Buffalo Field Campaign which said the press release “thrusts into plain view the contradiction that lies at the heart of the agency’s relations with Tribal nations. Despite public claims that the agency ‘honors with gratitude … Indigenous peoples and values their continuous connections to their homelands,’ officials persist in the habit of positioning Indigenous views and lifeways as secondary to Euro-American priorities.”

Because of Yellowstone’s iconic wildlife, geysers, scenery and canyons it has long been at the center of passionate colonial debates over its management. Those continue even as the Park Service attempts to heal old wounds.

For example, as the agency has worked to increase the live transfer of bison to tribes, navigating Montana officials’ concerns about the spread of a disease that can cause cattle to abort, some conservationists like Wuerthner see the transfers as the domestication of a wild animal.

“Every bison herd that I am aware of on reservations are treated more like livestock than wild animals,” he said. “Even the killing (of bison) by Gardiner negatively impacts the bison and the ecosystem, which is seldom acknowledged by anyone, including the NPS, the tribes, or most so-called conservation groups.”

A sign from the bison

Although the white buffalo calf has not been seen since it was photographed and filmed shortly after being born in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, bison advocates view the animal — alive or dead — as an omen.

“The sacred white buffalo calf signals to us two-leggeds that it is time to come together to heal the world we share,” Buffalo Field Campaign wrote.

Ignoring the warning will lead down the “path of ecological degradation.”