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By Carson Walker
Badlands National Partk, South Dakota (AP) 7-08
The north end of this national park bustles with roughly a million tourists a year who pull over to view and photograph the majestic canyons, spires and tables, hike the trails and learn about fossils.
The park’s mostly undeveloped and far less-traveled South Unit, which also boasts mile upon mile of moonscape-like vistas, lies within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In the 1940s, the federal government seized it from more than 800 American Indian families for a military bombing and gunnery range that was used until the 1960s.
In 1976, the land was returned to the Oglala Sioux Tribe, which has since co-managed it with the National Park Service.
As that agency drafts its operating plan for the South Unit, it’s thinking about returning complete control to the Oglala Sioux, which it has never done with a tribe.
“Many people want more tribal involvement and management and some want
it turned over to the tribe,” said Paige Baker, Badlands National Park
superintendent.
“My job is to balance the Park Service mission and very strongly listen
to what the tribe is suggesting and maybe do something that should have
been done long ago.”
Baker knows what it’s like to lose land to a federal project.
He is a member of the Hidatsa-Mandan tribe of North Dakota. Around
1950, his family had to move to make way for the Garrison Dam.
Now, as an Indian managing the Badlands, he’s asking tribal members how the South Unit should be managed.
“The thing we haven’t done with each other is listen,” Baker said.
The four concepts being discussed would:
– Keep things the way they are with the Park Service and tribe co-managing the area;
– Have both contribute equal funding and staff to manage the South Unit;
– Let the tribe manage the unit with technical assistance from the Park Service;
– Turn over total management to the tribe and remove it from Park Service territory.
Either of the last two would require congressional approval.
Those also are the options most favored by tribal members, but with a
transition period of several years and congressional funding, said
Birgil Kills Straight, director of the Oglala Sioux Parks and
Recreation Authority.
“That’s what seemed to prevail,” he said.
Most tribal members are cool to the idea of allowing mining or
increased foot traffic on the land, Kills Straight said. Instead,
likely uses would be expanded tourism, replacing grazing cattle with
buffalo and perhaps allowing more – but controlled – access to some of
the fossils, he said.
“Most people that we’ve had contact with would still like to keep the
land as pristine or as environmentally safe as possible,” Kills
Straight said.
Some tribal members want to give the land back to the families
displaced, said Clarence Yellow Hawk, chairman of the Oglala Sioux
Parks and Recreation Authority board of directors.
Others who support turning the South Unit over to the tribe are
concerned whether it would work, given the natural instability of
tribal government, he said.
“I’m going to rely on my elderlies as to what direction to take,” Yellow Hawk said.
If the South Unit were run by the tribe as a park, “that’s another part
of America that can be opened up and viewed and utilized for
everybody,” he said.
Comments from 14 public meetings this spring will be compiled into a
document that will be the subject of another comment period before a
preferred option is chosen.
The Badlands park is one of several places where the National Park
Service has done more to accommodate tribal interests, said Robert
Holden, deputy director of the National Congress of American Indians
and a member of the Choctaw-Chickasaw tribe of Oklahoma.
“Tribes are getting a fair shot at being able to do this. I think it’s
commendable for the Park Service, and every effort should be made to
make this happen,” he said.
The government should return land that was taken from tribal members –
often without consultation, Holden said, and turning over the South
Unit to the Oglala Sioux Tribe makes sense because it has a vested
interest.
“They would be careful in managing these areas. But they also know the
areas from a traditional cultural standpoint. They know the critical
habitat, the items of cultural significance, not only sacred sites but
also plants and animals,” he said.
The Park Service also co-manages with the Navajo tribe the Canyon de
Chelley National Monument in Arizona, which is on tribal trust land,
and works closely with Nez Perce tribal members who live in parts of
the national historic park by that name in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and
Washington.
“When we deal with tribes, it’s a nation-to-nation relationship,” said Jeff Olson, National Park Service spokesman.
Though the agency has other such arrangements with tribes,
deauthorizing the South Unit of the Badlands and turning management
over to the Oglala Sioux Tribe would be unique. But the way the land
came into federal possession is also rare, said Sandra Washington,
chief of planning and compliance for the Midwest Region of the National
Park Service.
The government took the South Unit from individuals and returned it to
the tribe only if it agreed to allow the National Park Service to
manage the unit. The alternative was for the land to be auctioned, so
tribal leaders took the safer route and agreed to the co-management
plan, she said.
“To some degree they were over a barrel,” Washington said.
Because of that uncommon history, the Park Service does not believe it
would set a precedent if the South Unit were turned over to the Oglala
Sioux Tribe, she said.
“What we’ll do in our plan is to make a recommendation for the
management structure of the park. Also in that plan we’ll make
decisions about how resources and the visitor experience should be
managed if it stays within the system,” Washington said.
Then, it’s up to Congress, she said.
“This is one of the most important projects I’m working on now and
probably one of the most important projects I’ve worked on in my
lifetime,” Washington said.
On the Net:
Badlands National Park plan: http://www.nps.gov/badl/parkmgmt/planning.htm
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