Chuck Sams, nation's first Native Parks director, marks first year on the job and a new philosophy

[Brexiter]

Charles “Chuck” Sams III of the Umatilla tribe of Oregon was sworn in as the 19th director of the National Park Service (NPS) on Dec. 16, 2021, by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo people after his Senate confirmation one year ago this week by voice vote. In the year he’s been on the job, Sams has talked to High Country News (HCN) about his philosophy in guiding the NPS, with an eye to the people who have always been written out of the American wilderness story. Starting with that idea of “wilderness” and “wild.”

As I go around the country and have conversations with folks, I remind them that wilderness is a colonial, Western European ideal. What people call “wild,” we’ve called home for thousands of years. And there is literally no word that I can find when I talk with Indigenous tribes around the states that has an equivalent of the word “wild.” Among my own people, there is Chinook Jargon, and the word skookum. But skookum means “crooked,” anything that’s just not straight, and doesn’t necessarily mean “wild.” We never refer to the land in that way. Once we remove that idea (and see) that these places were actually managed, maybe not through agricultural purposes, but through horticultural purposes, and that reciprocal relationship with humans and nature are important for sustainability, we can have a much stronger stewardship value, rather than a dominance value over the landscape.

So how do you reintroduce the population of this Eurocentric nation that “wilderness” is actually just “home”? When the NPS was founded in the concept of a “wilderness” that is apart from the natural world in which we live our everyday existence? You teach, Sams said, and allow people to discover that. “Our job is not to tell you what to think. Our job is to help you become a critical thinker,” he told HCN.

“We have the largest outside classrooms in the United States, in managing 85 million acres. And so I think it’s important that we bring these conversations forward, and we let people think for themselves to determine how that relationship is going to play itself out.”

That includes expanding that relationship to people who have for too long been on the sidelines of this particular discussion.

With tribal communities and other people of color, we want to ensure that everybody actually sees themselves in the parks. So we’re looking at that with tribes, of course, but we’re also looking at it with the African American community, the Latino community, the Asian community, the LGBTQ [community], to ensure that they can tell their story in the parks. They will still go through rigorous academic review. That’s part of the process that the National Park Service has done so well.

In September, the NPS issued new guidance to strengthen the role of American Indian, Alaska Native Tribes, and the Native Hawaiian Community in federal land management and integrate native approaches to stewardship into park practices. That includes the co-management of federal lands with NPS, the Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management.

The co-management plan has already begun at Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah. Sams explains that tribes benefit through this partnership in that “they’re exercising either their treaty rights or pre-existing Indigenous rights that they’ve always had, managing these lands for thousands of years.”

“But more importantly, it is the recognition by the federal government, through Secretarial Order 3403, that we have a trust responsibility as a federal agency to ensure that we’re upholding those rights for tribes.” The land and the government benefit from the stewardship of the people who are “back on the landscape where they have that reciprocating relationship between the flora and the fauna that they’ve managed as horticulturalists since time immemorial.”

There are some 80 agreements with tribes in place, and Sams is excited about the potential and the projects themselves. “At Acadia (National Park), we’re working on sweetgrass propagation with the tribes,” he explained. “We’re working with the tribes of the Seminole down in the Everglades on traditional plant use and propagation. At Yellowstone, Superintendent Cam Sholly works with 49 different tribes who have an interest in bison.”

I’m trying to work, again, [at] getting us back in balance, ensuring that we go from a structure that really was about dominance, to one that is about stewardship. What I see is a younger generation of rangers and staff coming up who are also striving for that balance, wanting to be the good stewards of those resources while ensuring that there’s a human presence.