Quick quiz: How many of the U.S. National Parks are located on Indigenous ancestral lands?
Answer: 63 out of 63.
Second question: How many co-management agreements are there between the national parks and tribes?
Answer: 4*
It’s late June 2023 and for five days Bryce Canyon National Park’s rocks and sky, edge and contour, are ours to explore. The storylines are plentiful. Will the old friends recapture their glory days when they wandered the Colorado Plateau nearly every vacation? Who will be the first to channel Paul Simon and sing “Hoodoo you think you’re fooling?” Will a Southern Paiute woman rock our Indiana Jones thinking (i.e., our ancestors-and-the-past-should-be-in-museums)?
As you may be guessing, the Paiute woman, Glendora Homer, gifted us the most compelling story line. Speaking in the video, Bryce Canyon: American Indian Perspectives, she says:
“The Kaibab Paiute tribe’s historical connection to Bryce Canyon is family… there were different Paiute bands that aren’t here today but were here in the past and their descendants live on. The Paiutes still live here.”
That’s a lot to unpack, and she’s just the first of 11 speakers representing various tribes (Southern Paiute Kaibab Band, Cedar Band of Paiutes, Zuni, Northern Ute, Navajo Nation and Hopi) playing on video in the visitor center. Amidst the bustle of travelers snapping up information and T-shirts, I respond to Glendora with a provincial fail of epic proportions.
“What does ‘Paiutes live here’ mean?” I remember visiting Germany and noticing more people who look like me, but not feeling part of a “we.” Even when I visit my parents’ graves I don’t feel closer to their experience.
Glendora continues:
“Today Paiute people view Bryce Canyon basically as a normal visitor. But we still consider it part of our homelands … still part of our country. We still claim it.”
I am still confused. The good news is that Joe, my traveling companion, and I can hike all day, lay our souls on the ground each night, and contemplate what it means to honor and recognize the spirit and the people of each landscape we visit. When I mention Glendora’s comment to Joe, he quickly highlights what I’m missing.
“What I am hearing her say is that today’s Paiutes are visitors, as individuals. When she refers to Paiutes as “we” she is including all the ancestors. We the Paiutes are still here.”
I hadn’t thought in terms of the individual tribal members’ relationship to the place versus the ways indigenous sacred places are connections to ancestors.
Driving back to our campsite, Joe and I start talking about connections with ancestors. Our fathers grew up not far from each other, his on a farm in Aurora, Indiana, and mine in Cincinnati, Ohio. His dad loved visiting relatives in graveyards. Mine mowed the German and Irish cemeteries’ grass. Despite my dad’s extensive family genealogical research, I feel little connection to my relatives, past or present, and rarely visit my parents’ graves. We agree that visiting a grave does not bring one closer to a relative’s spirit and wonder why some folks feel comfort knowing their kin’s bodies are “cemented” in graveyards.
It is important to note here that Joe is not your average white male; he is a Denver Public Schools social worker and strong supporter of their Native American Culture and Education (NACE). When Joe begins to speak about feeling a connection to sacred places he has visited, he catches himself: “Is it arrogant or wrong if I say I have a connection to this place? Am I appropriating the spiritual connection of the place? I’m not saying I have a connection to their ancestors’ experience. But I feel something shift inside me.”
I start thinking that paying respects isn’t about visiting the dead, it’s honoring what’s alive in me. There’s a lot of privilege in that. I don’t deal with generational trauma or feel like I have gifts or responsibilities that are tied to my ancestors.
The Bryce Canyon brochure describes the Swamp Canyon Loop as “more rugged than the Bryce Amphitheater trails, taking hikers into a more forested backcountry hike.” Absent are the hoodoos and the crowds. Leaves seem to hold the morning sunlight and stillness bathes you like a prayer. At 8,000 feet, the sun’s warmth is just enough to encourage us to frequently stop and let shade and breeze cool our bodies. We stand beneath curving swatches of color high on a rock face, amidst a collection of twigs and berries. I remark to Joe that I am trying to imagine what it would be like to be nomadic, to feel drawn forward without any reason to return from where I came.
I am not thinking about what propels someone to declare, “I am still here.”
We return to the visitors center and rewatch the video. Charley Bullets, with short black hair and a knowing smile, states matter of factly:
“I’d like visitors that come to Bryce Canyon to know that Southern Paiutes are still here… We’re not “these people” — these people once lived here, these people once thrived, these people survived in the harsh environment.”
He briefly collects his thoughts and gestures towards himself as he emphasizes, “
Those types of statements, to me, are not true because it’s who I am. I am still here. We are still here.” His words, informed by mind-body-spirit understanding, speak to the erasure native peoples have faced, and continue to face.
In interview about the Glen Canyon Dam, Charley says:
Well, a few years back, when they were redoing the interpretive center at Carl Hayden visitor center on the dam, they asked the tribes, “Do you have pictures of the tribal people by the river, before the dam was built?” And we were like (rolling his eyes) did we have people down…? I mean it wasn’t like we were down there taking pictures while we were on an outing. We were down there farming and enjoying life. We never took pictures. To us, the pictures were the rock writing. The rock writing that’s covered back underneath the dam right now. But it was quite interesting to have that question asked, “Pictures of Paiutes down by the river?”
On our drive home, we stop at Sego Canyon, an area rich in rock art and mining history. We look upon 3 different styles of rock art, speculating how the original artists reached some of the markings left higher up on the walls. Some of the art has been defaced.
The climax of my Bryce Canyon story is supposed to be a memorable scene. How’s this?
Two white men stand alone in Sego Canyon, ashamed and angry as they view the visible erasure of another culture. Imagine close ups of our faces against the rugged canyon background.
But who cares what we think/feel from such distance in time and space? Or as Jason Reynolds asks in a Lesley University commencement address: “what good is it for me to fly so far above [those of us whose wings have been clipped] when they’ll only look smaller to me the higher I go?” Truth is, our lives intersect with racism, we are proximate to realities about racism, in much more tangible and personal ways.
Back on I-70 headed to Denver, Joe’s stream of consciousness surfaces a thought about the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace influencing the crafters of the U.S. Constitution. I had forgotten this, despite books and a 1988 U.S. Senate resolution acknowledging it. My own erasure. My employer gave us a day off in honor of Juneteenth; I took mine on a day that suited me, separate from anything meaningful about emancipation. Recently we attended a concert at the beautiful Chautauqua Auditorium (built in 1898) in Boulder, Colorado. I noted that the audience was very white, but never once did I think about the location’s racist past. But I did make the effort to watch the documentary, This is [Not] Who We Think We Are, which set me straight on that.
My Bryce Canyon story is a little story. But it connects to perhaps the biggest story of all, captured in 2 sentences by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass:
“To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.”
That story has been a true story since time immemorial.
*In the podcast Field Trip, The Washington Post’s Lillian Cunningham reports from Glacier National Park. She asks if Native people can have a role in co-managing National Parks lands. She notes that with Charles F. “Chuck” Sams III serving as Director of the National Parks Service and Deb Haaland serving as the Secretary of the Interior, perhaps the window for such progress is now.
