I will get to Thanksgiving stuff eventually...

I have found that I am more and more irritated when people refer to a place like Yellowstone National Park as a “natural” park. It insinuates that there is no cultural value of Yellowstone. It insinuates that only battlefields or poets’ homes or historic structures can be “cultural” parks. A cultural resource is not a tree or a bear, but a house or a fort or a mine. A cultural landscape is something that has been manipulated by man, not something that has only been appreciated. The US has a very single-minded view on what is and is not a cultural resource.

After working with tribes in Yellowstone, I understand that an outcropping or a waterfall or a bear isn’t just an outcropping or a waterfall or a bear. An outcropping could be a place where a guard stood watch every night while the tribe was camped nearby. A waterfall could be the place where someone believes a god sleeps. A bear could be a brother (for the sake of the cliché…). UNESCO defines a cultural landscape as any or any combination of the following: A landscape designed intentionally by humans; one which has been altered purposefully by humans; or one that humans consider culturally important but have not altered, or have altered only minimally and without purpose. The latter is known as a “associative landscape.” In the US, NPS defines a cultural landscape only as something that man has altered and considered significant. Which means cultural resources in Yellowstone are ignored in favor of slaughtering bison. Because that is more in-tune with the enabling legislation of the park, apparently.

It’s especially upsetting to me because, as an anthropologist, I have been able to get a better grasp on how much the US has sh*t on the Native Americans, and how we all like to think that we’re beyond that, and how much that just isn’t true. For example, the Nez Perce has asked for permission, if the US government is going to slaughter the bison anyway, to hunt the bison that wander outside of the park boundary on to public lands (notably USFS, though there may be some BLM land involved, also), as they see the bison not only as economically important, but also socially and cultural significant and stimulating. I’ve seen the photos of their hunts, the way they involve the children, who may not have such experiences otherwise, to join in on horseback; they praying and the revelry they have for the hunt and the death and the sacrifice. It’s serious stuff. But can the US government allow them to do this? Of course not. That would be way too economically viable; how would they spend all that money if not for the pointless slaughter of bison that probably won’t transmit brucellosis to cattle but because NPS/USF must suck up to ranchers ignorant of biology they kill them anyway. I mean, allowing a tribe to cushion some of the cost for their traditional practices, not to mention their contentious treaty rights to do so, would be irresponsible. I bet Suzanne Lewis thought that one up all on her own.

Now that I’ve brought up the Big S.L. (for those who don’t know, she is the superintendent for Yellowstone), I might as well segue into the New York Times’ opinion that calls for her immediate dismissal for her complete mockery of the YELL winter-use proposal. The editorial can be read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/opinion/22sat4.html?_r=1. I tend to agree with the statement, though for my own reasons. Yes, she has been instrumental in maintaining an unhealthy (according to ONLY the best scientists Yellowstone has to offer, so really, do they even count?) level of snowmobiles in the winter (though really, I love snowmobiling, I just believe in doing it sustainably). But I also believe that she has been entirely irresponsible in her duties to the association tribes of Yellowstone National Park. She has, on several occasions, refused to meet with and show respect to tribal elders for momentous occasions (for example, the first NAGPRA reburial that took place in the park in October 2006, during which she just “couldn’t make it”), and has also made it extremely difficult and uncomfortable for the cultural resources staff within the park to function efficiently and appropriately. Her lack of support is a tell-tale sign that she is not fit to run one of the Capital N, Capital P icon parks in the United States, a park that should have a rich a thriving, not stymied and struggling, cultural resources program. The role Native Americans play in park administration should be held in high esteem by the superintendent, and instead she treats it as an unnecessary and annoying burden that should be minimized at all costs.