Public lands in the United States are a beautiful thing. They hold some of the country’s most amazing natural treasures and are meant to be a place where the land is taken care of, and anybody can go to enjoy a pristine taste of the outdoors. But it’s impossible to talk about the beauty they hold, without acknowledging the dark realities of their inception.
In 1830, US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi out of their ancestral lands. While the act called for negotiation with indigenous peoples, President Andrew Jackson resorted to force, and many of those lands became playgrounds for the rich to enjoy nature. Those playgrounds are now the National Parks. Only after many years of hunting the animals and destroying the land did they realize that they were damaging the one thing they loved about the spaces, which was their wild hearts and untouched landscapes.
So, in 1916 the National Park Service was created, and stewards of the land began taking care of the natural area, keeping out poachers and making the parks accessible to everyone.
This was a step in the right direction, but would not have been at all necessary if the native tribes would have been allowed to remain in their lands and take care of them as they had been doing for thousands of years. The tribes didn’t consider themselves “stewards of the land” because for them the word didn’t exist, it wasn’t necessary to state they were working in harmony with the land because it was something they did out of tradition and without thought.
These days the public lands are taken care of by many different stewards, and some of them are of the native tribes forced out of their homes all of those years ago. For indigenous folks, it is necessary that native people become a part of the decision making and leadership in the Park Service.
Emily Johnson, a member of the fire effects crew at Grand Teton National Park, is one of the many who shares these ideas. There she works collecting vegetation and fuels data before and after a fire.
“I think that in my perfect world, indigenous people would have full say over their ancestral lands,” Johnsons said. “I feel like working for the government in this way is the first step into getting indigenous presence within Land Management conservation.”
Johnson, 24, is of the Wahpeton Dakota tribe, and like many others of native descent she has an ancestral and spiritual connection with the land and natural world in general. From a young age she knew that she wanted to work outside, and within ecology. Her job in the national park has offered her a place where she can live, work, and make an impact where she feels most comfortable, in nature.
She began working at Grand Teton in 2021 through a program called American Conservation Experience (ACE) as a part of an interagency crew studying fire ecology. Last year she was working with similar ecology in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), but her experience there was nothing like the time she has spent at Grand Teton.
In terms of minority representation, she says that the BLM has much more work to do than the park service. While she worked at the Bureau this past year, she was the only person of color, and coming to work at the Grand Tetons was a breath of fresh air. This isn’t to say that the parks are a diverse place, they too have a lot more work to do, but through their partnerships with multiple agencies they’ve been able to pave paths for diverse populations to find their place in the park service.
“It was so refreshing coming here and meeting more people that do this diversity internship with ACE and live and work with me,” Johnson said. “There’s also a much larger BIPOC community and LGBTQ community which is really amazing.”
Her time here has allowed her to grow her community and be in a place where she feels connected to her ancestral lands and culture. She sees herself continuing to work in land management to create more inclusive and ancestrally motivated public lands.