Land Ownership & Indigenous Rights

Foremost, it is critical to acknowledge that the history of conservation in the United States is fundamentally a history of land seizure from indigenous people. At the height of the conservation movement between 1887 and 1934, the United States federal government broke existing treaties and stole more than 90 million acres of land from indigenous people without compensation. These 90 million acres, which represented nearly two-thirds of all reservation lands at the time, were then sold to settlers or set aside for conservation. Despite the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934, which sought to strengthen indigenous land rights, the National Congress of American Indians estimates that only about 8% of the 90 million acres have been returned in trust status. Much of the land that was illegally seized during this period was converted into some of the first designated national parks (e.g. Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier). To this day, the National Park Service seeks to erase the history of past indigenous presence by creating “a scenic, pre-historical fantasy...designed to mask the violence inherent to these parks’ creation”. Conservation was complicit in the colonization of unceded indigenous lands and, therefore, the national parks are fundamentally on stolen lands.

Since the dawn of the conservation movement, there has been the dominant ideology that the government can better manage the land than indigenous people. Historian Karl Jacoby describes this framing as ‘We the state and the state bureaucracies, have the appropriate knowledge to manage the environment in the best way,’ rather than indigenous peoples and other prior inhabitants.” Similarly, Tuck and Yang argue that “the settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as holding dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species.”  

However, there is a burgeoning movement that is building awareness and pushing back against this racist notion in the conservation movement. The surge of recent climate-induced wildfires in the West has shined a spotlight on the need for indigenous practices of controlled forest burning to increase the resilience of forest ecosystems against destructive wildfires. Furthermore, after years of activism and cleanup of abandoned land, the Wiyot People were successful in convincing the City of Eureka, CA to repatriate an island back to the tribe in what the National Congress of American Indians calls the United States’ first known voluntary municipal land return achieved without sale, lawsuit, or trade. Rather than allow conserved lands to be used for further fossil fuel extraction, the United States must adopt the sustainable, stewardship practices of indigenous communities that have protected these lands for centuries.

To learn more about the importance of recognizing and incorporating indigenous practices into conservation systems:

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