Last week, Secretary Deb Haaland announced new guidance for three federal bureaus of the U.S. Department of Interior, outlining how each will facilitate and support agreements with Native tribes to collaborate in the stewardship of federal lands and waters. Here are the guidance memorandums for the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service created under joint order 3403, issued last November by secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments. The policy is designed to assist tribes in co-managing projects on 620 million acres of public lands.
For more than 50 years, tribal governments have sought a larger role in managing ancestral Native lands, most of them obtained by the federal government through duplicitous treaties or grabbed at gunpoint. Indigenous inhabitants were removed and corralled onto reservations or assigned to individual allotments that, all too often, wound up in non-Native hands. Some of that land was turned into national monuments, parks, and forests, but Natives were purposely excluded from having any part in how those were managed. Until relatively recently, officials educating visitors to these lands only gave the Boy Scout version of what life on these lands was like before they were snatched, and few Natives got to tell their own side of the story.
