Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas: A New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights

Chapter 4. A Tale of Three Parks: Tlingit Conservation, Representation, and Repatriation in Southeastern Alaska’s National Parks - Thomas F. Thornton

108 chapter four A Tale of Three Parks Tlingit Conservation, Representation, and Repatriation in Southeastern Alaska’s National Parks Thomas F. Thornton Why have Native Americans, in general, and the Tlingit of southeastern Alaska, in particular, enjoyed success in gaining governing authority over cultural resource economies but limited success in gaining comanagement over natural resource economies in the U.S. national park system? Much of the answer to this question lies in how national parks evolved within a particular historical, legal, and cultural context in the United States, wherein the environment became increasingly constructed according to a nature/culture dichotomy in which certain “uninhabited” wilderness landscapes became framed and preserved, fortress-like, as museums of nature and historical landscapes (see Keller and Turek 1998; Spence 1999; West et al. 2006; Dowie 2009). Of course, as many have pointed out, including Theodore Catton (1997: 217) in Alaska, this “romantic impulse to preserve America’s past . . . as remnants of a once-continental wilderness,” or “vignettes of primitive America,” has become increasingly untenable. Wilderness and primitiveness may themselves become fetishes in support of a certain dominant nationalist identity, topophilia (love of place; see Tuan 1974), and historia (atlas of eternity; see Wallace 2005) to the exclusion of other identities, especially those of Indigenous peoples . Even in countries with legal recognition of multiculturalism, as in Australia and Canada, the state typically requires Indigenous people to A Tale of Three Parks • 109 authenticate their aboriginality and “connectedness” to land using logics defined by Western law and heritage, thereby strengthening the latter at the expense of Indigenous logics (Povinelli 2002). Indigenous peoples, including the Tlingit, never accepted the assumptions that underlie the dominant nature/culture paradigm in U.S. national parks and have actively resisted their removal, regulation, and representation by the National Park Service through articulations of their own identities, topophilia, and historia. Recently, Tlingits have begun to enjoy some success in promoting these visions within southeastern Alaska ’s three national parks. But access to natural resources, such as fish and wildlife, remains stubbornly limited, in part due to conflicting visions of what these resources represent and how and for whom they should be conserved. Here I argue that conflicts over natural resources between park managers and Natives could be reduced if certain natural resources of critical cultural significance were reconceptualized as “inalienable possessions ” of cultural patrimony, rather than mere “resources” to be developed or preserved. In this way, the logic of “repatriation,” increasingly utilized in the cultural resources realm under such laws as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), could be applied to the natural resource realm to restore Alaska Native relations to critical fish, wildlife, and other features of the land and sea, in national parks and other areas. Such a paradigm shift would help to conserve critical Tlingit cultural landscapes and livelihoods in parks within their homelands, where subsistence and other relations have been severely circumscribed by the establishment of protected area boundaries and regulations. Tlingits today number more than 16,000, with about 10,000 still dwelling in southeastern Alaska and surrounding regions. They are among the most complex and successful hunting-gathering-fishing peoples of the world, having capitalized on the abundant salmon, halibut, herring, eulachon , seal, shellfish, deer, and other resources in the region through highly effective harvesting and processing methods combined with a flexible , multilayered, and multilocal social structure and dynamic systems of exchange and governance (Thornton 2008). For millennia, Tlingits have dwelled in the coastal Pacific Northwest rainforest ecosystem that is today dominated by the Tongass National Forest, the largest forest in the United States (17 million acres), and other protected areas. Indeed, southeastern Alaska is a patchwork of national forest, monuments (Admiralty Island and Misty Fjords), and parks (Glacier Bay, Klondike Gold Rush, Sitka, and, at the northwestern fringe, Wrangell–St. Elias) that occupy much of 110 • Protected Areas and Indigenous Peoples what is conceived of as Lingít Aaní, Tlingit Country (figure 4.1). Tlingits were granted title to less than 3 percent of their original lands through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which also extinguished their aboriginal title and hunting and fishing rights in exchange for limited monetary compensation and subsistence protections. In Tlingit ideology, the relationship between natural and cultural capital is fused in at.óow (valued or sacred possessions). At.óow includes material property, such as land, regalia, and totem poles, as well as...