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Yurok Tribe in California becomes first indigenous tribe to co-manage National Parks land

The Yurok had 90% of their homelands taken during the Gold Rush. Now they're getting some of it back.

MPSharwood/Wikimedia Commons

The Yurok Tribe has lived among the redwoods for thousands of years.

The history of colonialism and the stealing of lands from indigenous peoples in the Americas is fraught with pain and suffering that has gone unseen by many. A growing Land Back movement has been fighting, in part, for indigenous people's reclamation of their ancestral homelands and the restoration of land management based on Native knowledge and practices.

One small but significant move in that direction has taken place in the redwood forests of northern California. The Yurok Tribe, who had 90% of their homelands stolen during the Gold Rush, has joined the Redwood National and State Parks and the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League in an agreement that will give ownership in 2026 of 125 acres (50 hectares) of land near Orick, California to the tribe.

According to the AP, the land is named 'O Rew in the Yurok language, and the tribe's cultural resources director Rosie Clayburn said the return of the land is proof of the “sheer will and perseverance of the Yurok people."

"We kind of don't give up," Clayburn said. The Yurok Tribe has been living along the Klamath River for thousands of years and is currently the largest indigenous tribe in California, with over 6,300 members. It is one of the few tribes in the state that lives on a portion of its ancestral lands.

The site being returned to the Yurok is about a mile from the Pacific coast and sits adjacent to the Redwood National and State Parks, home of the world's tallest trees. The Yurok people have always utilized the redwoods for building plankhouses, sweat lodges and canoes, though they traditionally only use trees that have fallen naturally.

Clayburn explained what the memorandum of understanding between the tribe and the parks service means.

“As the original stewards of this land, we look forward to working together with the Redwood National and State Parks to manage it,” she said. “This is work that we’ve always done, and continued to fight for, but I feel like the rest of world is catching up right now and starting to see that Native people know how to manage this land the best.”

Reconstructed plankhouse, the traditional dwelling of the Yurok Tribe in Redwood National Park

NPS/Public Domain

The tribe plans to build a traditional Yurok village on the site, as well as a new visitor and cultural center displaying sacred artifacts, sharing information on redwoods and forest restoration and serving as a hub for the tribe to carry out Yurok traditions, Clayburn said.

The site will also serve as a new gateway to the Redwood National and State Parks, with more than a mile of new trails that will connect to existing trails inside the parks. The trails will include a new segment of the popular California Coastal Trail with interpretive exhibits.

The agreement also sees the restoration of a salmon habitat in Prairie Creek that had been buried by a lumber operation. The Yurok have been working on restoring it for the past three years, bringing thousands of juvenile coho and chinook salmon and steelhead back to the stream where salmon traditionally swam upstream to spawn.

In this historic collaboration, the Yurok will be the first indigenous people to co-manage National Parks land. But there are many more examples of Native American and First Nations people working with government institutions and municipalities to return land and pass management back to the people with centuries of proven sustainable relationship to the land.

For instance, in 2018, the city of Vancouver returned a piece of land belonging to the Musqueam people, who had used the land as a sacred burial site. In 2012, the Land Buy-Back Program began in the U.S., consolidating and restoring nearly 3 million acres in 15 states to Tribal trust ownership and paying $1.69 billion to more than 123,000 interested individuals.

Another significant move toward the legal recognition of Native lands was the Supreme Court's 2020 ruling that the eastern half of Oklahoma, including much of Tulsa, is on tribal land. The ruling was deemed a huge win for tribal sovereignty and territorial boundaries, but the fact that the battle made its way to America's highest court (and had limitations placed on it in 2022 by the same court) is indicative of the struggle indigenous people face in reclaiming their ancestral lands.

The logistics of land rights, restoration and reclamation are complex from a legal standpoint, so it's heartening when an agreement can be made without protracted legal battles. Such agreements depend on the people engaged in them acting in good faith, which appears to have made this Yurok Tribe agreement successful.

As Redwoods National Park Superintendent Steve Mietz said, the restoration effort and partnership with the Yurok Tribe, it is “healing the land while healing the relationships among all the people who inhabit this magnificent forest."

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Joy

Jim Thorpe's stripped Olympic gold medals have finally, officially been reinstated

A 110-year wrong has finally been righted.

Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

Jim Thorpe dominated the competition at the 1912 Olympics in the decathlon and pentathlon events.

Jim Thorpe is widely regarded as one of the greatest athletes of all time, and many would claim he is still the greatest. Britannica describes him as "a marvel of speed, power, kicking, and all-around ability," and he excelled in multiple sports throughout his life. In 1950, he was voted the Associated Press' Athlete of the Half Century.

As a person of Sac, Fox and Potawatomi descent, Thorpe became the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the United States in 1912. He dominated the decathlon and pentathlon events at the Stockholm Olympic Games that year, winning by large margins, but an investigation the following year resulted in him being stripped of his medals.

Thorpe had played semiprofessional baseball in 1909 and 1910, which, according to the stringent rules on only having amateur athletes competing in the Olympics at the time, should have disqualified him. He ended up having the gold medals he clearly deserved to win taken away due to a minor violation of a technical rule that would end up being changed anyway.

Forty years ago, the International Olympic Committee gave shared gold medals to Thorpe's family, but they did not reinstate his Olympic records or name him as the sole gold medalist in the two events he won.

Now the record has officially been corrected.

Bright Path Strong, an organization created to continue Thorpe's legacy of community service, created a petition to have Thorpe's medals and records fully reinstated. (Thorpe's Native name, Wa-Tho-Huk, means "bright path.")

“We are so grateful this nearly 110-year-old injustice has finally been corrected, and there is no confusion about the most remarkable athlete in history,” said Nedra Darling, Bright Path Strong co-founder and citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, according to the Associated Press.

As it turns out, the silver medalists had never accepted the gold medals they were offered after Thorpe had been stripped of them. Bright Path Strong and IOC member Anita DeFrantz contacted decathlete Hugo Wieslander's family as well as the Swedish Olympic Committee to discuss the matter with them.

“They confirmed that Wieslander himself had never accepted the Olympic gold medal allocated to him, and had always been of the opinion that Jim Thorpe was the sole legitimate Olympic gold medalist,” said the IOC, according to the AP. “The same declaration was received from the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports, whose athlete, Ferdinand Bie, was named as the gold medalist when Thorpe was stripped of the pentathlon title."

Now the record has been set straight. Thorpe will officially go down in history as the sole gold medal winner of the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympic Games.

Darling told Indian Country Today that she called Billy Mills, the Oglala Lakota runner who won gold in the 10,000 meter race in the 1964 Olympics (in one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history), after she heard the news.

“It was emotional," she said. "It was the most beautiful gift I could get to be able to tell him, and I didn’t realize it ’til he just couldn’t speak and I couldn’t speak. He’s been so supportive of what I’ve been doing.”

IOC President Thomas Bach expressed his gratitude to all involved.

“We welcome the fact that, thanks to the great engagement of Bright Path Strong, a solution could be found,” he said. “This is a most exceptional and unique situation, which has been addressed by an extraordinary gesture of fair play from the National Olympic Committees concerned.”

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Education & Information

Assignments that prompt students to empathize with those who committed atrocities need to go

Jennifer C. Martin/Twitter

An assignment on the Trail of Tears has prompted debate about taking historical perspectives.

Helping young people understand the causes and effects of historical events is a formidable task for any educator. History isn't just "what happened and when." There's also a "why," "how" and "who" in every historical happening, and quality history education helps students explore those questions.

Sometimes, however, that exploration can go off the rails.

Most people would agree that understanding different perspectives is an important part of learning history, but there are more and less problematic ways of helping students gain that understanding. We've seen some of the more problematic methods pop up in school assignments before, from asking students to pick cotton like slaves to listing the pros and cons of slavery.

Now an assignment from a school in Georgia is making the rounds, with people calling out issues with the perspective it asked students to take.

Jennifer C. Martin shared a photo of a computer screen from her friend's kid's school with an assignment about the Trail of Tears, telling students to write letters from the points of view listed in the questions and to use facts to support their point of view. (The Trail of Tears sometimes refers to the forced removal of several Native nations from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast in the 1830s, but also refers more specifically to the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation to Oklahoma in 1838. Thousands died of disease, exposure and starvation during the removals.)

The writing prompt on the screen reads:

"Write a letter to President Jackson from the perspective of an American settler. Explain why you think removing the Cherokee will help the United States grow and prosper."

Having written about problematic history lessons before, I know there will be people saying, "But this is just asking students to understand different perspectives! We have to be able to understand perspectives we don't agree with."

That may sound reasonable—or even desirable—but there are some problems with that line of thinking when it comes to teaching kids.

One, there's a difference between understanding someone's perspective and taking on their perspective, even as an exercise. The latter can be useful; putting yourself into someone else's shoes through "Imagine if" exercises is a good way to build empathy, helping us understand the impact of an event on a person or people. But is it desirable to build empathy with people who committed or perpetuated atrocities? I would argue it's not.

Second, the Trail of Tears is an objectively oppressive historical event. Asking students to explain the benefits of it from the perspective of the oppressors is gross. We don't need to "both sides" an oppressive event, as if there is some legitimate justification for why it happened and what the impact was. There is an explanation, of course, but when we take on a perspective and make arguments in favor of it as a personal exercise, we risk legitimizing and justifying it. This is totally unnecessary and potentially harmful.

Third, what if you were a student whose ancestors were the ones who suffered and/or died during the Trail of Tears? How would this assignment assist in your understanding of that event? It's not like you wouldn't already know that the settlers cared more about the growth and prosperity of the United States than about your people's lives, so what would be the point of this assignment for you?

If we want students to think critically about these events and look at the different perspectives that led to the tragedy of the Trail of Tears, we can ask questions that get them to think critically without making them argue the benefits from a colonizing perspective, such as:

"Why did some American settlers support the removal of the Cherokee people? What do you think about their reasoning?"

"What were the motivations behind forcing the Cherokee people off their land? How did American settlers benefit from the tragedy?"

"Were the settlers' arguments for relocating the Cherokee aligned with the American ideals of liberty and justice? Explain."

None of those writing prompts require a student to put themselves into the mindset of people who committed or supported violent injustice, but they still accomplish the goal of understanding different perspectives and getting students to think.

We need to acknowledge that history is not neutral and history lessons are not benign. There are ways to teach history that are objectively inappropriate, no matter what the intention behind them. Asking students to take the perspective of a Nazi during the Holocaust would be inappropriate. Asking students to take the perspective of a racist white person in the South during the civil rights movement would be inappropriate. It's not appropriate to ask students to think like a colonizer during the Trail of Tears. Understanding that perspectives differ does not require taking on an oppressive perspective, even as an academic exercise, and we do students a disservice by asking them to do so.


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Heroes

Montana's Blackfeet Tribe has gifted hundreds of COVID vaccines to its Canadian neighbors

via Wikimedia Commons

Native Americans have been especially hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Montana, Native Americans account for 6.6% of the population but are 17% of the state's total COVID-19 cases.

The Blackfeet Nation Reservation in northwestern Montana is no exception. The reservation is home to just under 10,000 people but in less than a year, it recorded a total of 1,3838 COVID-19 cases.

At the pandemic's height, there were 390 cases of the virus on the reservation and the number tripled over just 10 days. The tribe lost 47 members to the virus.

Given the devastation the pandemic has on the Blackfeet Tribe, it has taken vaccination seriously. As of late April, 98% of the tribe was vaccinated.

In an act of goodwill, the tribe has decided to donate its leftover vials of Pfizer and Moderna vaccine to their neighbors on the other side of the border in Canada. The tribe calls the donation is a "gift" of "reconciliation" between governments, nations, and tribe members.

"We started having some discussion about that about a month ago," Piita'hkotokii James McNeely, the public information officer with the Blackfeet Tribe, said in late April. "We threw this together in the last seven, eight days and it really fell together."

Over the past month, the tribe has held multiple clinics that have drawn hundreds of people from all over Canada to get vaccinated. The first clinic in late April vaccinated over 450 people. A follow-up clinic on Monday provided many with their second doses.

Ken Sawartzy drove nearly 400 miles from Calgary to make sure he got his booster shot. His wife is a cancer patient, so he had no problem going the extra mile for his final shot. "This will make sure we're both safe, because I'm her caregiver, too. I think it's a great thing," Sawatzky told the CBC.

"It's absolutely beautiful. The Blackfoot Indians are just coming through (for us)," Dave and Cathy Goodbrand from Calgary, who just got their second shots, told the CBC.

The long lines of Canadians flocking to the reservation highlight the difference in vaccine availability between the two countries.

"I had a hard time believing it was that hard to get a shot in Canada," Bonnie Healy, health director for the Blackfoot Confederacy, said.

America has vaccinated its population at a faster rate than Canada, but Canada will eventually surpass the U.S. in the percentage of citizens who've got the jab. A major reason for the difference is vaccine hesitancy.

Thirty-four percent of Americans have said they will not be getting the shot, versus just 12% of Canadians.

Blackfeet Tribal leaders are happy that their gift has been so well-received.

"I am actually brought to tears today hearing that the efforts to assist our relatives and folks across the medicine line with vaccines has been awesome! Many of the folks cried today when they were able to get vaccinated," McNeely said.

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