Moderator who is the executive director of denver parks and recreation. She traveled east and then found herself back home where she has worked for a couple mayors and served on the city council as president. In addition to her public post, she worked for several years as a facilitator with the National Civic lead and she was a founding boarde member for Political Action in mile high youth corps. April 26, 2021. You can see her in action on our Youtube Channel but we are delighted to have her today and she will moderate this final panel. Thank you so much. Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. I am excited to be part of this final panel. Y it will be a shift in what we will bean doing in the panel ths afternoon that i hope you will find fascinating and in some ways is hope sam has set us up with some of the most challenging questions about where do we go from here as we engage in this exploration of the history of these phenomenal individuals. I will come to a quick story about how i came to this in the first place. We have some olmsted inspired parks inn denver to participate in the celebration, the anniversary celebration. Right at the same time, we had some Community Gatherings about one of our parks in denver where the wordmu that was getting arod the community was it was not as great as they said they were and they were involved in these very racist endeavors. I raise that issue because it disturbed me. I came to understanding parks like everyone else with a sense of awe and admiration and i was horrified if these rumors were true. With all rumors there is always a kernel of truth, but the great response and i think you and the organization for me and engaging in this conversation was lets explore. I dont want to give you the answers, lets talk about what it means for individuals from multicultural backgrounds today as we move forward. I have accepted this about where we go and how we learn from the past and from the history to guide us in that endeavor. Part of that history in denver, what underscored that exchange was that when they were having an influence on our development in denver, a time at our city. In some ways guilty by association. It also represented the movement to build parks it was the founding fathers, shall i say. Talking about the prerogatives of wealth and influence. The very notion was not that. The people in cities around the country who were doing their own version were in fact representatives of the prerogatives. We haveba this very mixed bag ad i like to say the founding of our country, the complexities in the paradoxes of our history and the history of the designs and parks and ideas is also equally complex. You think about the relationships that were talked about. The marriage relationship the multifaceted. You will be hearing from this panel a real focus on people. The thing that we envisioned you should not give me any technology [laughter] all the people is a very mixed bag as we move forward in designing and creating our parks system both at a national and state and local level. Who was involved. We have a panel of individuals that will reflect in powerful ways about the relationship of people to this movement and where we go into the future. Ralph talked about a sense of freedom that the parks would create for us. One of those paradoxes is that some people do not feel, get that sense of freedom. One of the primary goals in my Department Today still is getting africanamerican, young africanamerican and latino individuals into our parks, and to our mountain parks. We talk about feeling welcome. Having a conversation of changing that idea of welcome. You are being welcome to a space that is not really yours. Part of that challenge we will be facing in these individuals will be talking about is that very notion into the we really assume we are talking about equitable access to our parks system. Reimagining and inclusive system reimagining and thinking differently about the ideas of ownership in those relationships exploring where we have been in this movement. People still look at folks that look like me and wonder how we got into conversation. We will be addressing some really hard questions here that hopefully will help us in the exploration of history because we dont want to be doomed to repeat it, we want to build on what we have learned. Let me tell you about the people first, Philip Burnham who is the author of indian country, gods country, native americans and National Parks. He is going to bring a very personal perspective. Having lived and worked and taught at the Rosebud Indian Reservation and really exploring this ideact of natural parks for everybody from the perspective of individuals that lived on this land and are now to designate just them. Again, one of those paradoxes. Currently, i asked him last night, currently working on work about the impact of indian boarding schools on many of the Indigenous People today. The legacies of oppression, of our past, at the same time, these marvelous new ideas about our National Park system. Secondly, we have priscilla who was the associate professor in the department of english at the university of northern texas. Priscilla will turn this whole conversation upside down. I think she gave us a little bit of a clue earlier today about really challenging our basic premises about parks and National Parks and access and even this notion of ownership. We will be looking forward to that. Finally, shelton johnson, a National Park ranger and educator extraordinaire who has landed in yosemite National Park adjust refuses to go away. [laughter]gl also the author of glory land. A really interesting perspective about National Parks and the dilemmas that many of us, people of current color in this country face. When we celebrate on one hand this marvelous land and yet the prices some of us paid for some of them to even exist. Wonderful exploration of that in hiss book, but he will be bringing a very personal sort of perspective about what it means to be in these places that he is now the steward and helps guide the rest of us in that notion of stewardship. I leave you finally with this. It is about that notion of stewardship. About that collective responsibility we now have. We inherit, we pick up the legacies. We continue the legacies. In denver we started every meeting andnt every event with e land acknowledgment. I would say it is a People Knowledge and acknowledgment of our history. As we move forward, i think we will hear from these folks about what we should shape our public stewardship of public lands as we move forward. First up is philip. All of my things to the National Association of olmsted parks for inviting me to talk today. I get this is my time to speak for my dinner. I i will not be singing, but i m going to tell you a story. I will ask you to follow the story in your minds eye. Because it unravels over quite a substantial period of time. The title of the story is the badlands a National Park service parable. A landscape is a sculpted point of view. A framedit perspective of space. It is in the hands of people a place groomed with exceptional care. We tend to think of landscapes as consisting of a fixed image focused in time and space. Look over there, isnt that a beautiful, view. Some landscapes, however, can only be understood after the passage of decades, perhaps centuries. Our National Parks landscapes have been pulled from the land. Through forces that are partly geological and environmental, partly political and more often than we would like to think, sharpened on the cutting and of cultural conflict. If you ever visit the south dakota badlands, you will not soon forget them. A stunning panorama, a balding bolding formation that has been described without doing them full justice as lunar or otherworldly. They were ritually inhabited ecosystem. One trapper in the 1880s called them, and i quote, the greatest game country that i ever saw. But the area was heavily hunted and subsequent years by farmers, ranchers, tribal people, even the federal government. The u. S. Biological survey exterminated coyotes and wolves as part of their predator control program. Buffalo, black and grizzly bear, antelope, elk and grizzly bear were killed and chased from the region by locals and market hunters. What had been a mixed grassland cross by badlands draws and cutaways was transformed within half a century into the equivalent of a desert. The government, though,an had visions of something bigger and better. I federal report from 1919 noted thatat stocking the entire badlands in the pine ridge Indian Forest with game and using all the bad land and Indian Forest would be an object enthusiastically sought by the general public. It is worth thinking about for a moment what the writer meant by the general public. At the outset americas parks were envisioned to compete with the grand monuments of europe. Early parkpu legislation had the prospect of playgrounds and wonderlands whose stewardship and ownership would be jointly held by the american people. The easiest way to retain or reserve is to show that they were unfit for economic development. The landns in question was to be of incomparable inspiration, priceless. But also ruthless from the viewpoint of making money through private investment. The only industry that stood to profit was the western railroads and only then by bringing visitors to the newly created parks. The new parks like yellowstone and yosemite had cousin scattered across the west in the form of indian reservations. Reservations were generallyon regarded as economically marginal or next to worthless in the interior department. As aou result, indian land was obvious candidates for inclusion in the parks because they were regarded as unproductive and already under the hand of federal trusteeship. The badlands of south dakota were themselves part of the greatow reservation established four years before yellowstone National Park was created. In 1889 a Government Commission strongarmed into selling 9 million acres of theirir land including the badlands. At which point they became part of the public domain. In 1922, the first congressional bill was introduced to create an entity called wonderland National Park in the western regions of south dakota. Not many settlers may have wanted to live in the badlands anymore, butom someone was bettg that people would want to come and marvel at their mysterious beauty. A paradoxa about the National Park service is worth noting here. It is a Conservation Bureau charged with admission to expand in other words, entrusted with protect public land, they also aim to acquire it. Through donation, purchase, exchange and Eminent Domain. When you think about it, such an expansive agenda was likely to create hard feelings sooner or later in indian country. Our parksks are natural, of coue but they are also humanly shaped stocked with large ungulates, Old Railroad Hotels the parts came in a few decades. Expanses whereto a risk at camp, hike and fish with a sense every inhabiting a prehistoric past. There was a problem, too. They were not the first ones in nathe socalled wilderness. The parkland has been used by 1 degree or another by generations or even centuries. With Business Boosters at its back, congress authorized in 1929 the establishment of badlands nationalig monument. A lesser designation for park to a maximum of 50,000 acres. Seven years later in the midst of the great depression, congress authorized monument boundaries to extent to five times their original area by including the addition of land declared sub marginal or unproductive. The expansion brought the monument to the doorstep of the pine ridge indian reservation, home of this tribe. Thanks to a faraway war, the park service was not finish with the badlands. In 1942, washington, the War Department that is, announce plans to confiscate a chunk of the reservation adjacent to the monument. 43 miles long by 12 miles wide. Think of that. 43 miles by 12 miles. Roughly 350,000 acres to create the pine ridge aerial gunnery range. It was to be used by highflying target practice. This area is worthless land wrote south dakota congressman francis case. Own for the most part by the government in trust for the pine ridge indians and could be had on the longterm lease for a small amount. In fact, there were 125 indian families on the proposed lands. Not to mention several day schools, churches and cemeteries scores of other families use the land for subsistence or leased it to outsiders for cash income. The wedge of rangeland was equal in size to a goodsized western county about half the size of rhode island. The War Department offered 0. 01 per acre per year to lease tribally owned land within this gunnery range area. The going rate according to the interior secretary was between seven and a half and 0. 25. They were offered 0. 01. The tribe eventually settled because it was a time of national emergency. They eventually settled for 0. 03 an acre. Some of the land was owned outright by individuals, indian and nonindian who were given 30 days noticeer to move all possessions and vacate their homes. Through Eminent Domain they were paid an average of 3. 85 per acre. Not much more than the going rate for one days manual labor. Permanent improvement left behind largely went uncompensated. Little did any of them suspect gathering up their possessions in the act of being evicted that one day a large part of the gunnery range would become a part of badlands National Park. A place where people would come from thousands of miles away to camp, hike the low lands and roar of the goalies and pricey offroad vehicles. Twenty years and two wars past at which point the air force declared surplus almost 300,000 acres in 1963. That year a park Service Report discussed how local poverty may be addressed through road improvements in tourist facilities. A dance center, motel, pick accenture, craft sales all and reservation communities. It evene recommended and authentic sioux Indian Village with real teepees, a point that had to raise eyebrows among the tribe in an area where adequate housing was barely obtainable. The tribe reluctant to hand over control of any treaty land to an outside authority resisted. So, the bureau of Indian Affairs and the park service joined forces to devise a plan that would make part of pine ridge a tourist attraction. Badlands National Monument was to annex a south unit consisting of somend 130,000 acres of the d gunnery range and additional land more than doubling the monument of size. 76,000 of those acres would revert to the tribe which would provide an easement compatible with park administration. They would not have to buy the land at all. It would only need to comanagement. Again, the drive resisted. If they would not make the exchange countered the Senate Committee on interior affairs, the remaining gunnery land will be subject to disposal under Surplus Property procedures. In other words, if the Tribal Council did not agree, there was no hope of regaining most of the gunnery range land once controlled. In 1968 Congress Passed public law 9468 approving the annexation as a way to pressure the tribe and formalize its intention to establish a badlands National Park. The badlands at least as a park Service Landscape were still growing. It took seven more years before the Tribal Council consented. A memorandum of agreement was signed by the park service in the tribe in 1976 and two years later badlands National Park was born in 78. So, it was that the south unit newly created, already was what was there before became the north unit was to be, if not an emerald necklace, hopefully a native jewel of the prairie. The truth was more sobering however. In exchange for allowing the park service onto the reservation they were. Merely returned land they had been forced to surrender in a national emergency. Time has not been kind. Nsince i reported on the badlas in the book about the National Parks 20 years ago, washington has done little to live up to its written promises. Training of the personnel has been haphazard, not nonexistent. Ordinance mitigation of the old bombing range land is still unfinished. Proposed studies to assess whether bison should be introduced into the south unit have been shelved. Signage and infrastructure pushed traffic away from the reservation. A small Visitor Center in a converted trailer is all that visitors will find. The tribe has been denied first right of a refusal for cart part concessions. While it is true that these people were promised all jobs in the south unit, there have never been more than a handful at any given time. The conditional clauses of the memorandum whereas carefully crafted to washingtons advantage as were those of congressional treaties a century before. Finally, the tribe has political problems of its own. Powerful ranching interest have prevented the council from endorsing the idea of making the south unitng a tribal National Park. A longheld dream of many to be administered independently. Many on the reservation at college the tribal government is in need of reform. Without appropriations, the vision of a scenic byway connecting the badlands to the black hills and brin