Tourism and Policy

Greater Yellowstone (established 1872)

Yellowstone National Park

Long before Yellowstone became the world’s first national park, its geysers, valleys, and rivers were integral to the lifeways of at least 27 tribes—including the Eastern Shoshone (Sheepeaters), Bannock, Nez Perce (Nimiipuu), Blackfeet, Crow, and others—who followed seasonal migrations for bison, elk, trout, and camas root harvesting. Archaeological evidence shows human presence in the region dating back over 15,000 years, with horse acquisition in the early 1700s greatly expanding tribal hunting ranges.

After the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Sheepeaters ceded much of this land but retained hunting rights. Yet those rights were unratified and soon nullified: by 1877, Chief Joseph’s band of roughly 750 Nez Perce, fleeing U.S. Army forces, passed through Yellowstone in a desperate bid for freedom—an episode now commemorated by Nez Perce Creek—only to surrender in Montana. In 1895, settlers forcibly destroyed a Bannock encampment in Jackson Hole, killing and displacing families, and the 1896 “Racehorse” court decision stripped all off-reservation hunting rights, effectively criminalizing subsistence practices—all to protect an imagined “wild” landscape that was already deeply managed by its original stewards.

Rocky Mountain National Park (Established 1915)

Rocky Mountain National Park

For millennia the Ute and later the Eastern Arapaho traversed the Estes Valley, burning meadows to promote elk habitat, gathering chokecherries and medicinal roots, and fishing trout-rich streams on both sides of the Continental Divide. Seasonal encampments clustered around Grand Lake and Lake Granby for summer hunting, while winter villages sat at lower elevations. After gold was discovered in 1858, massive influxes of miners and settlers overwhelmed the region. Broken treaties—the 1851 and 1861 Treaties of Fort Laramie and Fort Wise—rapidly confined tribes to reservations; the Arapaho were forcibly relocated, with the Southern Arapaho removed to Oklahoma after 1867, and the Northern Arapaho settled on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming by 1878. The Ute, meanwhile, were pushed into southwestern Colorado and Utah by the 1880s. When RMNP was proclaimed in 1915, those displacement policies were enshrined: customary access for subsistence, ceremony, and stewardship ceased virtually overnight.

Yosemite National Park (Established 1890)

Yosemite National Park

Human habitation in Yosemite Valley dates back at least 3,000 years, and throughout the Sierra Nevada for nearly 8,000–10,000 years. By the late 18th century, Southern and Central Sierra Miwok peoples, along with Mono, Paiute, and Ahwahnechee bands, managed the valley’s oak woodlands—gathering acorns from oak groves, trading obsidian, and conducting annual “Big Times” ceremonies. The 1849 Gold Rush triggered the Mariposa War (1850–51), when the state-authorized Mariposa Battalion, led by settler James Savage, attacked Ahwahnechee villages, burned food stores, and marched survivors to the Fresno River Reservation. Although some Ahwahnechee later returned under Chief Tenaya, further violence and disease decimated populations. When Yosemite Valley was ceded to California in 1864 and then incorporated into the national park in 1890, Miwok acorn harvesting, obsidian trade, and village sites like Ahwahnee were closed to Indigenous use, even as their cultural labor and knowledge were appropriated to build tourism infrastructure.

Grand Canyon National Park (Established 1919)

Grand Canyon National Park

The Grand Canyon’s sheer walls and river corridors have sustained Hualapai, Havasupai (“people of the blue-green waters”), Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Kaibab Paiute, and other tribes for at least 2,000 years, if not much longer. These communities farmed in canyon bottoms, hunted mule deer on plateaus, and held origin-story ceremonies in cliff alcoves. 1882 President Chester A. Arthur unilaterally established a mere 518-acre Havasupai reservation, cutting the tribe off from most of their ancestral lands. When Congress created Grand Canyon NP in 1919, the park surrounded that reservation, prohibiting tribal access to sacred springs, cave shrines, and grazing lands. Only after decades of litigation—culminating in the 1975 Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act—Congress returned roughly 188,077 acres to the Havasupai.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Established 1934)

Grand Canyon National Park

For over 11,000 years, the Cherokee people, who call these mist-shrouded peaks “Shaconag,e”—lived in year-round towns, farmed river bottoms, and wove extensive trails across what is now Tennessee and North Carolina. Following the 1838 Trail of Tears, most Cherokee were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, but a band led by Yonaguska and William Thomas remained in the Oconaluftee region. When Congress authorized GSMNP in 1926 (formally created in 1934), much of the Qualla Boundary land was purchased or ceded under pressure, and Cherokee access was restricted, though a small enclave was maintained by buying back parcels or through right-of-way agreements on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Today, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians stewards both the park’s cultural interpretation and their Qualla Boundary homeland, preserving language, basketry, and traditional ecological knowledge through museums and living-culture villages.

Tourism: A doubled-Edged Sword

The very creation of our National Parks served as a tool of Indigenous removal. Once lands were “protected” under federal designation, treaties were ignored or rescinded, and customary hunting, fishing, and ceremonial access were outlawed. Ute and Arapaho people who had stewarded these valleys for millennia found themselves barred from the rivers where they once spear-fished, the meadows where they picked berries, and the high passes where they held seasonal ceremonies. At the same time, park service and concession jobs were often low-wage positions, relegating Indigenous laborers to roles that served the recreational pursuits of white tourists rather than honoring their own deep ecological knowledge and traditions.

Yet tourism can also commodify and misrepresent Indigenous cultures in harmful ways. When sacred ceremonies are repackaged as staged “performances,” or when authentic crafts are mass-produced and sold as mere souvenirs, the spiritual and cultural significance of those practices is stripped away. Visitors may leave with little more than a snapshot or trinket—an experience that reinforces the idea of Indigenous heritage as a relic of the past, rather than a living, evolving presence. This form of cultural exploitation perpetuates stereotypes and erases the complex realities of contemporary tribal life.

Despite these risks, tourism holds tremendous potential as a platform for Indigenous self-determination and cultural revitalization. By supporting tribal-owned guiding services, campgrounds, and interpretive centers, visitors help keep economic benefits within Native communities. Authentic storytelling tours—led by Ute and Arapaho experts—can transmit language, ecological wisdom, and oral histories to younger generations, ensuring continuity of traditions. When tribal artisans sell their crafts through fair-trade cooperatives or visitor center boutiques, they control the narrative and retain the full value of their work. In this way, tourism becomes not a means of erasure, but a powerful tool for reclaiming land, language, and legacy.