Patricia,
Good news: A federal judge ordered the Department of the Interior (DOI) to reinstate signs and exhibits that were recently censored or removed at national parks!
She’s requiring the restoration of historical information on topics such as slavery, Two-Spirit and LGBTQ+ people, climate change, and the U.S. government’s forced removal of Tribal Nations to create national parks on our ancestral homelands.
This judge’s order is a win for the movement we’ve helped build to re-Indigenize national parks, reveal the history of the land and its people, and help visitors understand why the parks’ original stewards should be co-managing these lands and waters as their ancestors did.
But we must defend this win because DOI Secretary Burgum is likely to appeal the judge’s decision.
Will you chip in now to help defend this victory for protecting history from erasure, and to power the vital work ahead to protect our ancestral lands and waters from corporate plunder and other threats?
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As part of the Coalition for Outdoor Renaming and Education (CORE), we have advocated for inclusive interpretation in national parks, pushed to replace racist names of geographic landmarks with Indigenous place names, and called for the Department of the Interior (DOI) to immediately restore these exhibits. You helped us send 14,000 messages to DOI Secretary Doug Burgum about this.
Since the DOI began attempting to erase our collective history -- of LGBTQ+, Black, and Native people, as well as climate change -- at parks like the Grand Canyon and Grand Teton last year, many Tribes, climate groups, and communities have been taking action.
For example, after an order to change exhibit text at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the Northern Cheyenne unanimously passed a resolution that opposes any change to the current language (which describes broken promises to Tribes and notes that the federal boarding school system “violently erased cultural identities and language”).
Tribes have the inherent and legal right to participate in decisions and approve or disapprove activities on their homelands, from interpretative signage to fossil fuel development and mining.
With your support, Native Organizers Alliance has partnered with many Tribes to help secure Tribal-federal agreements to co-manage sacred national parks and monuments, such as Bears Ears and Chaco Canyon (a UNESCO World Heritage Site).
Co-stewardship is not only our right as sovereign nations, but also a long-term solution of restorative environmental management that enables Mother Earth and all our relatives to thrive.
But with pro-corporate, anti-Native rights leaders at the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, we’ve got to scale up our work to defend not only our public lands, but also the hard-won progress we’ve made for Tribal sovereignty and Mother Earth.
Please donate to our urgent work to re-Indigenize public lands, ensure that Native stories are part of the national narrative, and defend Tribes’ inherent right to determine the future of their ancestral homelands for generations to come.
CHIP IN NOWHawwih (thank you in Caddo) for making our work possible. Together, we’ll keep organizing to uphold the rights of Tribal Nations and all people -- and build grassroots power and alliances to protect our lands, waters, and lifeways for future generations.
With your support, the Native Organizers Alliance will also keep strengthening movements and alliances to support Tribal and Native communities in exercising their legal and inherent right to co-manage federal lands, with the same decision-making rights as federal agencies.
Judith LeBlanc (Caddo)
Executive Director
BUILD NATIVE POWER
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