As a teenager, I lived on the boundary of Canyon De Chelly National Monument in the Navajo Nation near the Arizona and New Mexico border. The red rock canyon system extends like fingers outwards from the Chuska Mountains, carving deep into a broad plateau. It ultimately converges into one canyon as it emerges into the Chinle Valley nearly 2,000 feet below and more than 25 miles from where it started.

Multiple civilizations of Indigenous people have called the canyon home thanks to its abundance of water, fertile soils, and fortress-like impenetrability from intruders. Ancestral structures, burial sites, plants, animals, and pictographs are scattered across Canyon De Chelly and hold immense significance to Native people today. Navajo people still live and farm in the canyon.

This national monument, unlike many others, sits entirely within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation on reservation trust land. It wasn’t until 2018 that a new structure: being managed cooperatively between the tribe, National Park Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs—a rarity in park management. But now this type of partnership is becoming a model for U.S. agencies that are finally beginning to embrace tribal co-management of public lands.

Last year, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, leaders of the two agencies that oversee the majority of federal lands, issued Order 3403: Joint Secretarial Order on Fulfilling the Trust Responsibility to Indian Tribes in the Stewardship of Federal Lands and Waters. The order calls for federal agencies to take tribes into account when making decisions about public land, water, and wildlife, and to embrace co-stewardship. It affirmed that tribes have a deep and longstanding connection to these landscapes as the previous owners and managers of them, and that existing treaties signed between tribes and the federal government over the use of these lands must be honored.

Many Native people are skeptical that this is simply lip service, as tribes have been on the receiving end of the long history of broken treaties and promises by the federal government. In the view of many tribes, co-management means that tribal decision-making authority is equal to federal decision-making authority and must have a focus on long-term management, not just consultation on small issues. Historically, federal agencies have unilaterally determined what is good for tribes and have not followed fundamental principles of free, prior, and informed consent.

Promises to uphold treaties consistently broken by the federal government draw rightful skepticism. The history of violent dispossession and removal of tribes from federal lands to create national parks continues to affect Native communities today. Many aspects of Native American religions and ceremonies were prohibited by law until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. Before this law, it was not uncommon for government agencies to deny access to Native Americans to sacred sites on federal lands and to interfere with religious practices.

For decades, private collectors, museums, universities, and federal agencies drove a large and expansive market for Native artifacts and human remains. The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 finally established Indigenous ownership of cultural items and Native American human remains excavated from federal and tribal lands. At the passage of the law, federal agencies reported the possession of 14,500 Native remains. The numbers that exist in museums and universities are far higher. A government accountability office study estimated in 2021 that these institutions hold around 116,000 ancestors in their “collections.” Pretty words in public statements do not change this reality for many Native people.

But there is one notable difference between Order 3403 and previous federal promises: the order directs agencies to increase opportunities for tribes to be a part of the decision-making. “Participate in their traditional stewardship of present-day federal lands and waters and the integration of thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge and sustainability practices into federal management and operations,” it reads.

Order 3403 refers to co-stewardship more than co-management. While the line between the terms can be fuzzy, co-stewardship implies caring for the land and its resources together, while co-management signifies collaborative decision making. Prior to the new order, there were already examples of both when it comes to U.S. federal lands. In western Idaho, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) exempts Nez Perce Tribe members from recreational use fees in several national forests so that they can exercise reserved treaty rights to ceremonial practices and traditional animal and plant harvesting.

On a more complex level, the USFS, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and a variety of tribes collaborate on managing the reintroduction of threatened species, such as wolves, into national forests. The three also contract agreements that allow tribes to perform wildfire mitigation work on federal public lands adjacent to reservation lands.

But perhaps the most complex example already in place is the co-management of national monuments and national parks with tribes. Two notable examples of co-management of national monuments on BLM lands include Kasha Kautwe Tent Rocks National Monument in northern New Mexico and the San Jacinto National Monument located outside of Los Angeles, California. Within the National Park System, four parks currently have co-management agreements with tribes: Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Southeast Alaska, Grand Portage National Monument located within the Grand Portage Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida.

Native scholars and some tribes will argue that the current arrangements don’t count as full co-management, as the final decision authority and ownership still sits in the hands of the federal government. Tribes and the federal government can also have vast differences in perspectives on management; the latter are myopic in their focus and limited by existing federal statutes, and tribes are more concerned with extensive ecosystem management. Federal agencies still must act under the authority given to them by Congress, that still retains plenary power over tribal issues in the United States.

Then there’s the issue that the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge is primarily valued when it confirms the conclusions of western science, but is disregarded when it diverges. Plus, the extent to which tribes are empowered in the first place can change drastically from one administration to the next.

But although there are challenges, hope is not lost. Many tribes are willing and motivated to develop these agreements with the federal government, and there are already pathways that can address the gaps. The Biden Administration is drawing upon examples of co-management arrangements with Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada, where there are a handful of examples that arguably can place tribes on a more equal footing with those federal governments. In nearly all instances, co-management must be tailored to each context and tribe.

Right now, we’re witnessing a monumental shift in federal lands management. Just decades ago, federal policy actively excluded and, in the worst instances, criminalized, Native people from participating in managing their homelands. Today, Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, is now the Secretary of Interior, overseeing many of the agencies that led the dispossession that occurred decades before and shifting policies to undo that history. In addition, Chuck Sams is the first tribally enrolled member to lead the National Park Service. These symbolic wins are important and we must celebrate them as such. Progress on tribal co-management will be slow and incremental in the years to come, and a change in power to a Republican-led administration could easily halt this progress. What gives me hope is that in just three generations we have seen a transformation of the self governance of Native Nations in this country and the inertia of these wins are not easily stopped.

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I remember the rhythmic crunch of each of my steps breaking the crust of the snow on the road below. The twin buttes of the Bears Ears on the horizon sat ahead of me, backlit by the low January sunset. It was the winter of 2018, and I was running in protest with 17 friends and six dogs across Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments to raise awareness about the Trump administration’s efforts to radically reduce their protections and sidelined tribes’ involvement in their management. At that moment, I also had no idea where my next paycheck would come from. Not only was I running in protest, but I had also quit my job with the Department of Energy in protest as well. I had left because I could not stomach the moral compromises I would need to navigate as a Native person implementing the Trump administration’s policies.

The election of 2016 represented a seismic shift. Just months prior, the term “climate change” was a centerpiece of our work under the Obama administration; however, with the change in the presidency, I was asked to scrub this term from all our public-facing materials. I refused, and later shared this experience with congress. The climate of our office grew tense after the Trump administration appointed a new official who had advocated for the targeted executions of , who “believed” in climate change, and shared a multitude of racist and anti-Semitic views. The best way I could advocate for my community was to fight from the outside to make a change.

Following Bears Ears’ Native Messengers

Four years later, we now sit at a precarious junction in our history. On June 21, the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and Five Tribes of the Intertribal Coalition—the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni Tribe, and Ute Indian Tribe— for the Bears Ears National Monument. The cooperative management, or “comanagement,” approach between the federal government and tribes is not a new concept and has been implemented in . These in law enforcement, hazardous and solid waste disposal, tax revenues, economic development, and allocation of water rights. This marks the first time in the modern history of federal land management that the U.S. government will treat tribes as equals and experts, and not as people to be subjugated under a paternalistic policy.

Labeling Bears Ears as a success story glosses over the jurisdictional complexities of Federal Indian law. Historically, the most litigated topics between states and the federal government are gaming regulations, fish and game issues, and environmental matters. The Bears Ears National Monument fits into the latter two categories. To understand the significance of this cooperation, we must recognize history, tribal sovereignty, and federal Indian law.

The relationship between the U.S. government and tribes has oscillated between conflict and cooperation since its founding. In the country’s early years, tribes were viewed as independent nations, as we would consider our neighbors of Mexico or Canada. Between 1778 and 1871, congress ratified . Before 1830, , like the Comanche in West Texas, had regional military superiority over the United States and Mexico. As tribes fought against and alongside the United States in conflicts like the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the view of them as independent nations . In the subsequent decades, conflict increased between eastern tribes and settlers, which led to a series of consequential Supreme Court decisions known as the ” that now form the basis of Federal Indian law today.

In these decisions, the United States deemed tribes as “” whose relationship was akin to a “.” Today, congress still holds absolute power over tribes and is the title holder for all Indian lands.

The Civil War strengthened, armed, and professionalized the U.S. military to the degree that would tip the balance of power in favor of the United States as manifest-destiny-fueled white settlement and violence. Policies of paternalism and subjugation continued throughout the 20th Century with , , , and , and—to name a few of the injustices. In the 1970s, with the momentum of recent civil-rights gains, tribes and groups like the began pushing hard for increased tribal self-determination and an end to paternalistic . The result was several substantial policy shifts in favor of tribes, like the that enfranchised Native peoples’ fundamental civil liberties around religion.

The conflict at the heart of Bears Ears has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been tied to white supremacy. White Mormon settlers arrived in southeast Utah in the late 1800s after the forced subjugation and displacement of Native peoples in the region. Since then, the white minority has dominated politics despite a Native majority in places like San Juan County, where Bears Ears is located. Utah was one of the to grant Native Americans the right to vote, and it only did so after being forced by a federal judge in 1957.

During the early 20th century, white settlers increased the from the thousands of sites throughout the region. These thefts continued even as congress tried to protect resources through acts like the Archeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Despite these efforts, artifact theft vastly enriched local settler communities in places like Blanding, Utah, which sits on the east border of Bears Ears. In 2009, the federal government conducted one of the largest federal stings related to archeological theft in modern history in Blanding: . Federal agents seized over 40,000 artifacts, with some pieces dating back to 6,000 B.C., totaling millions of dollars on the black market.

Displacement and erasure of our language and culture. I grew up hearing about how my mom and her siblings were physically beaten and had their mouths washed with soap when they spoke Navajo, their only language, at Indian boarding schools. The intent of these “” was to forcibly steal and assimilate Native children into the white culture. At them, Native children faced physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.

I witnessed firsthand how many from this generation refused to teach their kids Navajo culture because they worried it would “hold them back.” I also saw the result of the trauma of boarding schools: substance abuse, physical violence, and a broader breakdown in families and communities. My mother and her siblings held firm to their language and tradition despite their experiences. I was lucky that I could learn my language and feel proud of my cultural traditions. Many Native people my age are not afforded the same privilege.

Just a few days after secretary Deb Haaland announced the cooperative agreement at Bears Ears, she tearfully about the Department of Interior’s efforts to investigate the horrors of boarding schools. Bears Ears and the history of forced assimilation are inseparable.

For the Native communities tied to the Bears Ears region, our history and heritage loss from decades of unfettered artifact theft and boarding schools is immeasurable. We do not know the full extent of what has been lost, nor do we have much hope of returning everything that was taken. But the foundational pieces of cultures and languages remain, despite the many attempts by the government and white supremacist ideology to erase them. These pieces of our language and culture will die if we do nothing to revitalize them in our generation actively. The cooperative management agreement between the federal government and the tribes speaks to this specifically: “Develop opportunities to engage Tribal youth in the culture and traditions of the Bears Ears,” , “as well as the protection and management of the monument to cultivate a shared understanding of the monument’s context and a shared stewardship for its resources.”

Connecting youth to this landscape and its cultural traditions is not only about social justice. We must figure out how to adapt our land management to a rapidly changing climate. The Southwest, where Bears Ears sits, is facing its worst drought in . All five tribes of the intertribal coalition remember the last drought over a millennia ago because our ancestors saw it, and these stories are codified in our history.

As someone who’s trained in western science and policy, I know the shortcomings and strengths of this approach to addressing climate challenges. Native languages and cultures hold thousands of years of tested knowledge about specific ecosystems. Yet it is still no panacea for tackling global climate change alone. We need multiple perspectives, like the ones represented by the comanagement of Bears Ears, to address these large and complex issues.

Tribal comanagement of Bears Ears is likely to become a target for the political right. Bears Ears was one of the first policy priorities of the Trump administration’s initial year in office because it represented a significant gain for environmental goals and tribes. It’s not hard to imagine a variety of nightmarish scenarios of what could happen to my community and our recent gains should another Republic administration come into power. What gives me hope is that we’ve built a coalition of Native and non-Native communities who show up politically and protest. As one preeminent Federal Indian law lawyer said in 2017 when the Trump administration reduced Bears Ears by 85 percent, “Oh shit, now the Indians have allies.”

Bears Ears represents a culmination of tribes’ decades-long efforts to rebuild themselves as Nations and a unique approach to federal land management. We are looking to a future in which the challenges of our natural world directly threaten our civilization. We will all share this future, and we have a choice: we can fight over what it looks like or we can work together.

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One summer afternoon when I was seven or eight years old, I went for a hike with my grandfather and uncle in the Chuska Mountains of Navajo Nation to search for medicinal plants for traditional healing ceremonies. When we stopped on a ridge, to look at the vast, red desert below, my grandfather turned to me and spoke in Navajo. My uncle translated to English, “He said, ‘This is your first classroom; don’t ever forget that.’”Ìę

For the next two decades, I pursued a western education within a system that, just a generation before, had been used as a tool of assimilation and oppression against my people. I recognized from an early age that titles like Dr. and PhD held a lot of power in shaping our natural world. I also understood, from that moment atop the ridge, that having a deep knowledge of the land was an important piece of my own learning. As I pursed higher education, I wove together two threads: science and engineering and a Navajo knowledge of the natural world. My doctoral research focused on how Indigenous cultural values could be incorporated into technical decision making on energy and environmental policy. During most of my educational journey, the knowledge that I brought from my Navajo heritage was oftenÌębelittled and treated as inferior by the western academic worldview. But seeing firsthand the impacts of climate change in my own community motivated me to continue my eduction and graduate.Ìę

Once every few years since graduating I’ve read the report issued by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This year, though, for the first time there was dedicated to the value and importance of Indigenous knowledge in addressing global climate; not just a passing reference, as I’d seen in the past. The chapter correctly called out centuries of colonialism as a central culprit in our current global ecological mess. The authors of the report acknowledged that “Indigenous knowledge can be a unique source for techniques for adaptation,” and “is an important source of guidance for biodiversity conservation, impact assessment, governance, disaster preparedness, and resilience.” Given my many years fighting for this sort of acknowledgment of Indigenous ways of knowing, it did feel like a small win. But I am still not convinced that Indigenous peoples will benefit from it.

In the past few years, I’ve become skeptical that academia and institutions like the IPCC will truly embrace Indigenous peoples, much less the knowledge that we carry about the natural world. I left a tenured professor track role because of the inability of academia and western institutions to meaningfully incorporate Indigenous knowledge. Within academia, Indigenous knowledgeÌęis largely only valued when it confirms the conclusions of western science. When it conflicts or disagrees with western science it is often discarded or ignored.

The Indigenous knowledge that’s accepted by academics is often published in peer reviewed journals, which might as well lock this information in a vault for the communities providing the information. It is largely written in inaccessible academic jargon and hidden behind expensive paywalls. I know because I’ve published a number of open access journal articles and sent thousands of dollars to publishers .

Indigenous knowledge tends to be localized and holistic, while western science’s approach is highly specialized, andÌęseeks universal truths. In many respects these different orientations can make threading these knowledge systems together fundamentally impossible. It’s not surprising that the global focus on reducing carbon emissions has been characterized by some academics as “.” Responses to climate change tend to neglect the other elements of this equation, like addressing biodiversity challenges, environmental toxicity, and the broader socio-political and cultural changes needed to make solutions feasible. The most recent IPCC report acknowledges that Indigenous knowledge systems could help provide the critical framework to bridge these interconnected challenges. But using , a Maasai scholar, these are just “pretty words” on a piece of paper. They don’t mean much without action.Ìę

The trust needed to meaningfully incorporate Indigenous knowledge into policy doesn’t exist. Building equal relationships on the heels of hundred years of colonization is not a quick process, and time is running out. It will take longer to implement a fully justice-informed approach to the climate crisis than the time we have to address the worst impacts of climate change. . I have seen how the warming of the Arctic has entire villages and thousands of years of cultural traditions and ways of knowing. In my home community, I have witnessed large swaths of rangeland turn to sand dunes and medicinal plants I once collected move to higher latitudes and elevations due to warming temperatures and two decades of drought.

Take, for example, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s , which it released in February. One fundamental piece of a transition to a lower carbon economy globally will mean a greater level of mining for these critical minerals and increased pressures to develop supply chains within the United States and globally. The list includes familiar materials like lithium, which the U.S. imports 50 percent of its supply from abroad. But other materials on the list are less familiar: Tin, which we import 75 percent of, is used for electronic soldering. Cobalt, 76 percent of which the U.S. must import, is used in rechargeable batteries. Gallium and manganese, which both have 100 percent reliance on imports, are used in electronic circuits and batteries, respectively. In fact, the U.S. is a net exporter of only one of these minerals: hafnium, which is used in nuclear control rods and alloying of metals. We don’t have to look far to see the impacts on Indigenous communities: in the name of national security during the Cold War, proposed copper mines within and , , , and the current .

Another example is geoengineering, which the defines as, “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate in an attempt to counteract global warming.” Since marginalized communities are often impacted by large-scale events, it’s unfortunate that they are not being brought into discussions on how best to employ the new technology.

Two examples of large-scale geoengineering approaches include ideas such as introducing large amounts of chemicals into the ocean to reduce acidification and releasing aerosols into the high atmosphere to reflect heat from the sun back into the atmosphere. A decade ago, these solutions had been categorized emergency measures. But each year that we fail to address carbon emissions at a meaningful scale, they become closer to reality.

These technologies are not a panacea, and the scale and breadth of unintended consequences of them deployed at a global scale is not fully known. The seriousness in the discussion about using these approaches will only increase in years to come. As we have seen in the past, the large brunt of the negative consequences of these technologies will fall on marginalized communities who cannot afford to mitigate the impacts or are not in a political position to have a meaningful influence on policy to advocate for their positions.Ìę

If it’s not obvious already, I’m a fun addition to any dinner party discussion on climate change. My position may reek of nihilism, but I have reached peace with the belief that the best way forward in addressing Indigenous justice on a global scale is averting the worst impacts of climate change. In terms of policy, we should aim to address colonial history of marginalization and dispossession, but this may not be possible given the time constraints placed on our decisions by the urgency needed to address climate change. We must also accept that the solutions that we choose will continue to fall into the colonial ruts of the history we inherit, even if there will be wins for Indigenous people along the way. To have our ways of knowing acknowledged as valuable to addressing global problems is one of those wins, and we must celebrate it—but it’s not enough to meaningfully address climate change or correct past injustices.

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Recently, I was on a conference call during which the organizers of the meeting asked each participant to give an acknowledgment of the Indigenous people whose land they were calling from, a well-intentioned gesture that has become standard practice within some parts of the business world. The meeting stands out from the blur of pandemic video calls because it was one of the most recent moments that I felt viscerally uncomfortable as the only Native person in the (digital) room.

As we went round-robin through the squares on screen, it reminded me of the awkwardness of my earliest Spanish immersion classes, where we stumbled our way through reading Don Quixote aloud. In place of the words of Cervantes’ Castilian Spanish stood the many tribes, whose traditional names clogged the mouths on the screen. The group experience seemed to range from engaging for some to deeply perfunctory for others. As a result, the tribes and their history felt as distant as the purpose of the exercise.

I didn’t prepare to give a land acknowledgment since I was calling in from a place my people have called home for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. I was the last in the queue, so I sat and observed what was happening before me. Do the servers and data centers that made this video conference possible deserve an acknowledgment as well? That land underneath that server farm is also the result of Indigenous removal, I thought. Should I mention that some of the tribes listed don’t recognize each other’s claims to their homeland?

I was calling from my mom’s house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which arguably is a part of our traditional homelands as Navajos. However, the many Pueblos in the region would rightfully and vehemently disagree. Was this practice supposed to make me feel better or make my people’s issues feel seen? When it was my turn, feeling awkward, I jokingly acknowledged myself for being on my own homelands. Unfortunately my joke didn’t land with the audience, clearly uncomfortable after the exercise.

Land acknowledgment—stating the names of the Indigenous people who were the traditional stewards of a section of land—might look something like, “I’m calling from Moab, Utah, traditional homelands of the Ute people.” On social media, an acknowledgment could appear as a red location pin with the names of the Indigenous people listed following it. In the last few years, it has pervaded the outdoor world. As it’s grown more common, I’ve begun to see it for the incomplete tool that it is. The cynic in me wonders if this is simply a perfunctory, box-checking exercise to signal someone’s politics without a deeper understanding of Indigenous people. It’s time for a dramatic reframing of the guiding question of why we participate—or don’t—in land acknowledgment.

One of the stronger arguments for the practice is that it addresses the erasure of Indigenous people from history. Without a doubt, we are all products of a settler colonial society, in which Indigenous people’s past is rarely taught with the depth and complexity it deserves. In part, it feels like we’re using this practice to signal our desire to learn more about the history beneath our feet. The problem is, we don’t know where to start. At its best, a land acknowledgment is a first step.

It’s important to recognize the background this practice signals. The dispossession, removal, and state-sanctioned acts of genocide against Indigenous people are not confined to the past. Many of the challenges Indigenous communities face today can be traced back to this violence—including economic marginalization, food insecurity, poverty, and the looming extinction of many Native languages. But acknowledgments can have the unintended consequence of framing Indigenous people’s issues as antiquated and limited to land, glossing over the most brutal acts as a result.

This is the core issue with land acknowledgments: they aren’t enough. And while no single action can speak to all historical sins, this one in particular lacks nuance. At its worst, a land acknowledgment may make someone feel like they’ve done their part, and that Native history—and past and present identity—fit into a neat little box.

There’s also the often untold story of slavery of Indigenous peoples within the Americas, whose scale, , rivaled that of the Atlantic Slave Trade. From the late 1400s through the 1800s, millions of Indigenous people were enslaved, resulting in genocide and eradicating culture. There’s a clear parallel between that cruel history and police violence toward Indigenous people today, those of other marginalized groups in the country.ÌęIn a small way, land acknowledgments are a step forward, but they don’t provide enough visibility to truly highlight this traumatic past and present.

A common variation on the land acknowledgment calls out that the land was stolen (“on stolen Ute land,” for example). From a western perspective, it might be easy to say land was “stolen” with little consideration of word choice. While some tribes share this perspective, for other tribes, the view on land ownership is flipped: people belong to the land. Landscapes’s elements make up the blood, bone, and flesh that animate our bodies. When we die, we return to the land and turn into the trees, rocks, and water that once gave us life. The phrase “on stolen land” can unknowingly erase these cultural views.

A focus solely on land oversimplifies many other varying beliefs. For some Indigenous people, while the land is important, bodies of water—rivers, lakes, and the ocean—hold significantly more cultural relevance. For other tribes, the dream world may be a much more central component of their lived experience. I have yet to hear a water or dream acknowledgment on one of my conference calls.

When it comes to using land acknowledgments, I’ve begun to ask myself a guiding question: Is what I’m doing positively impacting the social, economic, or political standing of Native communities? If I can’t answer yes to any of these categories, I try to find another approach.

Sometimes, instead, I’ll identify a teaching moment and share a story that could spark the curiosity of the audience into learning more about the contemporary issues of Indigenous people. In other instances, I might encourage people to give money to support language revitalization or college scholarships for Native youth.

, the media and consulting company I started five years ago, sells products and shares stories of Indigenous peoples and the outdoors. A year ago, we moved away from placing the pins in our Instagram photo captions because they didn’t spur the education for our non-Native audience that’s critical to our work. Now, our work has shifted to filling the gaps in the land acknowledgments with storytelling through writing, . To move the needle, we have to better reflect the vibrant contemporary relationship Native people have with the places we live. And a can dig so much deeper than a little red pin.

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In late April, former congressman and presidential candidate Rick Santorum : “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” His remarksÌę from many within the Native American community. Santorum’s speech came a week after a white climberÌębolted over a petroglyph panel on the Sunshine Wall Slabs north of Arches National Park, and a day before with white supremacist phrases.

As an Indigenous person living in this country, I see these events as directly connected. We have inherited an incomplete understanding of the history of the U.S., and that understanding allows for egregious acts of dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. I know because I received the same education as most of white America growing up in Kansas.

I vividly remember sitting on the floor, alongside my second-grade peers, while we listened to our teacher read from a book about westward expansion and how Kansas came to be. The storyline of the children’s book about Native people spoke broadly about the arrival of the settlers, how Native people taught them to grow corn, and as these settlements expanded, the Natives peacefully moved away to Indian reservations. As the book continued, it spoke about how Native people drank raw blood from buffalo—at which point my entire class turned their heads toward me and made exclamations of disgust. The flood of embarrassment and confusion of that moment still haunts me today; that was not how my Navajo family lived.Ìę

After the reading, we were prompted to write a few sentences answering: What kind of Indian would you like to be?ÌęBut the teacher told me that I couldn’t write about being Navajo because it would be an unfair advantage. I sat and cried, refusing to put pencil to paper in protest while the class moved on to other activities. The teacher assigned me to in-school suspension for the remainder of the day or until I finished the assignment. I sat in suspension for the rest of the day.

As I got older, this moment helped me realize how the larger American society relates to Indigenous peoples. The understanding that many of my peers left with was that Indigenous peoples were barbaric, if not subhuman, and that we willingly chose to relocate to reservations where we continue to live off of government subsidies. End of story. I saw how education can be used as a tool of oppression and to further societal beliefs about marginalized groups of people.Ìę

But I knew that the ancestral puebloan petroglyphs and structures that surrounded my grandparents’ home on the Navajo Nation held a much different story. I have seen some non-Native peers experience these sites, and walk away with a sense of confusion about the history they were taught versus what they experienced firsthand.Ìę

This continent has been a cradle of civilization for Indigenous peoples for millennia. But very few Americans learn about that history. From this cradle sprouted complex and sophisticated societies, which we walk through each day. Places like , located just east of St. Louis, Missouri, was the site of one of the largest urban settlements in the world. At its peak in 1100 C.E., Cahokia was likely larger than London, exceeding 20,000 inhabitants. Today this site sits right off I-70 between industrial and residential developments with little hint that it’s aÌęUunescoÌęWorld Heritage site. Until the early 1800s, most Indigenous peoples had a higher standard of living and life expectancy than surrounding white settler societies.

The history of desecration of Indigenous historic and sacred sites spans back over a century in the Southwest. The arrival of Mormon settler communities inÌęsoutheast Utah coincided with an increased demand for artifacts and human remains from museums and universities across the world. In the 1920s, the , for example,Ìępaid local Blanding residents $2 per piece of ancestral puebloan pottery. These economic forces combined with deeply held racist views toward Native people, allowed for pillaging of ancestral sites to the theft of bodies from graves. We live with these legacies today: there is still aÌę for stolen artifacts from public lands; plus, there’s under-resourcing of federal institutions entrusted to protect the artifacts.

We do not choose the history we are born into, nor which side of it we land on. But we do have a choice about our actions and beliefs after we hear the whole story. This history is one we have violently inherited as a country, and it is also one that has been shaped by settler colonialism and racism.Ìę

It was of no surprise to me, as a Native person, to see phrases like “WHITE POWER” scrawled over the petroglyphs in Moab. Part of me was actually happy to see it, because I knew it would help illustrate the tie between white supremacy and the dispossession of Native people to their connection to homeland.Ìę

Moments like the defacing of petroglyphs in southern Utah can provide the necessary fodder to make much-needed changes as a society to how we respect Indigenous peoples and their histories. The momentum for this change should come from the outdoor community supporting Native communities to ensure that they can both access and protect our ancestral homelands. This means fully enforcing existing federal laws protecting these resources on public lands and empowering tribes and other Native-led organizations, like the , to be the managers of our own homelands. The first step toward rectifying this history is collectively unlearning the history we have been taught.

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The federal public lands that are so celebrated today came about in parallel with the Indian reservation system to cement the legal and physical separation of Indigenous peoples from their homelands. The Department of Interior was founded in 1849 to manage issues of domestic concern by the government, but now houses a number of agencies that oversee and manage the millions of acres of public lands violently disposed from Indigenous peoples centuries earlier. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is now a part of the DOI, manages aÌęsignificant portion of the federal relationship with and the treaty obligations to Native Nations. Consequently, this relationship and who heads this agency directly impacts the millions of American Indians and Alaskan Natives, who are the descendants of this dispossession.

TheÌę was established in 1824 as part of the U.S. War Department, a precursor to the Department of Defense. Its placement is telling of how the government used the bureau to deal with what it thought of as the “Indian problems,” caused by settler violence and westward expansion. This path led to an increasing level of military engagement with tribes across the West, and consequently the signing of treaties intended to subdue Native peoples and to force the cessation of lands. The immense brutality and death caused by the civil war and the multitude of Indian wars in the decades that followed led to a shift in policies toward Native peoples: instead of complete extermination, policies began to focus more on reformation through assimilation. While the new approach seemed less bloody, the end goal of genocide continued as the U.S. government attempted to erase Native cultures and peoples through tools like boarding schools.

Haskell Indian Nations University, in Lawrence, Kansas, began as an Indian boarding school in the 1870s. Its purpose was to further goals of genocide through the cultural erasure of Native peoples by forcing the removal and assimilation of Native children into white culture. In the 1890s, the federal government issued a compulsory attendance law that allowed for the forced removal of Native American children from their homes. Many of these children, as young as toddlers, would never return home because of assimilation from disease. In other instances, children ran away from the school trying to reunite with their families, but often died from exposure, dehydration, or starvation. The museum on the Haskell campus displays handcuffs used to keep Native children from seeking freedom and escaping these policies.

My own mother was forced to attend boarding schools in the Navajo Nation and was physically beaten for speaking Navajo. When she was eight years old, my aunt ran away from the boarding school and covered nearly 50 miles from Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, toward her home in Red Valley, Arizona, before she was caught. It was from these experiences that my mother was driven to improve education for Native children after her. She was the only child in her family to go to college, and she pursued doctoral studies that focused on the role of language and culture in Native student achievement. She became the president ofÌę, the first tribally run university in the United States, and a political appointee in the Department of Education under the Obama administration, focusing on Tribal Colleges and Universities.

I was raised in Lawrence by my Navajo mother and Scottish and Romanian father. As a child, the juxtaposition between the history of Haskell Indian Nations University and the vibrancy of the young Native people pursuing a college education left me confused about how these two realities could exist on this small plot of land in eastern Kansas. Growing up, I would present my Certificate of Indian Blood to the Indian Health Service clinic on campus for routine dental and medical screenings, as promised in treaties from over a century earlier.Ìę

Because of the unique relationship that the federal government has with American Indian tribes, and the fact that American Indians have a unique political and legal identity in addition to race, my healthcare and education were controlled by the policies of the Department of the Interior. The policies of Congress, the Department of the Interior, and consequently those of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, over the past century have defined Haskell and the many Native people within it by the (failed) policies, (lack of) funding, and multitude of (broken) treaty obligations.

The agencies charged with carrying out treaty obligations, such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, have historically assumed a paternal relationship with Native Nations, dictating policies to tribes andÌęassuming them incapable of managing their own affairs. In recent decades, though, the relationship has shifted to one more closely resembling self-determination, with the understanding that tribes are capable of governing themselves. My own experience at Navajo Preparatory School, a Bureau of Indian Education high school in Farmington, New Mexico, was very different and much more positive than what my mother and aunt encountered at boarding schools: it’s where I learned to speak Navajo and was taught about Navajo culture.Ìę

The nomination of an American Indian to the role of secretary of the interior represents another shift in the relationship between Native Nations and the federal government. It’s been a long time coming and a reality that seemed impossible even just a few years ago. Deb Haaland, a Pueblo woman, is the most fitting to serve this role.Ìę

Today, many of the current issues and politics surrounding public lands involve climate policy. Much ofÌęSecretary Haaland’s confirmation reflected this larger existential question, but the impact these policies will have on Native peoples was left out of the discussion. Implementing these climate-focused policies and balancing the multitude of stakeholder positions and complicated trade-offs will appear to be a compromise too far for some on the left and too radical for those on the right. In this mix sits the multitude of tribes: there are those who rely on fossil fuel development and extraction, like the Crow and Navajo Nations, who are heavily invested in coal development. And there are those experiencing the direct effects of climate change, like the manyÌęcoastal Alaskan Native villages in the Arctic.

Increasing pressures to reduce carbon emissions will lead to an increased demand in the mining for minerals used in critical components, including power electronics, batteries, solar panels, and modular nuclear reactors. Compounding this demand, national security concerns have led to a more substantial discussion about how the United States should secure this critical mineral supply. Tribes, like my own, have had a tumultuous relationshipÌę in the name of national security. My grandfather was one of many Navajo miners who extracted uranium ore for nuclear weapons and technology during the Cold War. Companies were allowed to operate with little safety precautions for their workers. And when the uranium market collapsed at the end of the war, many of these mines were abandoned, often poisoning communities nearby.

There is no one size fits all for Native Nations when it comes to economic development, energy, and climate policy. To avoid repeating the past, the government will need to embrace robust tribal consultation early on in creating and establishing these policies. Secretary Haaland understands this, and she committed to doing so. I have little reason to doubt her commitment, as her past includes working for her tribe, both as an administrator and the director of the tribe’s development corporation.

The challenge of this position, in this time, is significant. Secretary Haaland not only inherits the long and tumultuous history of the position she has been appointed to, but also the uncertain questions of the role of federal lands in climate policy. A number of secretaries of the interior in recent decades have been more supportive of tribes and advanced beneficial policies; none have had to live with the effects of these policies after their tenure. Auntie Deb, as she is known endearingly within many Native communities, is well aware of how her tenure will affect her life, those of her community, and Native people throughout this country. She has a stake in the game, and her future success will open the door for many other Native people after her.

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When graphic designer Vernan Kee received an invitation to the winter Outdoor Retailer market in January 2017, he jumped at the chance to attend, hoping the opportunity would help him advance his career and build his client base. Like most Outdoor Retailer rookies, he was initially blown away by the innovative product designs and outdoor merchandise displayed by brand after brand. Outdoor Retailer is, among many other things, a chance for brands to debut new product lines and show off a bit.

But the more products and brands Kee saw, the worse he felt about pursuing work in the outdoor industry.

Kee is DinĂ©, or Navajo. As he walked among the flashy booths, he saw the designs of his people plastered on everything from scarves to snowboards. Symbols like the sacred DinĂ©tah diamonds that symbolize the four corners of the Navajo Nation, the traditional Spider Woman crosses that honor the culture’s history as weavers, and the sun-face graphics that symbolize prosperity were being used with no respect for their traditional meanings.

“I tried ignoring it at first, but it just got worse. Almost every brand had something Native American–related,” says Kee, who had at various points approached some of the brands for work but had never been hired. “A lot of them were using actual symbols that are sacred and mean something.”

This uncredited adoption of imagery and symbols has a name: cultural appropriation. Outdoor brands, like countless clothing, bedding, and furniture manufacturers before them, have put Native imagery on all sorts of apparel and technical gear for years. Only a fraction of that imagery has been created by Indigenous designers and artists. The problem is especially ironic as the outdoor industry has aligned itself with tribal interests in protecting public lands, from Bears Ears National Monument to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s time to elevate the work of Native people who are fully capable of creating that aesthetic on their own and have been doing it for untold generations before white people realized how good these designs look on Instagram.

“Let’s face it,” says Shain Jackson, a Coast Salish artist and lawyer based in British Columbia, “we are the most impoverished demographic in this country. Our artwork, nationwide, is our biggest source of private direct revenue. Handcrafts, arts, and designs are hardly scratching the surface, but we just want the benefit from the artwork to go to the right people, or at least a large part of it.”

Mainstream—that is, mostly white—culture continues to steal from and profit off Indigenous people who have already lost land, language, culture, and countless lives to colonialism and cruel policies. Using meaningful Native images on products simply for aesthetic reasons is a way of ignoring the context of colonialism and stolen lands. The trendiness of Native imagery compounds the problem even further by making it harder for talented, motivated Native people like Kee to break into the industry.

“We’re not stuck in the Stone Age,” Kee says. “I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design, and I’m implementing traditional designs in modern, artistic ways.” Kee’s client list includes NativesOutdoors, a B-Corp organization that works to support Indigenous people in the outdoor industry and beyond. (NativesOutdoors was founded by Len Necefer, a co-author of this article.)

This problem extends far beyond the outdoor industry, but it’s worth scrutinizing especially as outdoor brands publicize their politics, as they did in 2017, when Outdoor Retailer moved from Salt Lake City to Denver in protest of Utah’s position on public lands. Brands walk a fine line between a white savior complex and true allyship when they ignore other injustices in how they treat Indigenous cultures and artwork.

“Part of reconciliation is being honest about the history that is difficult to hear,” says Gregg Deal, a Native activist and artist who is very vocal about the relationship between Indigenous identity and pop culture. “And knowing your history isn’t just like saying, ‘I know Indians got a raw deal.’ Look at something like the Sand Creek Massacre,” in 1864, when U.S. soldiers raided a Cheyenne and Arapahoe village, killing hundreds. “Once you have that context, then you understand things like historical trauma.”

The outdoor industry, which is already making strides in upholding stringent guidelines in other areas, such as sustainabilityÌęandÌęspecific standards on feather sourcing for down products, could give the same treatment to ethical standards when it comes to Native designs. “A good ally is someone who facilitates the opportunity for our people to speak for ourselves,” Deal says.

Customers should ask questions and make sure they’re spending money on real Indigenous designs, Jackson says. “Ask if an Indigenous design on a product is not only a real Indigenous design, but also if the artist has been remunerated for that design,” he says.

Over the past year, Jackson has partnered with Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Canada’s version of REI, to help the retail chain set standards of fairness to Indigenous artists. He educated MEC staff about the impact of cultural appropriation as the co-op began to remove products from its inventory that used Indigenous imagery but weren’t created by Natives.

“For me, it’s been an incredible learning journey,” says ShonaÌęMcGlashan, MEC’s chief governance officer and internal leader of the company’s effort to remove appropriated designs from its shelves. “The first two or three times this question came up to me, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is no big deal.’ It has taken me a while to understand what I currently understand. You have to confront things that you were doing in the past that you maybe don’t feel that great about.”

MEC has been relatively quiet about this new policy, but the company now asks each brand it carries to prove a Native artist was financially compensated before placing an item with Indigenous symbols or graphics on its shelves.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. “It’s hard for people like me to confront the shoulders they’re standing on. It’s very uncomfortable, and it’s very necessary,” McGlashan says. “There are a lot of gray areas. If it was an easy question to have solved, we would have solved it.”

Still, consider that the outdoor industry contributes $373 billion to the U.S. economy, and brands have been known to brainstorm very long lists of potential product names for each jacket in their line. Why not put the same effort into making sure Native designs are properly used? Treating Native artists fairly isn’t a simple process, but that doesn’t mean that the line between right and wrong is blurry.

“There are things that somebody will consider egregious appropriation and others will think is fair artistic game,” McGlashan says. “When people say a product is ‘inspired’ by something, that’s already a red flag that has my ears pricking up. One of the things that I will say in my work on this subject is that art absolutely exists to challenge and critique society. Outdoor retail, not so much.”

Indigenous artists like Kee are ready to make their voices heard—with or without the support of larger brands and other potential allies. Toward this goal, with the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs and the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office to gather 20 tribes’ elected officials at this summer’s Outdoor Retailer show to discuss their involvement with the outdoor industry and public land management. This gathering is the first of its kind and will create a bridge between the industry and the tribes.

“I really wanted to make the industry aware that there are Native Americans here now—at Outdoor Retailer, in the outdoor industry, and purchasing products as outdoor consumers,” KeeÌęsays. “These brands should just be aware of that. Things need to change a little bit around here.”

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