Sacred Lands In Jeopardy
The United States' most iconic and sacred landscapes, like Devils Tower, Yosemite, and Yellowstone, are at great risk—threatened by devastating staff cuts that compromise their care and protection.
The National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and United States Forest Service are under attack as the new administration has enacted severe budget cuts, eliminating thousands of jobs and leaving our public lands and communities vulnerable. The people who dedicated their lives to protecting these places are now being discarded, and with them, the stewardship of our nation’s most significant landscapes. In a 2014 issue of National Geographic Traveler, I wrote about three sacred sites—Devils Tower, Yosemite, and Yellowstone–powerful symbols of what is at risk. These are not mere tourist attractions; they are sacred lands, revered by Native American communities for thousands of years. These unique places represent a deep connection to the land that predates the formation of our national parks. The dedicated efforts of the staff working to protect these places are what truly make a difference—and we must stand with them.
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I have been to Timbuktu. I came down the Niger by boat and like the Tuareg nomads, put my tent up on the edge of town. I walked among the tan, hand-packed mud towers of the three great mosques, Sankore, Djinguereber and Sidi Yahya, and learned that in the 1300s Timbuktu was home to the greatest university in all of Africa.
I’ve been to the Taj Mahal, completed in 1653, commissioned by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. According to legend, when his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died giving birth to their 14th child, his grief drove him to create a marble mausoleum of such beauty that it would be the material manifestation of their love.
And I’ve been to the Coliseum---where lions captured in North Africa did savage battle with slave gladiators also capture in North Africa---and the Eiffel Tower, accompanied by a lover in a purple dress, and the Great Wall, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, Lenin’s macabre Tomb, Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, Notre Dame, Neuschwanstein, the Parthenon … They all have their singular history, lore of passion and architectural magic. And they are all monuments built by the hand and mind of man.
Not long ago I was at a cocktail party where some of these edifices were mentioned. A woman in an elegant gown, something of a global jetsetter I was told, melodramatically declared that “America has no culture.” Everyone moaned in agreement. What she meant, I take it, was that our history is too short, our heritage too immature, compared to that of Europe or India or China. Which revealed that she ignorantly and egotistically viewed American history as beginning with the Puritans and ending with the civil rights movement?
In reality, apparently contrary to common knowledge, when Columbus reached the edge of North America it was not a vast, empty wilderness just waiting for the arrival of Christians, but a well-populated continent of some 30 million inhabitants. There were over 200 separate nations, all of whom had their own cultural traditions and sacred monuments. The subsequent conquest of the continent is a tale of such monstrous cruelty and unspeakable evil that it can only be compared to the Crusades or the Khmer Rouge.
Nonetheless, many Native American monuments are still standing, we simply don’t recognize them as such. Unlike the sedentary, agricultural civilizations of Europe and East Asia, the semi-nomadic nations of North America, particularly in the West after they acquired the horse, didn’t have the time nor interest in building monuments----especially not when minarets, towers and basilicas of colossal size and beauty already existed in their world. Egypt’s Pyramid of Giza is 455 feet tall and 4500 years old; Devils Tower is 1267 feet high, 50 million years old and humans have been living there for 10,000 years. Notre Dame is almost 700 years old; the walls of Yosemite were quarried out by glaciers two million years ago and humans have been worshiping beneath these cathedrals of stone for 4ooo years. The Eiffel tower was built in 1889 for the World’s Fair; Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in 1872, but the present volcanic geomorphology was created over the course of 2 million years and humans have been living in the region for 12,000 years.
Native American cultures and traditions are the forgotten bedrock of our nation. The Constitution itself borrowed fundamental principles from the Great Law of Peace, the Iroquois Constitution. Viewed with a sense of inclusivity, North America has some of the deepest cultures and longest histories on the planet. That said, to understand and appreciate our most magnificent natural monuments, you must abandon Judeo-Christian mythology and approach these geologic temples with same open-heartedness and thirst for knowledge that you would the icons of foreign cultures.
Mato Tipila
I’m sitting silently atop America’s first national monument, a thousand feet in the air, my feet dangling in space. Aloft on this skyscraper of the plains, I am closer to heaven than earth.
The effort of the climb has drained my body and cleansed my mind. I close my eyes. A warm breeze is gliding across my skin. The heat of the sun is on my neck. When my eyelids lift I discover a tiny, purple-petaled alpine forget-me-not in a crack and ponder its singular combination of hardiness and delicacy. Violet green swallows shoot by like self-guided bullets, a golden eagle floats the updrafts. I find myself on the wings of the birds soaring around me, detached and buoyant.
The sound of the voice enters my ears but not my head.
“You’re CRAZY!”
The spell is broken.
Peering down between my legs I can make out ant-like people on the paved trail that circles the Tower. One man is looking up, waving his arms and shouting.
When my climbing partner, Patrick, reaches my belay, we stand together on top of Devils Tower and slowly turn in a circle. We’ve both been here many times, but it’s still moving. A luminous western light lies upon the rolling hills. We can see a hundred miles in every direction. Montana to the north, South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the west and south.
Eventually we rappel back to the base of the Tower and begin scrambling down through the junipers. Here and there we spot brightly colored prayer bundles, like homemade Christmas ornaments or Tibetan prayer flags, tied to limbs. Each prayer bundle contains the supplications of a Native American.
Back down on the asphalt path, loaded with our ropes and climbing gear, we are surrounded by a crowd of camera-clicking tourists. It’s July in a national park.
“Now whatall’s up there,” asks a woman wearing a gaudy blouse apparently sewn from the American flag.
“Just prairie,” I say, “grass and cactus.”
“Any critters?” queries her husband, who’s wearing a matching American flag shirt.
“Only birds,” I respond.
“How do the ropes get up there?” asks an older gentleman in cowboy boots. We explain how we put the ropes up ourselves.
A boy of perhaps six in an oversize baseball cap, encouraged by his two older sisters, blurts out, “What’s inside!”
“Chocolate,” replies Patrick, grinning mischievously.
After a few more questions we arrive at the parking lot where there is a gaggle of Japanese tourists around the show teepee. A Corvette club has used up half the parking spaces, the other half are chock-full of motor homes, motorcycles and family vans. The place is as packed as Disneyland---rambunctious kids, overweight adults, slow-moving seniors---a veritable cross-section of Middle America.
Most people have no idea that Devils Tower is one of the most sacred places in North America. Many of them only learned of its existence through the Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To them it’s just a big rock, a tourist attraction: take pics, check out the gift shop, drive away. But like all holy places on earth, to be touched by its sacredness, you need to spend a little time there, preferably in silence.
Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Gall and Spotted Tail---the five great chiefs of the Sioux nation---went to Devils Tower sometime in the 1870s to pray for the survival of their people. This was in the midst of the thirty-six years of bloodshed that would be called the Sioux Wars. The chiefs slept on pungent beds of sagebrush with buffalo-hide blankets and following tradition, neither ate nor drank. For four days they meditated, sang entreaties, and sought spiritual guidance. Their tribes, their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, were being hunted and killed by whites as indiscriminately as buffalo.
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse did not call this place Devils Tower, an insult to Native Americans even today, but rather Mato Tipila, “Bear Lodge.” There is no word for “devil” in the Lakota language, and to the Sioux, the Kiowa, the Crow, the Shoshone, and the Cheyenne, Bear Lodge symbolizes just the opposite of evil: Mato Tipila is a place of spiritual healing and divine guidance.
“To my people, and to over 20 other tribes, Mato Tipila is an altar,” says Dorothy FireCloud, a Lakota Sioux and superintendent of Devils Tower National Monument. FireCloud is the first native caretaker of the Tower since the 1800s, before the whites arrived, when it was looked after by the tribes and their traditions. When I visit her office, she is preparing for the arrival of a large group of Native Americans.
“Mato Tipila is where we have come for a thousand years to worship and pray,” says FireCloud. “It is where our people received divine wisdom.”
FireCloud puts me in touch with Arvol Looking Horse, a Cheyenne River Reservation medicine man and the 19th generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf pipe. Looking Horse tells me this story.
“A spirit woman appeared before two warriors hunting in the meadows around Mato Tipila, one had good thoughts and one had bad thoughts.” When the warrior with bad thoughts approached the spirit woman, she enveloped him in smoke and fog, and when the air cleared, he was nothing more than a skeleton. The spirit woman spared the warrior with good thoughts and told him to walk in a sacred way and tell his people that she had arrived. After he did this, the spirit woman gave the Sioux the peace pipe and the seven sacred ceremonies that form the core of the Sioux religion.
“Then the spirit woman turned into a buffalo,” says Looking Horse. First a black buffalo, then a red buffalo, then a buckskin-colored buffalo, then finally a white buffalo calf.
From an agnostic’s perspective, the legend of Mato Tipila is remarkably similar to that of Moses receiving the ten commandments on Mount Sinai: a sacrosanct place where the faithful go for devotion, redemption and regeneration. Mato Tipila is made of stone, like must cathedrals, but importantly, to the Lakota, it was made by the hand of God, not the hand of man.
“To us, Mato Tipila is our church,” says Looking Horse proudly, “a place where we can connect with the holy spirit.”
Ah-Umati
Yosemite Valley was packed. Twenty thousand vehicles on the narrow roads (I got caught in two traffic jams) every campsite, cot, cabin, hotel room, bar stool, bus seat and restaurant bench occupied. Aaron and I considered bivouacking in the boulders like in the old days when we were dirt bag climbers, but decided to drive up to Glacier Point, on the south rim of the valley, instead. We lucked out and got the last tent site at the Bridalveil Creek campground.
We set the alarm for 5 a.m., intending to hike out to Taft Point to catch the morning sun. When it went off, we didn’t stir. It wasn’t until a coyote, standing in the morning mist in a meadow, began to call us, barking in a hoarse, high-pitched voice, that we got up. We slipped from our sleeping bags and set out.
The coyote, or perhaps its ghost or brother, did not move when we passed by. It was twilight as we dropped down the trail through thick ponderosas. We shut off our headlamps and practically skipped through the forest. Coming close to the rim, we could see the mountains directly across the valley, the magnificent drop-off hidden, as if we could just trot right over to them. At one point we heard noises, branches snapping in the woods. I thought it was just a deer.
When we got to the edge, the grandeur of the huge drop stunned us. I carefully crawled out on a diving board of rock and let my legs hang over a half a mile of emptiness. A shot of adrenaline rushed up from my feet into my stomach---the cheap thrill of being that close to oblivion.
I was staring at the bright streaks of yellow lichen on the vertical gray rock far beneath my feet, when something growled.
Instinctively, I looked behind me, then inched back away from the precipice. Something was moving in the trees. I tiptoed forward to investigate and peered around a boulder.
A monstrous mama bear, cinnamon in color, was tearing apart a downed tree. She had enormous arms that were digging into the belly of the tree like a dog digs a hole. I could see the muscles in her shoulders and back rolling and flexing. Atop the trunk was a very small black cub scampering back and forth, watching its mother.
I smelled like campfire and the breeze was not in my favor. In moments the bear caught wind of me, pulled its giant head from inside the trunk, and looked right at me. It stood up on its hind legs, paws punching the air, and roared. I slowly walked backward. The bear glanced at her cub, then at me, then back at her cub. As I retreated, the bear returned to destroying the tree and the cub pranced about.
Aaron didn’t see the bear and her cub and didn’t want to. We gave them a wide berth and circled back to the trail. And yet, within five minutes, we encountered another black bear. It was shimmying up a tree. A ragged adolescent with tuffs of black, brown and tan hair, it dropped to the ground as soon as it saw us, but didn’t run away. We watched the bear standing still, and the bear watched us standing still. It moved into the trees and we followed, spotting it again sniffing the ground. It lifted its splotchy head, checking us out, then, tired of hide-and-seek, vanished in the dense trees.
That afternoon, at the Wahoga, the new roundhouse the Miwok tribe are building near Camp IV in Yosemite Valley, our encounter with bears is not a surprise to the tribal elders.
“They are welcoming you,” says Tony Brochini, 61, his face as smooth as a man half his age. “They know you are here to tell our story.”
To the Miwok, bears are relatives.
“They are part of our family,” explains, Jay Johnson, 80, the spiritual leader of the Yosemite Miwok. Both Johnson and Brochini grew up inside Yosemite National Park in the village of Wahoga. When the last Native American who lived in the park died, in 1968, the village was demolished by the park service. The new roundhouse is the Miwok people’s attempt at saving a small piece of their past.
“We were told by our elders that Bears, Ah-Umati in our language, were our aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins,” says lean, white-haired Johnson. Johnson worked for the Yosemite park service for 46 years. “We used to sleep outside every night as kids, and back then Bears were thick. During the night Bears would walk through us and around us and over us and we were never scared. They were our relatives. Once in a while some white person would shoot Bear and then try to give us the meat. We could never eat Bear meat! Would you eat your own relative?”
We are walking around the roundhouse with Johnson and Brochini. Above us is Tu-tuka-nula, named perhaps thousands of years ago, then renamed El Capitan in the last century. Johnson and Brochini are blessing each pole with prayers and tobacco. The park service has stopped construction of the roundhouse because it does not meet federal building codes.
“But there are no building codes for a traditional Native American structure,” says Brochini. “The Yosemite our people knew was taken from us and is gone forever. We simply want one place where we can still worship in our own way, still perform the Bear Spirit Ceremony.”
Brochini has worked for the park service 36 years. One summer morning he was driving into the park and came upon black streaks across the highway and a patrolman directing traffic. The officer told him that someone had hit a bear and that the animal had taken off into the woods.
“I got out of my car and went searching for Bear,” said Tony. He found it down in the willows.
“I heard it moaning and when I got close,” said Tony, “I could see its spine had been broken. It was dragging its hind legs.”
At first he couldn’t get near the bear, “So I began to sing,” says Brochini. “I sang the songs of our people and Bear relaxed.”
“I could see how much pain Bear was in,” says Brochini, beginning to weep. “I told him that I would stay with him. I told him I was his relative, his brother, and that I would stay with him and he did not have to die alone.”
Brochini stayed with the bear for four hours before it died. When he came out of the woods he contacted park officials, said he wanted to bury the bear, and was granted permission.
“I called Jay here,” said Brochini, wiping the tears from his eyes and touching Johnson’s thin shoulder, “and asked how to give Bear a burial, and Jay said ‘just like we would for any other member of the family.’”
Tukuarika
In the dead of winter, we strip naked and cross the Snake River. Our packs, skis and boots balanced on our heads, we climb down the snow bank and enter the blue water. At first we can feel the sharp stones gouging our feet, but they are nothing compared to the agony of the cold. Our toes and legs ache to the bone. The pain begins to go away by the time we are half way across. Climbing up the snow bank on the far side we feel nothing, our feet and legs completely numb.
The three of us dress in minutes and begin skiing hard, trying to pump blood back into our extremities. The temperature is 20 below, not uncommon for Yellowstone in winter. The only reason the river isn’t frozen solid are the hot springs upstream. It takes two hours of cross-country skiing before we are warm again.
It is dusk when we reach the hot springs. We each have our task. Dan stomps down a platform in the snow and sets up the tent; Keith cuts out benches and a table in the snow; I fire up the stove and begin melting snow for hot water. That night we sit on our foam pads, slurp scalding noodles, and stare up at the sky. The stars are as brilliant as fireworks. Keith and Dan can name every constellation.
It is snowing in the morning. We step into our skis and tour the hot springs. Steam rises from every pool, the heat making the snowflakes as large as butterflies. Close to the hot pools the ground is so warm the snow is gone, replaced by meadows of lush green grass. Summer nestled inside winter, like some lost paradise. We can often remove our skis and simply walk, a magical experience in the middle of winter when all around the forest is buried in seven feet of snow.
We know we are walking in the footsteps of the Tukuarika, a small Shoshoni tribe whose name literally means “eaters of big horn sheep.” Although the Tukuarika had lived in Yellowstone for centuries, the U.S. government began driving them out even before it became a park. After the park was established, to promote tourism, legends about the Tukuarika were invented---that they were a vanished tribe, that they were impoverished and depraved, that they had always feared the geysers and hot springs.
“That’s laughable,” says Dan. He has removed his ski boots and is running his toes through the warm grass. It’s late afternoon and the air temperature is far below zero.
“Idiotic,” remarks Keith, who is down to his underwear.
We have found just the right hot springs. Snow is still falling as we each slowly sink our bare bodies into the hot water. Only our heads are above the surface, our muscles being massaged by the mineral water. We can see our breath.
“It’s illogical,” continues Keith, “park propaganda. You know the Indians sat in these pools in the winter just like us.”
Reports from reputable trappers describe the Tukuarika using the hot pools and living in a kind of wilderness splendor. In 1866, Osborne Russell found a band of Tukuarika in the Lamar Valley: “They were all neatly clothed in dressed deer and sheep skins of the best quality and seemed perfectly contented and happy … They were well-armed with bows and arrows with obsidian. The bows were beautifully wrought from sheep, buffalo and elk horns secured with deer and elk sinews and ornamented with porcupine quills.”
This is my fourth winter tour in Yellowstone, one of which lasted 29 days. I have moved from hot springs to hot springs, as I’m sure the Tukuarika did. There have often been buffalo or elk in the thermal basins, grazing and browsing, escaping the cold.
We put our heads back and imagine what it would have been like to live in Yellowstone. Abundant game, oases of summer even in winter, packs of wolves and coyotes for entertainment. The Tukuarika did not use horses, but were masters with dogs---the clan Russell encountered had over thirty. No surprise: horses flounder in snow where dogs do not. Tukuarika clothes were said to have been velvet-like to the touch because they used two brains rather than one for tanning each hide. Badger pelts were used for moccasins, fox pelts for hats and leggings, wolf pelts for blankets. A single bow would take two months to craft and could send an arrow entirely through a bison.
“They lived the last outdoor life,” Dan says dreamily.
It is late when we finally pull our melted bodies from the hot springs. The snow has stopped and the black sky is sprayed with salt. We shove our feet into our boots, grabs our clothes, race to our tent, and burrow down in our sleeping bags. Before drifting asleep, it occurs to me that a few of us anyway, are still living the outdoor life.
In the morning, through the mist, a massive buffalo, horns dripping, is standing beside the pool where we soaked the night before.
Devils Tower, Yosemite, Yellowstone. These are but three of the hundreds of sacred sites that represent our rich cultural/geological heritage. The Grand Canyon, Shiprock, Mesa Verde, the Escalante---they were all once inhabited by people who fully recognized their beauty and sanctity. The national park system saved some of them from destruction, but in the process dispossessed the aboriginal peoples of their homes. Returning special privileges to the descendants of the original inhabitants is the very least we can do, politically. Individually, we can all enter our parks with a deeper understanding of their ancient, everlasting value.
You will never know the meaning of a park from the road. To know a place you must touch it, smell it, breathe it. You must get out of your air-conditioned car, get off your obnoxious Harley, exit your decadent Winnebago, forsake your snowmobile. You must travel with your own body, carry your own supplies, cross creeks, camp in a tent. You must get far away from the crowds. This will require hours or even days of hiking or skiing, climbing or paddling. You must go until you find nothing but stone and water, trees and flowers. When you get there, you must sit, and watch, and listen.
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In the News:
Outdoor Life Podcast: The Feds Fired Key Public-Land Workers. Here's What It Means for You
New York Times: Trump’s Cuts Could Make Parks and Forests More Dangerous, Employees Say
Afar: The National Parks Are At Risk Following Mass Layoffs—Here’s What That Means for Travelers Visiting the Parks
GearJunkie: Outdoor Industry Sounds Alarm After Trump Axes Park Workers
CBS News: Upside-down U.S flag hung at Yosemite National Park by workers protesting job cuts
Note: In response to public pressure, the Trump administration has reinstated some of the National Park Service employees who were previously laid off, recognizing the essential role they play in preserving our national parks and monuments. Associated Press