Public Lands are Native Lands: Yellowstone and Our Shared Future

Indigenous people have stewarded public land for millennia. They continue to have a presence on these landscapes all over the country.

ByShane Doyle

Updated:

Mar 24, 2025

Across the nation and around the world, the name Yellowstone conjures up images of towering geysers and steaming hot pools, wild bison, grizzly bears, and wolves. One figure notably absent from Yellowstone National Park imagery is that of Native people. Since it was created in 1872, the world’s first National Park has been disassociated from the continent’s first people, leaving the place void of Indigenous names, faces, and voices. Official Yellowstone brochures further emphasize this cultural invisibility by informing visitors that when they enter the park, they are traveling through a virgin landscape, left untrammeled and unspoiled by man. Historically, at least 27 tribes—including my own, the Apsáalooke—used the Yellowstone area for hunting, gathering, and ceremony. Yellowstone National Park is just one example where Indigenous people, culture, and history have been erased from America’s public lands, sometimes violently, and rendered irrelevant and obsolete. Despite this dark history of conflict and dispossession, contemporary Native people continue to recognize ourselves and the roots of our ways of life in these shared spaces, and we are working to reclaim our identities as the original stewards of these vibrant landscapes and ecosystems.

My Story

Growing up on the Crow Indian Reservation in the 1970s and 80s, I had little knowledge of Yellowstone National Park, and no clue about the profoundly important connection that my tribe had to the place. Although it was only a four-hour drive from my hometown of Crow Agency, it was a world away culturally and geographically. I never went there or learned about it in school or at home. Back in 2014, I was asked to teach a course about Apsáalooke history in Yellowstone. Digging into written records and oral accounts, I realized how much there was to learn, celebrate, and share.

Since time immemorial, vast swaths of open public lands have always been part of the country’s tribal cultural geography. In the Yellowstone region, the only areas considered private property were generationally inhabited winter campsites along rivers and adjacent to strategic resources, like game trails, bison jumps, or chert quarries. Springtime floods and reawakened mosquitoes and grizzly bears prompted tribes to transition to their summer lifestyle, where bands of people traversed on foot across the open prairie and harvested bison and wild plants on grounds utilized by many other neighbors. Their annual seasonal encounters provided diverse groups like the Blackfeet, Shoshone, Salish, and Kootenai with an opportunity to engage in friendship and trade. These historic cycles of seasonal travel are what spawned the ancient lingua franca, Plains Sign Language. A unique combination of vast differences in their spoken word, an undeterred determination to maintain consistent and stable interaction over many generations, and a knack for language innovation all formed the foundation for this unique, unspoken language that united tribes here, and would be cherished for millennia. This is the true legacy of the Yellowstone area’s tribal culture: thoughtful and generous people sitting down in a circle to share good company and good land.

Yellowstone, I discovered, is a place of ceremony and prayer, where tribal origin stories are centered and sacred resources could be harvested and traded with friends and partners from across the Great Divide. As I came to see The Land of Steam and my relationship to it with new eyes, I began to experience it as my home, and wanted to share that feeling with other Native people.

Rematriating Yellowstone

Yellowstone’s 150th birthday in March of 2022 provided an opportunity for the park to celebrate a major milestone and reflect on how to move forward for the next 150 years. It was an opportunity for exactly what the park needed to do: share its Native history with both tribes and the public. The previous summer, the Superintendent of the park, Cam Sholly, met with tribal members from throughout Montana, and pledged that a new era of connecting with tribal history had begun. The vision, as I saw it, was a spirit of friendship and a shared landscape that reflected a more Indigenized Yellowstone National Park. By the summer of 2022, working with local organizations to wrangle funding, we established the first ever Intertribal Teepee Village. The exhibition took more than a year of planning with Yellowstone officials and tribal representatives. The final product included 13 gleaming white teepees and accompanying tribal ambassadors. This resplendent All-Nations Teepee Village was nestled in Madison Junction, where the Madison River begins. For millennia, this historic spot hosted annual gatherings of the Nez Perce and Crow, the Blackfeet and Shoshone Bannock, the Kootenai and the Sheep Eaters.

The Teepee Village stood for five days, while tribal ambassadors from the Arapaho, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Crow, Chippewa-Cree, Eastern Shoshone, Gros-Ventre, Kootenai, Little Shell Chippewa, Northern Cheyenne, and Salish engaged with the public and with each other. Throughout their time together at the Teepee Village, the ambassadors shared traditional and personal stories, tribal histories, historic artifacts, Indigenous research projects, Native songs and dances, and of course, Indian humor. Native artists were celebrated during the event by showcasing their work within the Village, and during the evening, traditional singers and dancers as well as Native opera singers, performed for enraptured audiences who sat in lawn chairs and blankets in the open air.

The success of the All-Nations Teepee Village in 2022 was just one part of a larger movement on behalf of nonprofits, federal agencies, and tribes to reconnect Native communities to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. More meetings followed: there was a clear appetite to build on the success of the Teepee Village and continue this age-old tradition of meeting face-to-face and working towards common goals and dreams.

Yellowstone geyser erupting during teepee village celebration

Artwork in teepee village in Yellowstone

Attendees and planners of the event developed a goal: create a permanent, annual All-Nations Teepee Village that could further reconnect Tribes to this landscape, and visitors from around the world with the tribal history and present here. In the summer of 2024, after many meetings and a lot of planning, we developed a new nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing Native people back home to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It’s called Yellowstone Peoples, and our goals are to reconnect tribal communities to the Greater Yellowstone, advocate for meaningful tribal management and stewardship of the area, and push for the health and wellness of the broader ecosystem and its wildlife—especially by championing a corridor for free-roaming bison outside the park.

As the first Director of Yellowstone Peoples, I am excited to continue working with an established team of friends to build on our foundation of success and strengthen our circles of connection to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and to each other. We are a new organization, and gave careful thought to how to present our mission to the public. Our logo, for instance, utilizes Plains Sign Language to represent both ancient and modern intertribal unity. Plains Sign Language (PSL) is the world’s oldest and most sophisticated sign language, and its widespread use by 44 different Tribes across the Great Plains demonstrates an age-old culture of friendship and trade in the region. The origin of PSL cannot be traced back to a single tribal nation, and uses virtually no words, only concepts. The universal sign for the Yellowstone caldera zone is the sign for earth followed by the sign for steam: Land of Steam.

Our ancestors shared this landscape, and we aim to share this history and re-establish our connection to this land that means so much to so many people. The annual Teepee Village will sponsor one ambassador, one elder, and one tribal college intern from each respective nation in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and these core groups will create the foundation of an intergenerational and Intertribal coalition that can call Yellowstone its homebase for generations to come. Our Yellowstone Teepee Village homebase will also be a portal to the wider world for young tribal college students who seek to learn about the many career opportunities available to them in the realms of the National Park Service, higher education and research, wildland conservation, eco- and cultural tourism, and more.

Co-Stewardship and Co-Management

While tribes have had a role in some public lands or wildlife for decades, a new push over the last few years has ramped up Indigenous groups’ role in decision-making on public land all over the country. There are two important terms to know here: "co-stewardship" refers to tribes having a role, often through consultation or written agreements, on public lands. In this form of agreement, the federal government is still in general the main authority on a piece of land, but co-stewardship gives tribes a seat at the table in how it might be managed. Under “co-management,” tribes have formal decision-making authority on a piece of public land. Bears Ears National Monument, managed by the federal government along with the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni is one of the most well-known instances of this form of management. Since 2021, the federal government has signed nearly 150 co-stewardship agreements with tribes all over the country, according to a Department of the Interior report released in late 2024. Those agreements range from agreements between Everglades and Biscayne national parks with the Miccosukee Tribe to agreements around Redwood National Park with the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation.

A New Era For Public Lands

Our initiative in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is far from the only effort to re-Indigenize public land across the country. Public lands, wherever they are, are also Native lands, and Indigenous groups are working with federal and state agencies to create new and innovative partnerships. Successful examples of these partnerships include the Bears Ears National Monument, Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, and the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni—Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. These monuments and others still under review were proposed by Native communities to identify and protect public landscapes that they know are critical to maintaining cultural continuity into the future. Closer to the Yellowstone ecosystem, the Salish Kootenai, Shoshone-Bannock, and Nez Perce nations have led the way in establishing co- and full management agreements over public lands like the National Bison Range. There are dozens of other collaborative efforts underway in the U.S. to return both public and private lands to tribal nations, and they all work towards a common goal: healing and restoring lost circles of connection between Native people, non-Indians, and our shared lands.

Those of us working in the realm of decolonization are seeking personal and community healing from generations of inherited trauma. To heal both ourselves and our communities, we are teaching tribal youth about the proud history of their ancestors on those lands as an essential part of bridging the intellectual divide between the pre-colonial era and the modern day. Healing from historic trauma first requires learning about our culture and history on the landscape, then going to the landscape to rematriate ourselves to our place of origin, and finally sharing the landscape with others. In sharing the landscape with others, we share not only space, but also stories, perspectives, and insights. These small but profound events are how we use public lands to decolonize ourselves emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Through this process of intentionally reconnecting with the land, we make meaning of our relationships with the place over time, and we make medicine to heal ourselves and share with the world.

The experience of growing up on an Indian Reservation in Montana can be culturally insulating and geographically isolating, so bridging Native youth to elders in homelands in Yellowstone provides another opportunity for them to see outside their communities and create positive social, emotional, and intellectual connections to each other and the natural world. Reservation boundaries may be arbitrary and invisible, but they are very real. They have worked to separate generations of Native people from each other and from our sacred places that are sometimes just down the road in one sense, but worlds away in another.

Although myself and several others in Yellowstone Peoples have attained advanced degrees in Native American Studies, we agree that the most authentic and sophisticated way to learn about Indigenous people and their ways of life is to master the oral traditions that are tied so closely to the landscape. These oral traditions embody ideals of multiculturalism, ceremonialism, and ecological sustainability. Colonial powers sought to disintegrate and ethnically cleanse tribal nations from lands that we now call public, and in many ways they succeeded: most visitors to places like Yellowstone and Grand Teton or National Forests all over the country have no idea of our history there—or our present connection.

Now the time has come to honor and celebrate Indigenous people around the globe and learn from the connection they have had to land long before White settlers arrived. Contemporary Native people are not seeking to return to the old days and old ways; they are moving forward guided by traditional values and a flair for the modern world. Now is the time for Indigenous people to come together in places like Yellowstone—and public land all over the nation—so that we can teach ourselves and the world about what it means to be Native and resilient in the 21st Century.

Dr. Shane Doyle (Apsáalooke) is the director of Yellowstone Peoples. Doyle is also an independent contractor who acts as a cultural consultant, public lands advocate, tribal liaison and professional scholar and researcher throughout Montana and across the nation.