It's long been said that you should take only photographs and leave only footprints when you visit a national park. Well, a dispute over whether Native Americans can legally collect plants in the parks has prompted a group to call for a federal investigation into whether the National Park Service is looking the other way.
"In clear defiance of regulations, the Park Service has adopted a 'don't ask, don't tell' posture on Indian removal of plants," argues Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
To support his position, Mr. Ruch points to a legal opinion by the Interior Office of the Solicitor from 1978 underlining that the Park Service is legally required to protect park resources absent an explicit congressional waiver.
"Any decision made by the Park Service to completely reverse course on protecting plants has direct implications for park wildlife, minerals and cultural artifacts," he said. "As with plants, a number of tribes still claim hunting or other gathering rights on a score of iconic national parks."
According to PEER, Park Service Director Jon Jarvis cares little for the regulation, and during a meeting with Cherokee tribal officials in July voiced opposition to a rule that tribal members could not collect ramps, a type of wild onion, from Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
While a release from PEER said that the organization has not been able to obtain from the Park Service "any evidence that the complicated process for regulatory rewrite has even begun," Park Service spokesman David Barna told the Traveler on Tuesday that the process to change the regulations has begun.
"NPS has initiated the consultation process by conducting six meetings with tribes and parks held from mid-May to mid-June, 2010. The current regulation was discussed, and tribal perspectives were sought concerning how the regulation might be revised to permit park superintendents and Indian tribes to enter into agreements to gather plants and minerals for traditional uses," said Mr. Barna. "NPS is reviewing tribal comments and will soon begin drafting a new regulation in accordance with established processes, including compliance with NEPA and public review.
"The regulation would limit gathering to members of federally recognized tribes and to the specific parks with which the tribe or tribes have traditional associations," he added. "These park-specific agreements would specify any necessary limitations, for example, who may be allowed to gather, where, when, and how gathering may be allowed, and in what quantities. All agreements would be subject to a determination under the National Environmental Policy Act of no significant impact to park resources and values, and would also require compliance all other applicable laws."
Comments
The taking of plants from our National Parks is a problem throughout the country. The depletion of native plant populations by a wide range of violators feeding growing markets compounds the situation. Illegal aliens are even being brought into the Southern Appalachians specifically to harvest native plants from National Parks and Forests.
This higher level of demand and stress on plant populations results in Native American gathering contributing to degradation that was not apparent in the past.
The answer lies in higher levels of protection for plant populations and habitat. Public education and stricter enforcement of regulations is not possible without financial support for hiring, training, and equipping park rangers to do job.
You can learn more about "Plant Poaching" in my book, "A Park Ranger's Life: Thirty Two Years Protecting Our National Parks." I have also written more extensively on this topic at the blog: www.aparkrangerslife.blogspot.com.
Bruce--
To what extent is there overlap between the species collected by Native Americans and the species commercially poached or threatened & endangered species?
I'm well aware of commercial plant poaching in BLRI and GRSM, including the trend toward large-scale operations that drop off undocumented/illegal aliens at the side of the road to harvest massive amounts of at least 3 commercially valuable species in ways that wipe out entire populations, as opposed to the older, more sustainable harvest approaches to poaching especially ginsing, where the poachers would be revisiting the patches they knew about and thus left smaller plants behind to grow up. I'm also well aware of western plant poaching, especially of rare (and not-so-rare) cacti. I agree 100% with your statement of the need for more education & enforcement and support for rangers.
However, I'm not aware of any Native American plant gathering that involves collecting and selling commercially valuable species, or that involves threatened and endangered species. There likely are some examples (is ginsing collected by the Cherokees?), but could you provide any others? The collections for traditional / ceremonial uses I'm aware of (mostly from the west) are not of rare or commercially-targeted species.
The only collecting I know of is for ceremonial purposes, not for commercial sales. In that case I see nothing wrong with it. We kicked them out of their native lands for the creation of our parks, why not allow them back in to collect from sacred areas? The Hopi and other pueblo nations collect juniper branches in Mesa Verde for their dances and in turn share those dances with the visitors. Often parks are the only place where they can get the items they need due to all the development in other areas. Let them collect!
I always found it strange that plant collection is (usually) prohibited in national parks while fishing is permitted, even encouraged. In most parks I can, within state and federal law, catch and retain a fish, but if I pick a fiddle head...
I realize this may be off of the topic of Native American rights, but I do think PEER should also look at the hypocrisy of fishing in national parks. Is fishing really necessary to promote visitation to the parks like it was in the early 20th century?
Ike--
I'm not sure PEER is needed to cast a spotlight on fishing in National parks.
In many parks, the fish you catch & eat aren't native wildlife. Until recently many big western parks stocked big non-native hatchery trout for visitors to (easily) catch & eat, without concern for the native fish or aquatic ecosystem. There's a bill to force NPS to continue stocking lower elevation lakes in North Cascades (several NPT articles here). Lake Trout in Yellowstone Lake are another huge management issue (where, alas, visitors can't catch them fast enough to put a dent in the population). Cause & effect work in convoluted ways. Originally, fishing was a priority visitor usage, so fish were planted. Now, with non-native fish, fishing is permitted.
My sense is that in many recreation areas and seashores (e.g., Cape Hatteras) and parks like Everglades or Biscayne with oceans or big reservoirs, fishing will continue (and in my opinion probably should continue), but in big western mountainous parks, fishing is already moving to barbless flies and catch & release in streams and no stocking of small lakes, and complete closures and eradication of non-native fish where ecosystems otherwise would be harmed.
I remember catching a limit of 5 12" trout in Yellowstone in the Gardner River just across the road from the campground (presumably Indian Creek) when I was 10 (probably a worm & a bobber, I wasn't coordinated enough to fly fish back then), and my dad frying them up for dinner. A big wet stinky bear wandered through the campground, so my dad tossed the fish from the pan onto the ground as far away from our tent as he could. That's a great memory (even not getting to eat the fish), but looking back, how many things were wrong with that picture?! It's a very different world today. We understand more about ecological cascades and consequences, and the levels of visitation & usage are so much higher, and many of the practices in parks weren't sustainable in the long term even at the levels of the 60s & 70s.