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For Oregon tribes, retracing the Rogue River Trail of Tears helps heal old wounds

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Saturday, May 25, 2024

Forged by an explosive volcanic eruption in southwest Oregon, Table Rocks took their shape over millions of years, carved by the steady waters of the Rogue River, which now flows more than 800 feet below the rim.Every autumn, as temperatures drop and rainclouds return, acorns fall from oak trees that surround the pair of flat-topped mesas. The return of the acorns precedes the return of Native peoples, who gather the bitter nuts, grind them up and turn them into a nutritious mush – a practice that goes back millennia.In recent years, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians have created opportunities for members to reforge connections to the lands their ancestors knew intimately. Their removal from this place in 1856, an event some historians call the Rogue River Trail of Tears, has become a road map that many tribal members are retracing into the future.In the fall, the two tribes come together to gather acorns at an event called Acorn Camp in southwest Oregon. This June, they will host their first joint Camas Camp, where they will harvest camas lilies and other spring plants. And, just after Memorial Day Weekend, the Siletz tribe will host its annual Run to the Rogue marathon, a 216-mile relay down the coastline and up the Rogue River.Greg Archuleta, cultural policy analyst with the Grand Ronde tribe, said the current focus is on refamiliarizing tribal members with the places of their ancestors, as well as passing down practices that have survived for generations.“Our primary focus right now is really to get tribal members out on the landscape,” Archuleta said. “It’s all about presence.”That presence has also created a new sense of home for many Indigenous families who have spent generations living elsewhere – on reservations far away, in bigger cities or out of the region altogether.“It’s kind of like meeting a relative that you’ve heard about for a long time but never had a chance to meet,” Robert Kentta, tribal council member for the Siletz tribe, said of returning to southwest Oregon. “That connection is still there.”A popular hiking trail leads up to and around Upper Table Rock, a volcanic plateau near Medford in southern Oregon.Jamie Hale/The OregonianRobert Kentta, tribal council member for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, stands on former reservation land that once belonged to his great-grandfather, who was removed from southwest Oregon in 1856. Jamie Hale/The OregonianTRAUMA AT TABLE ROCKSFor tribal members, revisiting Table Rocks isn’t always easy. There is trauma there, buried in the ground, filling the recesses of the hard, volcanic rock.At the start of the 19th century, the region was home to the Takelma, Shastan and Athabaskan peoples who had lived in the area for untold generations. But it was also becoming home to a growing number of non-Indigenous settlers. The first to arrive, French fur trappers called the Indigenous people in the region “rogues,” a derogatory nickname that was often used as a justification for violence, according to historian Gray Whaley in “Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee.”When gold miners showed up in 1849, they treated the “rogues” as a threat, and waged an open campaign of extermination, according to historical documents. That first year, a militia killed 60 Indigenous people after allegedly finding an Indigenous man “secreted” in a white woman’s home, according to Whaley. Tribal historians say their ancestors suffered violence both casual and organized, by both local militias and the U.S. Army.“Pretty much the whole philosophy was to exterminate the Indians,” Archuleta said. “It was something that was pretty extreme during that time.”In 1853, many of the Rogue River peoples gathered at Table Rocks to sign a treaty with the U.S. government in which they agreed to cede the lands in exchange for a permanent reservation, where they might be safe. Violence from militias continued during the treaty negotiations, an attempt to derail the process, tribal historians said. After signing the treaty, the people were removed to a temporary reservation at Table Rocks, where hardships continued.Being forced to remain in one location kept the Rogue River peoples from their traditionally mobile practices of gathering, hunting and creating seasonal homes, resulting in starvation in addition to disease and continued attacks, according to historians. Those who left the reservation were often hunted down and killed by local militias.The situation came to a head in 1855, when the deaths of two packers were blamed on Indigenous men. A white militia seeking to avenge the deaths left under the cover of darkness to the Table Rock Reservation, where they killed about 25 people sleeping by the banks of the river, according to historical accounts. As they left, the militiamen killed another 50 to 80 Indigenous people in the area, most of whom were women and children.The violence was particularly brutal. One witness recalled seeing two elderly women who were bashed to death with clubs and a child who was “taken by the heels and its brains dashed out against a tree.” According to Whaley, one attacker later said that while the extermination made him feel bad, “the understanding was that [the Indians] were all to be killed. So we did that work.”In response to the attacks, a group of Indigenous leaders retaliated with raids on homesteads and settlements. In less than a year, roughly 250 Indigenous people were killed, along with some 50 non-Indigenous soldiers and 44 civilians, according to historical records.Table Rocks are a pair of volcanic mesas above the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.Jamie Hale/The OregonianTravis Stewart, director of the Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde, stands outside a plankhouse named achaf-hammi.Jamie Hale/The OregonianA winter landscape at Fern Ridge Lake, a reservoir on the Long Tom River outside Eugene that is on the historic pathway of the Rogue River Trail of Tears.Jamie Hale/The OregonianTribal members have been holding those horrific memories for generations.“We have these historical legal traumas as well as physical and emotional and spiritual traumas,” which metastasized into issues like substance abuse and domestic violence, Kentta said. “We often hear about elders who don’t want to be hugged.”Kentta’s great-grandfather was 7 or 8 years old when his people were removed from their homelands. After the boy’s father was killed, his mother left him with his paternal grandparents while she left to find her family. She never returned. The boy left southwest Oregon as an orphan.In February 1856, amid the fighting, U.S. soldiers led by Bureau of Indian Affairs agent George Ambrose moved 325 people by foot from the Table Rocks Reservation to a place that would become the Grand Ronde Reservation, 263 miles away. The 33-day journey went over mountains and along rivers, north through the Willamette Valley, roughly following the future Interstate 5 corridor, and up into the Coast Range.Aside from the rugged environment, winter weather and generally poor conditions, the captive travelers also faced the constant threat of violence from militiamen stalking the group. Ambrose, who apprehended one man, eventually dissuaded militias from murdering members of the group, though casualties still mounted. According to Ambrose’s journal, the journey saw eight deaths among the captives – as well as eight births.The Rogue River people who chose to stay and fight against removal held out until that summer, eventually surrendering after brutal losses. The surviving holdouts were taken to both the Grand Ronde and Siletz/Coast reservations, according to tribal historians.Despite generations of oppression and the attempted genocide of a people, leaders in the Grand Ronde and Siletz tribes said they prefer a frame of resilience.“There’s pride in the resilience of our ancestors,” Kentta said. “And some of it’s probably a stroke of luck that they didn’t get swept away.”A view of Spirit Mountain from Fort Yamhill State Heritage Area in Grand Ronde. Jamie Hale/The OregonianChris Mercier, vice chair of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde tribal council, stands in the Uyxat Powwow Grounds at the Grand Ronde Community. Jamie Hale/The OregonianHOMECOMINGIn the Grand Ronde Community, just a mile down the road from the tribe’s Spirit Mountain Casino, is a quiet place: the Uyxat Powwow Grounds, home to an outdoor arena lined with turf and a large ceremonial plankhouse named achaf-hammi.Outside the plankhouse is a tall gray pole carved from a single western redcedar tree, marking this place as the end of the Rogue River Trail of Tears.Travis Stewart, director of the tribe’s Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center, created the pole with a carving group for the plankhouse’s dedication in 2010. Standing at the base of the roughly 26-foot pole, he pointed out the headman at the top and coyote running down either side. The length of the pole is decorated with five tiers of faces representing five treaties signed by the tribe, he said, each face crying a stream of tears.Those tears are not just from grief, Stewart explained, “they’re bringing their generational knowledge to this place and it’s coming out into the ground here.”Traditional practices like carving and basket weaving, as well as harvesting plants for food and medicine, are now representations of the resiliency of Indigenous people throughout generations of hardship, Stewart said. The pole, the plankhouse, and events like Acorn Camp and Camas Camp are proof that this generational knowledge still exists.“There was a lot of effort and sacrifice on behalf of those old people that made tough decisions ultimately in order to preserve that (knowledge),” Stewart said. “It’s a responsibility of ours to continue that.”After the removal from southwest Oregon, the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations became home to more Indigenous survivors, people from neighboring lands who spoke different languages, ate different food and practiced their own customs. At first, most people kept to their own (going so far as to organize themselves geographically), according to tribal historians, but as the U.S. Government shrank the reservations – Siletz from 1.1 million acres to nearly 17,000 today, Grand Ronde from 61,000 acres to 11,500 today – the people came together, creating new tribal communities.“We’ve made our footprint here,” said Chris Mercier, vice chair of the Grand Ronde tribal council. “It wasn’t under the best circumstances that the tribal people were ushered up here, but I like the fact that we’ve established this community, one that’s been existing for over 150 years now.”Of the 5,700 enrolled members of the Grand Ronde tribe, only about 1,200 today live in or around Grand Ronde, Mercier said. But those who do enjoy a tight-knit community, where the past, present and future of the tribe seem to collide at every turn.The Rogue River runs through Valley of the Rogue State Park near Grants Pass in southern Oregon. Jamie Hale/The OregonianBuddy Lane, cultural resources manager for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, stands on the banks of the Siletz River down the road from the tribe’s headquarters.Jamie Hale/The OregonianThe Siletz River flows through the Coast Range near the Siletz Reservation. Jamie Hale/The OregonianFor several generations after removal, people didn’t want to directly confront the traumas of the past, tribal leaders said. That was in large part due to ongoing struggles, including being forced to send their children to boarding schools, which were rampant with abuse, and the 1954 termination of western Oregon tribes, during which the government severed all federal support.Only in the past few decades have the tribes directly faced the past, they said, seeking healing through conversation, support and returning to places of tragedy.In the mid 1990s, the Siletz tribe started Run to the Rogue, in which tribal members run and walk their way down the coastline, then up the Rogue River to a place called Oak Flat, about 50 miles from Table Rocks, where in 1856 several bands of the tribe’s ancestors surrendered to the U.S. Army.Buddy Lane, cultural resources manager for the tribe, has been organizing the event since 2012. He said runners of all abilities participate to different degrees. The tribe’s youngest members take the first mile in Siletz, and the elders take the final mile to Oak Flat. The strongest runners take the hardest miles along U.S. 101 at Cape Perpetua, a stretch Lane has done before.“The trek is a lot easier than it was for our ancestors,” Lane said.Many tribal members follow runners along the route, supporting their effort and finding ways to reconnect with their roots, he said. Some pay visits to the lands where their families once lived, or gather in parks, staying up late into the night as runners come and go.“It’s an emotionally charged event,” Lane said. “We’re not celebrating something, but we’re remembering things and making sure those folks with stories are not forgotten.”The relay, along with the Acorn Camp and Camas Camp, represents a new generation of tribal members who are actively connecting with their past through new experiences in the present, they said. The fact that these homecoming events all include a return trip back home – to Siletz, Grand Ronde and other places – underlines a complex question: What is “home” to a displaced people?For Kentta, who has lived his whole life in Siletz and whose ancestors are from the Applegate Valley as well as Finland, southwest Oregon is like a home away from home.“Whenever I’m in the Rogue Valley it’s kind of an emotional feeling of like a connection, even though I didn’t grow up there,” he said. “It’s an ancestral home rather than my current home.”Archuleta grew up primarily in east Portland and traces his ancestry to the Willamette Tumwater, Clackamas Chinook, Cascades Chinook, Santiam Kalapooia, Shasta and Rogue River peoples. He has family ties to the Warm Springs, Yakama, Siletz and Klamath tribes. “Pretty much all of western Oregon” is home, he said.“It’s really each person, each family’s perspective of how they see it,” he said.While many other places may be home, for these sister tribes, there’s still something special about the land in southwest Oregon. Table Rocks has always been an important place, a site of harvest and ritual, as well as the setting of creation stories, tribal historians said. Today, for non-Indigenous people, Lower Table Rock and Upper Table Rock are primarily places for recreation and conservation, managed by the Bureau of Land Management and environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy.The area is home to more than 340 species of plants and 70 animals, including the tiny dwarf-wooly meadowfoam wildflower, which grows nowhere else in the world, as well as a threatened species of fairy shrimp, which hatches in vernal pools that form in the rocky soil every winter.For the descendants of the Takelma, Shastan and Athabaskan people, it is also once again becoming a place to build community, while communing with a landscape that holds a rich and complicated history.“Some of these activities that we’re doing is to bring back healing, bring back families together, and to connect to the landscape, and to continue that stewardship and responsibility to the land,” Archuleta said. “Just being able to fish in a place where your ancestor fished or gathered … it’s restoring what’s always been there, and what’s always been in our hearts and minds.”--Jamie Hale covers travel and the outdoors and co-hosts the Peak Northwest podcast. Reach him at 503-294-4077, jhale@oregonian.com or @HaleJamesB.Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

The forced removal of Indigenous people from the Rogue River Valley still resonates in Oregon.

Forged by an explosive volcanic eruption in southwest Oregon, Table Rocks took their shape over millions of years, carved by the steady waters of the Rogue River, which now flows more than 800 feet below the rim.

Every autumn, as temperatures drop and rainclouds return, acorns fall from oak trees that surround the pair of flat-topped mesas. The return of the acorns precedes the return of Native peoples, who gather the bitter nuts, grind them up and turn them into a nutritious mush – a practice that goes back millennia.

In recent years, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians have created opportunities for members to reforge connections to the lands their ancestors knew intimately. Their removal from this place in 1856, an event some historians call the Rogue River Trail of Tears, has become a road map that many tribal members are retracing into the future.

In the fall, the two tribes come together to gather acorns at an event called Acorn Camp in southwest Oregon. This June, they will host their first joint Camas Camp, where they will harvest camas lilies and other spring plants. And, just after Memorial Day Weekend, the Siletz tribe will host its annual Run to the Rogue marathon, a 216-mile relay down the coastline and up the Rogue River.

Greg Archuleta, cultural policy analyst with the Grand Ronde tribe, said the current focus is on refamiliarizing tribal members with the places of their ancestors, as well as passing down practices that have survived for generations.

“Our primary focus right now is really to get tribal members out on the landscape,” Archuleta said. “It’s all about presence.”

That presence has also created a new sense of home for many Indigenous families who have spent generations living elsewhere – on reservations far away, in bigger cities or out of the region altogether.

“It’s kind of like meeting a relative that you’ve heard about for a long time but never had a chance to meet,” Robert Kentta, tribal council member for the Siletz tribe, said of returning to southwest Oregon. “That connection is still there.”

Upper Table Rock

A popular hiking trail leads up to and around Upper Table Rock, a volcanic plateau near Medford in southern Oregon.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Rogue River Trail of Tears

Robert Kentta, tribal council member for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, stands on former reservation land that once belonged to his great-grandfather, who was removed from southwest Oregon in 1856. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

TRAUMA AT TABLE ROCKS

For tribal members, revisiting Table Rocks isn’t always easy. There is trauma there, buried in the ground, filling the recesses of the hard, volcanic rock.

At the start of the 19th century, the region was home to the Takelma, Shastan and Athabaskan peoples who had lived in the area for untold generations. But it was also becoming home to a growing number of non-Indigenous settlers. The first to arrive, French fur trappers called the Indigenous people in the region “rogues,” a derogatory nickname that was often used as a justification for violence, according to historian Gray Whaley in “Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee.”

When gold miners showed up in 1849, they treated the “rogues” as a threat, and waged an open campaign of extermination, according to historical documents. That first year, a militia killed 60 Indigenous people after allegedly finding an Indigenous man “secreted” in a white woman’s home, according to Whaley. Tribal historians say their ancestors suffered violence both casual and organized, by both local militias and the U.S. Army.

“Pretty much the whole philosophy was to exterminate the Indians,” Archuleta said. “It was something that was pretty extreme during that time.”

In 1853, many of the Rogue River peoples gathered at Table Rocks to sign a treaty with the U.S. government in which they agreed to cede the lands in exchange for a permanent reservation, where they might be safe. Violence from militias continued during the treaty negotiations, an attempt to derail the process, tribal historians said. After signing the treaty, the people were removed to a temporary reservation at Table Rocks, where hardships continued.

Being forced to remain in one location kept the Rogue River peoples from their traditionally mobile practices of gathering, hunting and creating seasonal homes, resulting in starvation in addition to disease and continued attacks, according to historians. Those who left the reservation were often hunted down and killed by local militias.

The situation came to a head in 1855, when the deaths of two packers were blamed on Indigenous men. A white militia seeking to avenge the deaths left under the cover of darkness to the Table Rock Reservation, where they killed about 25 people sleeping by the banks of the river, according to historical accounts. As they left, the militiamen killed another 50 to 80 Indigenous people in the area, most of whom were women and children.

The violence was particularly brutal. One witness recalled seeing two elderly women who were bashed to death with clubs and a child who was “taken by the heels and its brains dashed out against a tree.” According to Whaley, one attacker later said that while the extermination made him feel bad, “the understanding was that [the Indians] were all to be killed. So we did that work.”

In response to the attacks, a group of Indigenous leaders retaliated with raids on homesteads and settlements. In less than a year, roughly 250 Indigenous people were killed, along with some 50 non-Indigenous soldiers and 44 civilians, according to historical records.

Upper Table Rock

Table Rocks are a pair of volcanic mesas above the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Rogue River Trail of Tears

Travis Stewart, director of the Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde, stands outside a plankhouse named achaf-hammi.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Rogue River Trail of Tears

A winter landscape at Fern Ridge Lake, a reservoir on the Long Tom River outside Eugene that is on the historic pathway of the Rogue River Trail of Tears.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Tribal members have been holding those horrific memories for generations.

“We have these historical legal traumas as well as physical and emotional and spiritual traumas,” which metastasized into issues like substance abuse and domestic violence, Kentta said. “We often hear about elders who don’t want to be hugged.”

Kentta’s great-grandfather was 7 or 8 years old when his people were removed from their homelands. After the boy’s father was killed, his mother left him with his paternal grandparents while she left to find her family. She never returned. The boy left southwest Oregon as an orphan.

In February 1856, amid the fighting, U.S. soldiers led by Bureau of Indian Affairs agent George Ambrose moved 325 people by foot from the Table Rocks Reservation to a place that would become the Grand Ronde Reservation, 263 miles away. The 33-day journey went over mountains and along rivers, north through the Willamette Valley, roughly following the future Interstate 5 corridor, and up into the Coast Range.

Aside from the rugged environment, winter weather and generally poor conditions, the captive travelers also faced the constant threat of violence from militiamen stalking the group. Ambrose, who apprehended one man, eventually dissuaded militias from murdering members of the group, though casualties still mounted. According to Ambrose’s journal, the journey saw eight deaths among the captives – as well as eight births.

The Rogue River people who chose to stay and fight against removal held out until that summer, eventually surrendering after brutal losses. The surviving holdouts were taken to both the Grand Ronde and Siletz/Coast reservations, according to tribal historians.

Despite generations of oppression and the attempted genocide of a people, leaders in the Grand Ronde and Siletz tribes said they prefer a frame of resilience.

“There’s pride in the resilience of our ancestors,” Kentta said. “And some of it’s probably a stroke of luck that they didn’t get swept away.”

Rogue River Trail of Tears

A view of Spirit Mountain from Fort Yamhill State Heritage Area in Grand Ronde. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Rogue River Trail of Tears

Chris Mercier, vice chair of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde tribal council, stands in the Uyxat Powwow Grounds at the Grand Ronde Community. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

HOMECOMING

In the Grand Ronde Community, just a mile down the road from the tribe’s Spirit Mountain Casino, is a quiet place: the Uyxat Powwow Grounds, home to an outdoor arena lined with turf and a large ceremonial plankhouse named achaf-hammi.

Outside the plankhouse is a tall gray pole carved from a single western redcedar tree, marking this place as the end of the Rogue River Trail of Tears.

Travis Stewart, director of the tribe’s Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center, created the pole with a carving group for the plankhouse’s dedication in 2010. Standing at the base of the roughly 26-foot pole, he pointed out the headman at the top and coyote running down either side. The length of the pole is decorated with five tiers of faces representing five treaties signed by the tribe, he said, each face crying a stream of tears.

Those tears are not just from grief, Stewart explained, “they’re bringing their generational knowledge to this place and it’s coming out into the ground here.”

Traditional practices like carving and basket weaving, as well as harvesting plants for food and medicine, are now representations of the resiliency of Indigenous people throughout generations of hardship, Stewart said. The pole, the plankhouse, and events like Acorn Camp and Camas Camp are proof that this generational knowledge still exists.

“There was a lot of effort and sacrifice on behalf of those old people that made tough decisions ultimately in order to preserve that (knowledge),” Stewart said. “It’s a responsibility of ours to continue that.”

After the removal from southwest Oregon, the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations became home to more Indigenous survivors, people from neighboring lands who spoke different languages, ate different food and practiced their own customs. At first, most people kept to their own (going so far as to organize themselves geographically), according to tribal historians, but as the U.S. Government shrank the reservations – Siletz from 1.1 million acres to nearly 17,000 today, Grand Ronde from 61,000 acres to 11,500 today – the people came together, creating new tribal communities.

“We’ve made our footprint here,” said Chris Mercier, vice chair of the Grand Ronde tribal council. “It wasn’t under the best circumstances that the tribal people were ushered up here, but I like the fact that we’ve established this community, one that’s been existing for over 150 years now.”

Of the 5,700 enrolled members of the Grand Ronde tribe, only about 1,200 today live in or around Grand Ronde, Mercier said. But those who do enjoy a tight-knit community, where the past, present and future of the tribe seem to collide at every turn.

Valley of the Rogue

The Rogue River runs through Valley of the Rogue State Park near Grants Pass in southern Oregon. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Rogue River Trail of Tears

Buddy Lane, cultural resources manager for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, stands on the banks of the Siletz River down the road from the tribe’s headquarters.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Rogue River Trail of Tears

The Siletz River flows through the Coast Range near the Siletz Reservation. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

For several generations after removal, people didn’t want to directly confront the traumas of the past, tribal leaders said. That was in large part due to ongoing struggles, including being forced to send their children to boarding schools, which were rampant with abuse, and the 1954 termination of western Oregon tribes, during which the government severed all federal support.

Only in the past few decades have the tribes directly faced the past, they said, seeking healing through conversation, support and returning to places of tragedy.

In the mid 1990s, the Siletz tribe started Run to the Rogue, in which tribal members run and walk their way down the coastline, then up the Rogue River to a place called Oak Flat, about 50 miles from Table Rocks, where in 1856 several bands of the tribe’s ancestors surrendered to the U.S. Army.

Buddy Lane, cultural resources manager for the tribe, has been organizing the event since 2012. He said runners of all abilities participate to different degrees. The tribe’s youngest members take the first mile in Siletz, and the elders take the final mile to Oak Flat. The strongest runners take the hardest miles along U.S. 101 at Cape Perpetua, a stretch Lane has done before.

“The trek is a lot easier than it was for our ancestors,” Lane said.

Many tribal members follow runners along the route, supporting their effort and finding ways to reconnect with their roots, he said. Some pay visits to the lands where their families once lived, or gather in parks, staying up late into the night as runners come and go.

“It’s an emotionally charged event,” Lane said. “We’re not celebrating something, but we’re remembering things and making sure those folks with stories are not forgotten.”

The relay, along with the Acorn Camp and Camas Camp, represents a new generation of tribal members who are actively connecting with their past through new experiences in the present, they said. The fact that these homecoming events all include a return trip back home – to Siletz, Grand Ronde and other places – underlines a complex question: What is “home” to a displaced people?

For Kentta, who has lived his whole life in Siletz and whose ancestors are from the Applegate Valley as well as Finland, southwest Oregon is like a home away from home.

“Whenever I’m in the Rogue Valley it’s kind of an emotional feeling of like a connection, even though I didn’t grow up there,” he said. “It’s an ancestral home rather than my current home.”

Archuleta grew up primarily in east Portland and traces his ancestry to the Willamette Tumwater, Clackamas Chinook, Cascades Chinook, Santiam Kalapooia, Shasta and Rogue River peoples. He has family ties to the Warm Springs, Yakama, Siletz and Klamath tribes. “Pretty much all of western Oregon” is home, he said.

“It’s really each person, each family’s perspective of how they see it,” he said.

While many other places may be home, for these sister tribes, there’s still something special about the land in southwest Oregon. Table Rocks has always been an important place, a site of harvest and ritual, as well as the setting of creation stories, tribal historians said. Today, for non-Indigenous people, Lower Table Rock and Upper Table Rock are primarily places for recreation and conservation, managed by the Bureau of Land Management and environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy.

The area is home to more than 340 species of plants and 70 animals, including the tiny dwarf-wooly meadowfoam wildflower, which grows nowhere else in the world, as well as a threatened species of fairy shrimp, which hatches in vernal pools that form in the rocky soil every winter.

For the descendants of the Takelma, Shastan and Athabaskan people, it is also once again becoming a place to build community, while communing with a landscape that holds a rich and complicated history.

“Some of these activities that we’re doing is to bring back healing, bring back families together, and to connect to the landscape, and to continue that stewardship and responsibility to the land,” Archuleta said. “Just being able to fish in a place where your ancestor fished or gathered … it’s restoring what’s always been there, and what’s always been in our hearts and minds.”

--Jamie Hale covers travel and the outdoors and co-hosts the Peak Northwest podcast. Reach him at 503-294-4077, jhale@oregonian.com or @HaleJamesB.

Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

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Oregon Indigenous farm navigating uncertainty over federal grants

One federal grant awarded to the farm was recently restored but two others are still on hold.

A few miles south of Salem, the Elderberry Wisdom Farm uses generations of traditional knowledge to grow native plants, restore habitats and train Indigenous adults and other underrepresented students for careers in agriculture. The six-year-old farm has received much of its funding through state and federal grants — but a farm founded on principles of equity and sustainability is a target for cuts under the Trump administration. As she led U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Oregon, on a tour of the farm Wednesday, founder Rose High Bear half-jokingly asked if she could still use the words “equity” and “climate,” both terms Trump and his team have disparaged and used as keywords to find disfavored programs and policies. One $750,000 grant, awarded to the farm and community partners to expand tree canopies, was temporarily frozen but restored as of last week, following a letter from Salinas. Two other federal grants meant for workforce development are still on hold. “We need to restore the planet, and this is one way to do it,” Salinas said. “I keep saying, let’s bring all solutions to the table. This is just one, but if I can write a letter and unfreeze funds, I’m going to do it.” High Bear, an Alaska Native of Deg Hitʼan and Inupiat descent, founded the farm in 2019 after retiring as executive director of Wisdom of the Elders, a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving and sharing Indigenous history. She said the work is spiritual, and that she trusts ancestors will help guide the farm’s workers to accomplish their task of restoring the earth and raising awareness of traditional ecological knowledge. “We have no doubt in our mind that what we’re doing is right,” High Bear said. “If a government doesn’t necessarily believe in it, that doesn’t mean they’re going to stop us from doing our work — no matter what, we’re going to accomplish it.”Right now, much of the work consists of developing a native tree nursery, with Willamette Valley ponderosa pines, as well as firs and other pines native to the region. About 1,000 of those trees, as well as companion shrubs and pollinator ground cover plants, will be planted in areas of Salem that lack tree canopies. The farm will work with local high school students, as well as its adult interns, on the project. Natural shade from tree canopies helps cool the air and reduce air pollution. Nearby trees also increase home values and help prevent stormwater runoff. The farm will also feature a garden planted with the “three sisters” — maize, beans and squash — growing together. Hopi corn will provide a natural trellis for the Cherokee Trail of Tears beans, which convert nitrogen in the air to soil nitrates. Leaves of the summer and winter squash that make up the lower level provide shade, suppress weeds and retain soil moisture. The farm doesn’t use pesticides. Instead, workers manually remove most pests — and are resigned to some others, including deer who wander through nibbling on plants. “This is our oldest grandmother here, Mother Earth, and we’re not going to put poison on her just to get rid of our new neighbors,” High Bear said. Dawn Lowe, an Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge instructor of Hawaiian, Apache, Cherokee, and Mohawk descent, told Salinas the farm could always use more grant money to expand its work. “There’s a lot that we want to be able to achieve in the crisis we’re living through,” Lowe said. Each day at the farm includes some classtime, with videos or reading, and a discussion about a different topic. On Wednesday, that topic was seeds — saving, germinating and choosing them. Then interns spend time working with plants, including transplanting native pines and planting an elderberry forest heading up the hill.For Joaquin Ocaña, interning at the Elderberry Wisdom Farm is part of connecting with his heritage. On his father’s side, Ocaña is descended from the Kaqchikel people, an Indigenous Maya group from the highlands of Guatemala. Trying to connect to that side of his identity over the past few years led Ocaña to farming and spirituality, but feeling that connection is still a work in progress, Ocaña said. “I’ve never actually been to the place where my people are from, so I think that part is kind of lacking for now,” he said. “I’m still very young and figuring it out, but there are some things that as an individual that you can pay attention to and feel. Those can be my family guiding me and helping me along the way.”Intern Amanda Puitiza, an Oregon State University graduate student completing her Ph.D. in animal sciences, said she learned more about ecology and traditional practices at the farm than she did through her classes or prior work. She grew up in New York, and on the East Coast she said there wasn’t as much discussion about traditional practices outside of specific communities. “I’m really happy to get another perspective on how we’re protecting the environment or the ecosystem, trying to make it healthier,” Puitiza said. “I think it makes me a better learner and teacher in general, just to have more perspectives.” C.J. Senn, an enrolled member of the Umatilla Tribe, pivoted from 13 years working as a pastry chef to finishing her double major in environmental studies and science at Portland State University. After graduation, she’ll join her tribe working on huckleberry genealogy. The most valuable thing Senn has learned through interning at the Elderberry Wisdom Farm, and that she hopes to continue working on, is how to relate to plants and animals. “It’s really just about being a part of it, rather than trying to manipulate it,” Senn said. -- Julia Shumway, Oregon Capital ChronicleThe Oregon Capital Chronicle, founded in 2021, is a nonprofit news organization that focuses on Oregon state government, politics and policy.

Indigenous river campaigner from Peru wins prestigious Goldman prize

Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari led a successful legal battle to protect the Marañon River in the Peruvian AmazonPrize recognises seven activists fighting corporate powerAn Indigenous campaigner and women’s leader from the Peruvian Amazon has been awarded the prestigious Goldman prize for environmental activists, after leading a successful legal campaign that led to the river where her people, the Kukama, live being granted legal personhood.Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 57, from the village of Shapajila on the Marañon River, led the Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana (HKK) women’s association, supported by lawyers from Peru’s Legal Defence Institute, in a campaign to protect the river. After three years, judges in Loreto, Peru’s largest Amazon region, ruled in March 2024 that the Marañon had the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination, respecting an Indigenous worldview that regards a river as a living entity. Continue reading...

An Indigenous campaigner and women’s leader from the Peruvian Amazon has been awarded the prestigious Goldman prize for environmental activists, after leading a successful legal campaign that led to the river where her people, the Kukama, live being granted legal personhood.Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 57, from the village of Shapajila on the Marañon River, led the Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana (HKK) women’s association, supported by lawyers from Peru’s Legal Defence Institute, in a campaign to protect the river. After three years, judges in Loreto, Peru’s largest Amazon region, ruled in March 2024 that the Marañon had the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination, respecting an Indigenous worldview that regards a river as a living entity.It was a landmark ruling in Peru. The court in Iquitos, Loreto’s capital city, found the Peruvian government had violated the river’s inherent rights, and ordered it to take immediate action to prevent future oil spills into the waterway. The court also ruled that the government must mandate the creation of a protection plan for the entire river basin and recognise the Kukama community as its stewards. The government appealed against the decision, but the court upheld the ruling in October 2024.“She is the ‘mother of rivers’, the Marañon is born in the Andes and flows downstream to become the Amazon River,” Canaquiri said. The Kukama believe the river is sacred and that their ancestors’ spirits reside in its bed. for four decades, however, the Kukama have endured scores of oil spills which destroy fish stocks, damage the ecosystem and contaminate the water with heavy metals.The village of Shapajila on the Marañon River. Photograph: Goldman Environmental PrizeThe Peruvian state oil company Petroperú began building the the Northern Peruvian pipeline in 1970s, and the region around the Marañon River has accounted for 40% of the county’s oil production since 2014 – with devastating effects. There have been more than 60 oil spills along the river since 1997, some of them catastrophic.“My grandparents taught me that there is a giant boa that lives in the river, Puragua, the ‘mother of the river’,”said Canaquiri. The spirit represents the health of the river and its personhood, according to the Kukama’s cosmovision.In practical terms, the Kukama depend on the river for transport, agriculture, water and fish, which is their main protein source. As a result of the the oil drilling, however, they have become highly vulnerable to water contamination.Local people have suffered from fevers, diarrhoea, skin rashes and miscarriages after oil spills, and elevated levels of lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium were found in the blood of river community members in a 2021 study.Canaquiri, a mother of four with six grandchildren, remembers a blissful childhood with abundant fish and animals before the oil drilling began. “There was plenty of food. We shared everything, worked on each other’s farms and celebrated the festivals together,” she said.Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari out on the river with members of her community. Photograph: Goldman Environmental PrizeDespite the ruling, the river is not out of danger and Canaquiri and the HKK are asking the Peruvian government to implement the court’s ruling. The fight continues.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionPeru’s congress passed an anti-NGO law last month, which the country’s president, Dina Boluarte, approved last week. The law prevents civil society organisations from taking legal action or even giving legal counsel in cases against the state over human rights abuses.Canaquiri says the law could cripple their legal battle. “It is worrying because it means lawyers cannot take our cases to enforce our fundamental rights,” she said.“It is not just for us, it is also for the country and the world. Who can live without breathing? If it wasn’t for the Amazon, the forest, the rivers, we wouldn’t have clean air to breathe. How would we get food to eat every day, our fruits, our vegetables, our animals, our fish?”She says she and the HKK are motivated by the future of their children and grandchildren,: “The government needs to understand that it should not kill nature but protect it. Otherwise, what hope will our children, the next generation, have?

Brazil's Indigenous Leader Raoni Says He Is Against Drilling for Oil in Amazon Region

By Lais MoraisBRASILIA (Reuters) -Brazil should not explore oil reserves in the Amazon region, because of the dangerous impact on local communities...

BRASILIA (Reuters) -Brazil should not explore oil reserves in the Amazon region, because of the dangerous impact on local communities, Indigenous leader Raoni Metuktire, of the Kayapo people, told Reuters during the country's largest Indigenous gathering last week.Raoni's comments at the gathering, called Acampamento Terra Livre, come as debate heats up around Brazil's state-run oil firm Petrobras' bid to drill for oil off the coast of the Amazonian state of Amapa, in the sensitive Foz do Amazonas basin."I'm against this oil project," said Raoni, days after he met with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. "I personally told President Lula that I am against it, I do not accept this oil in the Amazon."Though Lula has sought to be recognized as a champion of the world's tropical forests and Brazil's Indigenous peoples, he has also said that the country should be able to drill in the environmentally sensitive Foz do Amazonas basin. He has criticized the country's environmental agency Ibama for its delay in giving Petrobras a license to do so.Raoni, who has been an internationally recognized environmental campaigner for decades, was one of the few people invited by Lula to stand by him when he was sworn in for his third term as president in January 2023. In May 2023, Ibama denied Petrobras' request for an offshore drilling license for Foz do Amazonas, citing environmental concerns. It later also highlighted concerns over the effects the drilling could have on Amapa's Indigenous communities. The oil company appealed, but a final Ibama decision is pending.The Foz do Amazonas basin is in Brazil's Equatorial Margin, considered the country's most promising oil frontier, sharing geology with nearby Guyana, where Exxon Mobil is developing huge oil fields. (Reporting by Lais Morais in Brasilia, writing by Fabio Teixeira, editing by Manuela Andreoni and Aurora Ellis)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

This Land Is Our Land: New Books About Public Lands, the Threats They Face, and Their Ecological Importance

These new books cover challenges to our shared land, ranging from Indigenous appropriation to current corporate grabs. The post This Land Is <i>Our&lt;/i> Land: New Books About Public Lands, the Threats They Face, and Their Ecological Importance appeared first on The Revelator.

In a perfect world, a book-review column focused on public lands would provide readers with exciting tips and insights about visiting national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges, and other breathtaking sites across the United States. But it’s not a perfect world: Today America’s public lands face their greatest threats as the Trump administration expands the extractive economy, slashes agency workforces, seeks to shrink national monuments, and makes plans to sell off many of our natural assets — even as attendance at our national parks continues to soar to record levels. That’s why several new and forthcoming books about public lands are essential reading: They put this new threat into historical context, reveal the complexities and contradictions in our public-lands policies, offer insight into their current and future protections, and remind us of their beauty and ecological importance. Some of them also teach us how to get maximum enjoyment out of a visit to a national park. Here are a dozen-plus new books about public lands, published in 2024 and 2025, along with their official descriptions. The links go to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to request these books through your local booksellers or public libraries. We’ve also provided a list of several must-have, critical, and fundamental books about public lands for your environmental library and book collections — a list especially for new and young environmentalists and those new to environmentalism who seek core information as a foundation for their advocacy and understanding in today’s world. Before we get to the traditionally published books, we thought it was important to mention one of the primary texts being used right now to attack public lands: Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership We include this one on the list to reveal the strategies of those trying to monetize and minimize America’s public lands. There’s a lot to digest and understand in this roadmap for unworking the federal government; for the primary section affecting national parks, monuments, and forests, skip to Chapter 16 on the Department of the Interior by self-styled “Sagebrush Rebel” William Perry Pendley. Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands by Adam M. Sowards Environmental historian Adam Sowards synthesizes public-lands history from the beginning of the republic to recent controversies. The U.S. federal government owns more than a quarter of the nation’s landscape, managed by four federal agencies. It intersects history with nature, politics, and economics and explores how the concept of “public” has been controversial from the start, from homesteader visions to free-enterprise ranchers to activists. Americans have a stake in these lands: They are, after all, ours. Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by Julie Brugger Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah has figured prominently in the long and ongoing struggle over the meaning and value of America’s public lands. In 1996 President Bill Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create the monument, with the goal of protecting scientific and historical resources. This book focuses on the perspectives of diverse groups affected by conflict over the monument. Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes. Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism. The Other Public Lands: Preservation, Extraction, and Politics on the Fifty States’ Natural Resource Lands by Steven Davis A comprehensive primer on state public lands and the political dynamics that underlie their management. For most Americans state lands are the most accessible type of public land; however, despite their ubiquity, they remain largely terra incognita. Offering a wide-angle overview, Davis focuses on how states prioritize competing claims related to conservation, resource development, tourism, recreation, and finances. Exploring differences and common patterns in state land management, he examines the privatization and commercialization of state parks and the tensions between recreation, revenue, and the preservation of biodiversity and natural landscapes. He also raises issues about equity, access, appropriate development, and ecological health. With current demands to transfer federal lands to the states, Davis concludes with an appraisal of whether states could handle this transfer and suggests ways to ensure adequate access in an era of increased need. The Enduring Wild: A Journey Into California’s Public Lands by Josh Jackson A galvanizing road trip across California’s immense public wilderness from a beloved adventurer. It all began with a camping trip. Outdoor enthusiast Josh Jackson had never heard of “BLM land” before a casual recommendation from a friend led him to a free campsite in the desert — and the revelation that over 15 million acres of land in California are owned collectively by the people. In The Enduring Wild, he takes us on a road trip spanning thousands of miles, crisscrossing the Golden State to seek out every parcel of public wilderness, from the Pacific shores of the King Range down to the Mojave Desert. Over mountains, across prairies, and through sagebrush, Jackson unravels the stories of these lands: The Indigenous peoples who have called them home to the extractives’ threats that imperil them today, and of the grassroots organizers and political champions who have rallied to their common defense to uphold the radical mandate to protect these natural treasures for generations to come. Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem by Robert B. Keiter For more than 150 years, the 23-million-acre Yellowstone region — now widely known as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — has played a prominent role in the United States’ nature conservation agenda. In this book Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone. Keiter’s book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region. Extending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands, Yellowstone is a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. The quest for common ground among federal land managers, state officials, local communities, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is a vital, enduring task. (Available July 2025)  Land Back: Relational Landscapes of Indigenous Resistance across the Americas edited by Heather Dorries and Michelle Daigle Relationships with land are fundamental components of Indigenous worldviews, politics, and identity. The disruption of land relations is a defining feature of colonialism; colonial governments and capitalist industries have violently dispossessed Indigenous lands, undermining Indigenous political authority through the production of racialized and gendered hierarchies of difference. The collection of voices in Land Back highlight the ways Indigenous peoples and anticolonial co-resistors understand land relations for political resurgence and freedom across the Americas, examining the relationships of language, Indigenous ontologies, and land reclamation; Indigenous ecology and restoration; the interconnectivity of environmental exploitation and racial, class, and gender exploitation; Indigenous diasporic movement; community urban planning; transnational organizing and relational anti-racist place-making; and the role of storytelling and children in movements for liberation. Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands by Joseph Whitson While outdoor industry marketing promotes an image of “the wilderness” as an unpeopled haven, this book is an analysis of the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, U.S. public lands, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry’s marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism. Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of “wildernessing” to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of “wilderness” and what it means to fight for its preservation. National Parks, Native Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration edited by Christina Gish Hill, Matthew J. Hill, and Brooke Neely The history of national parks in the United States mirrors the fraught relations between the Department of the Interior and the nation’s Indigenous peoples. But amidst the challenges are examples of success. This collection of essays proposes a reorientation of relationships between tribal nations and national parks, placing Indigenous peoples as co-stewards through strategic collaboration. More than simple consultation, strategic collaboration, as the authors define it, involves the complex process by which participants come together to find ways to engage with one another across sometimes-conflicting interests. In case studies and interviews, the authors and editors of this volume — scholars as well as National Park Service staff and Tribal historic preservation officers — explore pathways for collaboration, emphasizing emotional commitment, mutual respect, and patience, rather than focusing on “land-back” solutions, in the cocreation of a socially sensible public-lands policy. Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus For millennia land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. Political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment. With an overview of modern global land reallocation history, Albertus shows how the shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis — and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate. Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet. Bison: Community Builders and Grassland Caretakers by Frances Backhouse Some 170,000 wood bison, North America’s largest land animals, once roamed northern regions, while at least 30 million plains bison trekked across the rest of the continent. Almost driven to extinction in the 1800s by decades of slaughter and hunting, this ecological and cultural keystone species supports biodiversity and strengthens the ecosystems around it. Bison: Community Builders and Grassland Caretakers celebrates the traditions and teachings of Indigenous Peoples and looks at how bison lovers of all backgrounds came together to save these iconic animals. Learn about the places where bison are regaining a hoof-hold and meet some of the young people who are welcoming bison back home. Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty A vivid portrait of the American prairie, which rivals the rainforest in its biological diversity and, with little notice, is disappearing even faster. The North American prairie is an ecological marvel, a lush carpet of grass that stretches to the horizon, and home to some of the nation’s most iconic creatures — bison, elk, wolves, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and bald eagles. Plants, microbes, and animals together made the grasslands one of the richest ecosystems on Earth and a massive carbon sink, but the constant expansion of agriculture threatens what remains. Exploring humanity’s relationship with this incredible land, this book offers a deep, compassionate analysis of the difficult decisions and opportunities facing agricultural and Indigenous communities. A vivid portrait of the heartland ecosystem that argues why the future of this region is essential far beyond the heartland. 2025 Rand McNally Road Atlas & National Park Guide Showcasing our country’s astonishing beauty, the Rand McNally Road Atlas & National Park Guide is packed with hundreds of photos, essential visitor information, and insightful travel tips for all 63 of America’s national parks. Includes a complete 2025 Rand McNally Road Atlas to make navigating a breeze, plus tourism websites and phone numbers for every U.S. state and Canadian province on map pages. More Must-Read, Fundamental Public Lands Books for Every Environmentalist’s Collection Literally hundreds of books about public land have crossed our desks since The Revelator started publishing eight years ago. Here’s a compendium of several must-have, critical, and fundamental books about public lands for your environmental library and book collections — a list especially relevant for new and young environmentalists who seek essential information to create a foundation for their advocacy and understanding in today’s often “anti-climate-change” world. In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer by Steven Davis Briefly lays out the history and characteristics of public lands at the local, state, and federal levels while examining the numerous policy prescriptions for their privatization or, in the case of federal lands, transfer. American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West by Betsy Gaines Quammen Quammen, historian and conservationist, documents the ongoing feud between the Bundy ranching family, the federal government, and the American public, examining the roots of the Bundys’ cowboy confrontations, and how history has shaped an often-dangerous mindset which today feeds the militia movement and threatens public lands, wild species, and American heritage. George Meléndez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks by Jerry Emory The first biography of a visionary biologist whose groundbreaking ideas regarding wildlife and science revolutionized national parks. This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments by McKenzie Long One woman’s enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii. Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands by John D. Leshy A leading expert in public-lands policy, Leshy discusses the key political decisions that led to this, beginning at the very founding of the nation. He traces the emergence of a bipartisan political consensus in favor of the national government holding these vast land areas primarily for recreation, education, and conservation of biodiversity and cultural resources. History Comics: The National Parks by Falynn Koch Turn back the clock to 1872, when Congress established Yellowstone National Park as an area of unspoiled beauty for the “benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Meet the visionaries, artists, and lovers of the American wilderness who fought against corruption and self-interest to carve out and protect these spaces for future generations. See for yourself how the idea of national parks began, how they’ve changed, and how they continue to define America. Head to your public library or local bookstore for all these great books about public lands. For hundreds of additional environmental books — including several more on these and related issues — visit the Revelator Reads archives. Previously in The Revelator: Saving America’s National Parks and Forests Means Shaking Off the Rust of Inaction Trump’s Approach to Public Lands? Expanding the Extractive Economy and Declaring a War on Nature The post This Land Is <i>Our&lt;/i> Land: New Books About Public Lands, the Threats They Face, and Their Ecological Importance appeared first on The Revelator.

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