Eager readers may look for a conclusion to this chapter that documents the return to a thriving state of Indigenous foodways within the national park system; alas, that future remains to be written. Vibrant Indigenous foodways and commitments to food sovereignty are not merely historical issues, but they are yet to be recentered in the context of US national parks. The political stage is set for a recentering: as of this writing, the government leaders of both the Department of the Interior and the NPS are enrolled Tribal members who have expressed a commitment to co-management of the parks. Deb Haaland, US Secretary of the Interior, is the first Native American (Pueblo of Laguna) to serve as a Cabinet secretary. Haaland’s past as a young single mother who started a small food business, Pueblo Salsa, while experiencing food insecurity and relying on food stamps to get by, is well documented (Hennessy 2021) and suggests that she has the life experience to imagine the possibilities of recentering Indigenous foodways in public lands. The NPS is led by Director Chuck Sams, who is Cayuse and Walla Walla and who is enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. In his first year, Sams has scored big with restorative justice efforts that involve repatriation of Tribal cultural items and the incorporation of narratives of affiliated Tribes into park visitor centers (Pennington 2022). Together, Sams and Haaland have championed the Tribal Homelands Initiative, a collaborative effort to improve federal stewardship of public lands, waters, and wildlife by incorporating Tribal capacity, expertise, and Indigenous knowledge into federal land and resources management (US Department of the Interior 2021). On the Tribal side, prominent efforts at recentering foodways have been focused on the restoration of usufruct rights, less so on concession management or the marketing of Native American foods in park restaurants. Federally recognized Tribal governments that have successfully lobbied the NPS for agreements for plant col-lection include the Tohono O’odham Nation in Saguaro National Park (2018), the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (2019), and the Cherokee Nation in Buffalo National River (2019/2022). A fourth agreement will be finalized soon between the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and Indiana Dunes National Park (National Park Service 2023). Other park-specific Tribal co-management agreements have restored food harvesting rights. For in-stance, Congress passed legislation in 2014 to authorize authorizing gull egg harvest by the Huna Tlingit in their traditional homeland of Glacier Bay National Park (Sams 2022). Likewise, the Nisqually Tribe is currently collaborating with Mount Rainier National Park to offer recommendations for administering traditional plant gathering in ways that minimizes ecological impact (Sams 2022).
Where park-specific enabling legislation provides Tribes the right of first refusal to provide visitor services, as between the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida in Big Cypress National Preserve, there has been no expression of interest in pursuing co-management agreements and there are currently none in place (Sams 2022). This reticence to provide direct visitor services within the parks may have good reason. To respond to the place-based market demands of cosmopolitan foodies, food producers “need to have a good command of the language, the aesthetic characteristics, and the discursive categories” these consumers observe (Parasecoli 2017, np). Yet when local Indigenous food producers lack the cultural capital and vocabulary needed to position themselves for the cosmopolitan market, experts and cultural intermediaries step in to validate their work and products and make them legible to cosmopolitan consumers (Parasecoli 2017, np).
The Cedar Pass Lodge and Dining Room in Badlands National Park provides an interesting case study of one of very few official park concessions that have been run by Indigenous people. In 1964, the NPS acquired a lodge and cabins (including a restaurant, gift shop, and gas station) that had operated privately in Badlands since before its designation as a unit of the NPS and, in turn, leased them to the Oglala Sioux Tribe. As many as 30,000 members of this tribe live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, best known as the location of the Wounded Knee massacre, which occupies 2 million acres south of the park. The reservation comprises counties that are among the poorest in the US, and estimates put the unemployment rate at 80%–90% due to the lack of local economic development (John Milner Associates 2005, Section 3, 2). Ostensibly a boon for economic development, the Oglala Sioux Tribe operated the concessions for nearly 40 years, until they lost the contract in 2002 amidst financial woes (Scott and Scott 2019). The concession was taken over by Forever Resorts, which was subsequently acquired by Aramark; travel guides still laud the restaurant there for its Sioux Indian tacos made with homemade frybread and frybread topped with wojapi, a traditional Lakota berry jam, regardless of who now profits from these sales.
Although the end of the proprietorship of Cedar Pass Lodge by Indigenous people could be interpreted as a cautionary tale about investing in industrial con-cessions, it does provide a link between the historic disenfranchisement I have out-lined in this chapter and the potential futures still to come. Chapter 6 offers a deeper exploration of food-focused visitor services that recenter Indigenous foodways within national parks. As the National Congress of American Indians has called on the US federal government and its constituent agencies “to protect, enhance, restore and assure tribal access to the First Foods” (Brigham 2014)—traditional foods eaten precontact—the time is ripe for a reckoning around foodways on park-lands comprising Indigenous ancestral lands. To understand the context of these contemporary efforts, it is necessary to examine the present-day national parks foodscape more broadly and to understand the regulatory environment and the role of media in shaping and responding to cosmopolitan desires.