By Marjorie Walter, WNPF Board Chair and member of WNPF’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee
National Native American Heritage Month is officially celebrated each November, but at Washington’s National Park Fund along with our three park partners, we work to center Native culture year-round. The lands that are now designated as North Cascades National Park Service Complex, Olympic National Park, and Mount Rainier National Park are the ancestral homes of many Indigenous groups, and are especially rich in Native history and culture. Staff at all three parks are committed to partnering with the tribes to promote accessibility, educate visitors, and preserve these special places.
In recent years, park staff have selected many priority projects involving local tribal communities, and we work to raise funds for those projects. Our donors this year have already fully funded a project at Olympic to expand opportunities for volunteers and outreach at the Matt Albright Native Plant Nursery, which supplies plants and restoration expertise for projects involving the Quinault Indian Nation, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the 10,000 Years Institute, and the Washington Department of Transportation.
Donors have also fully funded a program to give middle schoolers in Port Angeles a chance to take part in science fieldwork at Olympic National Park, including exploring the restoration of the Elwha River with the help of Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe cultural educators, who share with the students the importance of the river to the tribe’s culture and identity.
And we’re working to secure funding for several more projects at the parks that engage with local Native communities and culture. At North Cascades, we’re seeking support to expand the ongoing Food Sustainability and Native Plant Education project by adding two produce stands and a wagon to transport food grown at the Sauk-Suiattle Community Garden to the Tribe’s Elder’s Food Program, and by sourcing supplies and providing stipends to support internships for local tribal youth.
At Mount Rainier, we’re seeking support for community scientists, including students from the Northwest Indian College, to collect data as part of ongoing research on pikas and Cascade red fox and how those species are responding to climate change. And at Olympic, we are looking for funding to continue supporting the development of a Native Conservation Corps program in conjunction with youth interns from the Quileute Tribe. Learn more about projects we support in our project portfolio.
Learn more about the tribes with traditional connections to the lands of North Cascades, Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks here:
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This year, WNPF partnered with Rachel Heaton, a member of the Muckleshoot tribe and descendant of the Duwamish people, to support an all-Indigenous team to climb Mount təqʷuʔmaʔ, the Muckleshoot name for Mount Rainier. Rachel is an avid hiker and climber but, as she shared,
I started realizing my people weren’t out here on the mountain. Our stories, our knowledge, our language, and our faces weren’t visible out there. Yet when visitors are out there, they can see the plants that we use every day in our cultural teachings and that are important for our food sovereignty. … It got me thinking, if we’re not out there, what are these people being exposed to? What are they learning?
Although the team couldn’t summit because deteriorating conditions on the glaciers made it too dangerous, Rachel and the team feel the effort was a success all the same: “That’s not what it’s about. It’s about having our faces and our stories out on the mountain. And inspiring our youth and showing them that we are out here.”
You can learn more about the team in this blog and hear about how their trip went at our virtual field trip where a few climbers talked about their climb experience.
The land that is now Mount Rainier National Park is the ancestral land of six tribes: the Nisqually, Puyallup, Squaxin Island, Muckleshoot, Yakama, and Cowlitz.
Native people have hunted and gathered plants in the area for thousands of years. Archeological studies at the park have confirmed the oral history, with artifacts revealing evidence of long-term camps, short-term hunting camps, areas where cedar bark was stripped, and food storage locations.
In 2020, Cowlitz elders Greg LaDue-Grove and Patty Kinswa-Gaiser spoke about their personal ancestral connection to Ohanapecosh, and its healing power:
Recently, a lake at the park was renamed as part of a Department of Interior effort to remove derogatory place names from federal lands. Secretary Haaland personally called for the changes, saying:
Words matter, particularly in our work to make our nation’s public lands and waters accessible and welcoming to people of all backgrounds. Consideration of these replacements is a big step forward in our efforts to remove derogatory terms whose expiration dates are long overdue. Throughout this process, broad engagement with Tribes, stakeholders and the general public will help us advance our goals of equity and inclusion.”
The lake, which sits alongside the Wonderland Trail about five miles northwest of Longmire, is now known as “Kiya Lake.” The name was suggested by the Puyallup Tribe, and means grandmother in Twulshootseed.
The land that is now North Cascades National Park was home to Native people for thousands of years prior to colonization. Ancestors of the modern-day Sauk-Suiattle, Nlaka’pamux, Upper Skagit, Chelan, and Okanagan people hunted, fished, gathered plants, and traded across the Cascade range. What is now known as Cascade Pass was a key trade route for the Chelan and Upper Skagit people – they called the pass “Stehekin,” which means “the way through.”
North Cascades National Park Service Complex is currently partnering with two local Tribes, the Lummi and Sauk-Suiattle, as well as the Darrington School District, Glacier Peak Institute, and other partners on an innovative new project: Community Resilience Through Food Sustainability and Native Plant Education. With funding support from Washington’s National Park Fund, the program serves 160 youth participants per year and was recently recognized with the National Park Service’s Education Award, the highest recognition presented to an NPS team for outstanding contributions to the profession of education.
In spring of 2022, Darrington High School students took a field trip to the park’s native plant center, where they got a behind-the-scenes look at the park’s revegetation process from the park’s horticulturalists.
They put their new native plants knowledge to work and got their hands dirty at the North Cascades Visitor Center in Newhalem, developing and planting an ethnobotanical garden. This field trip is just one of the ways that the project inspires a sense of land stewardship in future generations. Read about the trip in our blog.
Curious for more? You can learn about what this project is accomplishing for the park and the area communities in our virtual field trip, and what’s next for the project, with Rangers Katie and Anna:
The eight area tribes with traditional connections to the lands of Olympic are the Hoh, Jamestown S’Klallam, Makah, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Quileute, Quinault, and Skokomish. Olympic National Park celebrates these original residents, providing a thorough history in their Ancient Peoples and Area Tribes page. Their resources include this thought-provoking introduction:
“What if your highways were rivers and mountain ridges? What if your grocery store was the forest and ocean? What if your home overlooked a beautiful coastline complete with whales and sunsets? For the original residents of the Olympic Peninsula, the majestic landscape and wealth of resources supplied both physical and spiritual sustenance. Although the land and its ownership has changed, these essential connections have been maintained through generations. Today Olympic National Park protects the natural resources that engendered those connections as well as the cultural resources that reveal the rich history of the people who first called this rugged place home.”
To explore more deeply, check out the website jointly maintained by the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Holocaust Memorial Organization, and the National Park Service: nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov. There, you’ll find film, audio, photographs, artwork, and writing from a broad range of Indigenous creators as well as a calendar of events celebrating and educating about Native history and culture.
Explore more about how the National Park Service celebrates Indigenous culture and history here. And don’t miss Rock Your Mocks 2023, when Indigenous people worldwide, including NPS employees locally and across the country, celebrate their heritage by wearing traditional footwear.
This worldwide social media event was initiated by Jessica Atsye (Laguna Pueblo, NM) in 2011 and has grown every year since – be sure to follow #RockYourMocs on social media to see a wonderful and diverse collection of traditional footwear.
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Washington’s National Park Fund is committed to equity and inclusion of all people, a commitment we share with the National Park Service and Washington’s three largest national parks. We strongly believe that by actively funding projects that give access and opportunities to traditionally underrepresented communities — and by building an organization whose donors and partners represent diverse cultures, backgrounds, and life experiences — we become more fruitful stewards and champions of Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. Learn more about our efforts.