Should We Return National Parks to Native Americans?

The Experiment

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4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2022

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The national-park system has been touted as “America’s best idea.” David Treuer, an Ojibwe historian and the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present, says we can make that idea even better—by giving national parks back to Native Americans.

This episode of The Experiment originally ran on April 15, 2021.

A transcript of this episode is available.

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This episode was produced by Tracie Hunte and Gabrielle Berbey, with editing by Matt Collette and Katherine Wells. Fact-check by Jack Segelstein. Sound design by David Herman. Additional engineering by Joe Plourde.

Music by Laundry (“Films”), Parish Council (“Socks Before Trousers” and “Heatherside Stores”), h hunt (“11e” and “Journeys”), and naran ratan (“Trees etc.”), provided by Tasty Morsels. Additional music by John Charles Schroeder and Ross Taggart Garren (“Mournful Blues”) and Ken Anderson and Rebecca Ruth Hall (“Calliope - Underscore”). Additional audio from National Geographic, WNYC, PBS, and C-SPAN.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Julia Lungoria, this is the experiment.
0:04.0	And if you haven't heard, this week is National Park Week.
0:09.0	So in honor of that, we're going to replay for you a story by Correspondent Tracey Hunt.
0:37.0	So Tracey Hunt. Hi. What are you good? Hi. What are you going to do this summer?
0:43.0	So I'm super pumped because this summer, me and my niece and my niece's mom, we are going to the Grand Canyon.
0:52.0	It's going to be a girls trip. And I'm super excited because this is my first time going to National Park as an adult.
0:57.0	And you know, it's just like such a classic American road trip kind of thing.
1:05.0	It is, it's like the kids winding in the bag. Are we there yet?
1:09.0	Oh, yeah. No, she's not excited about going to the Grand Canyon.
1:13.0	Is she like, you are going to be like, no, we're going to the Grand Canyon.
1:17.0	Oh my gosh. I remember my little sister being like, I think she was like five years old when we went to Yosemite.
1:24.0	And we would hike to the top and she'd be like, we have witnessed its magnificence and now we can go home.
1:30.0	She was like such a like, precocious little kid. You know what? Maybe there is something about being an adult and like being old.
1:38.0	You're getting older and witnessing the magnificence of a beautiful park.
1:44.0	Tracy Hunt is a correspondent at the experiment. And in anticipation of her big trip to the Grand Canyon,
1:51.0	she talked to one of the Atlantic's writers about visiting our national parks.
1:56.0	It's grand, right? There's some great views and some interesting crazy stuff.
2:01.0	This is David Choyer. I'm Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in Northern Minnesota.
2:06.0	He's a historian. And I'm also a professor of English and writer of books.
2:11.0	Last summer while researching an article for the Atlantic, he went on a road trip to visit several national parks.
2:18.0	His kids were with him for some of it and they stopped in Yellowstone.
2:22.0	Whether these huge colorful pools steaming out of the ground.
	...

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