How we're thinking about Yellowstone's 150th Anniversary

This year, Yellowstone National Park celebrates its 150th anniversary. It’s quite the occasion for “America’s best idea.” We welcome this milestone, not only for the enduring idea it symbolizes for conservation and public land, but also for the opportunity to contemplate Yellowstone’s deeper human history that stretches back nearly 12,000 years.

We tend to associate the precolonial history of a place, like the park, with the peoples European Americans encountered upon their arrival and settlement. And that’s where the story ends for many. 

It’s much deeper than that. Since the end of Pinedale glaciation around 15,000 years ago, (the last North American ice age) as the glaciers receded from the Yellowstone plateau, humans began to make their way into the area we now know as the park. 

Native American oral tradition tells us this, and there is ample evidence in the archeological record to back it up. 

The Kiowa place their people’s origin story in Yellowstone, describing the transformation of a barren landscape filled with geothermal features into a verdant place we would recognize today for the Kiowa to live. It is no stretch of the imagination to see how this story describes the Yellowstone plateau immediately after the Yellowstone ice sheet receded and the eventual return of plant and animal life. 

The Shoshone describe how the trickster Coyote had a hand in creating Yellowstone. The Crow also had stories of the origins of Yellowstone’s geysers and fumaroles, and even spoke of the benevolent spirits that lived within the geysers, which is ironic given the one of the great myths that was perpetuated after the founding of the Yellowstone National Park.

There was a story told to park visitors that attempted to explain the absence of Native peoples that went something like this: Native Americans considered the geothermal features in the park to possess “bad medicine”, that Indians were afraid of the park, and it was a place best left alone and avoided. It was nothing more than a deceptive marketing ploy to make early visitors feel more at ease in the relative wilds of the newly colonized West, and to explain the absence of the original inhabitants without having to go into detail about broken treaties, land takings and the forced relocation of native tribes to ever shrinking reservations.

And yet this myth was told by the same generation of Americans who saw to it that Yellowstone be set aside, kept free from logging and mining, and remain open to the public. Wonderland it was called. An idyllic place of redemption that was born out of the ruins of the Civil War: a place devoid of people, a wilderness, where we could visit without confronting our social and political conflicts, and tell a story about overcoming our singular narrative that considers the landscape in only monetary terms — a reinvented landscape, where the original occupants were carefully edited out of the story. In many ways, this inherent contradiction underpins much of the West for the last 150 years, and it is something that we continue to grapple with to this day.

There is no reason to do away with the story of Yellowstone, for in it lies the seeds of the North American conservation movement:  that there are places worth protecting, setting aside for their own intrinsic merits. Whether we enter those places seeking solace, renewal or simply a break from our every day, they are needed, not only for us, but for the larger ecosystem, and the wildlife, songbirds and smallest of insects that thrive therein. While not without its flaws, there is much more to that story needing to be told.

We herald Yellowstone as our greatest idea in conservation, and there is no denying the right thing was done in establishing the first national park. There are countless books and articles highlighting the geologic and geothermal treasures that make the park what it is today, the features that bring visitors in increasing record numbers from across the globe. But that is only part of the story, one that begins relatively recently. What knowledge are we missing? What stories have we lost? What does Yellowstone reflect in us today, and what did it represent to the first people who lived here many millennia ago?

At the PCEC office, we have a copy of a special newspaper insert published by the Billings Gazette in 1972 celebrating the 100th anniversary of Yellowstone. There are interesting and timely pieces about the closing of the park’s garbage dumps to keep bears out, as well as plenty of tips for visitors (all of the ads are a wonderful time capsule of Montana 50 years ago). It’s also filled with all the well-known history of the park, but that history begins with John Colter and progresses from there. Notably absent is any mention of Indigenous peoples. This is not meant to criticize the editors, but only to illustrate that our perspectives have changed. 

We applaud the National Park Service for their efforts this year to recognize Native culture and history within the park. Throughout the summer, there will be opportunities to learn more about the native history and culture of the park at the Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center. PCEC was also proud to partner with Mountain Time Arts on bringing the All Nations Teepee Village to Yellowstone.

Yellowstone is not a fortress. No battlements stand astride its border. It is the heart of a vibrant ecosystem that extends far and wide into three different states. 

PCEC is only one of many groups standing among all the people who champion not only the park, also but the lands that surround it. It is an honor to do so, and a responsibility we don’t take lightly. 

We are only one thread in the tapestry of Yellowstone and would like to thank everyone else who likewise are woven into this place.

We now recognize the tribes who were present on the landscape for the founding of the park, as well as their ancestors: the Assiniboine and Sioux, Blackfeet, Cheyenne River Sioux, Coeur d’Alene, Comanche, Colville Reservation, Crow, Crow Creek Sioux, Eastern Shoshone, Flandreau Santee Sioux, Gros Ventre and Assiniboine, Kiowa, Little Shell Chippewa, Lower Brule Sioux, Nez Perce, Northern Arapaho, Northern Cheyenne, Oglala Sioux, Rosebud Sioux, Salish and Kootenai, Shoshone–Bannock, Sisseton Wahpeton, Spirit Lake, Standing Rock Sioux, Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa, Umatilla Reservation and Yankton Sioux.