A recent proposal from the National Park Service would return thousands of acres of lands to the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. The land is currently part of South Unit in Badlands National Park but has an unfortunate past; in 1942 the US War Department took the land from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to use it as bombing range until the 1960s.
Later, the government returned the land to the tribe, but with a caveat: it would be government-held trust land managed by the NPS, and form part of Badlands National Park. Under the new proposal, the land would become the first tribal-managed national park land in the country.
The proposed tribal national park would require congressional approval and it would take a few years to fully transition the land over to the tribe. The Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority already has a few projects in the works that would go hand in hand with this conversion, namely the Lakota Heritage and Education Center currently being built by the tribe and a proposed scenic byway to the Crazy Horse Monument being carved.
The proposal is subject to a 60-day comment period, including five public meetings in September and one in Washington DC next month (October). The affected South Unit is the considerably less visited part of Badlands NP, with only a small fraction of the visitors (and operating budget) for the park.
Steve Thede, deputy superintendent of Badlands National Park, says of the proposal, “We can’t change history, but this is an opportunity to revisit the decisions that were made and maybe do a little better this time around.”
-via the Victoria Advocate
