Chuck Sams is well prepared. Thirty years of experience in tribal land management made him the ideal choice to be the first Native American director of the National Park Service (NPS) in December 2021.
Sams is Cayuse and Walla Walla and is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Northeast Oregon, where he grew up. He also has blood ties to the Cocopah Tribe and Yankton Sioux of Fort Peck. He is working with tribes to roll out co-stewardship and co-management of the nation’s 425 parks. Uniting Indigenous knowledge with scientific practices is another key goal.
“We must continue our traditional practices and ways of life to ensure the cycle of life of flora and fauna continues,” says Sams, who most recently was executive director of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon.
Winds of Change recently caught up with Sams to ask him some questions contributed by AISES members.
How is the NPS making itself a welcoming place for Native people to work?
All 85 million acres of land that the National Park Service stewards were once home to numerous tribes across the U.S. and Indigenous peoples in the Pacific. We work to ensure that we tell the full depth and breadth of their stories.
We will hire up to 5,000 new full-time employees over the next eight years. We will actively engage with Native colleges, clubs, and trade centers and Indian reservations to talk with tribal members who want to work for the National Park Service. We welcome them so they can continue to preserve and protect places we love and tell their tribal stories in the parks.
What advice do you have for students interested in working for the federal government?
We have a whole host of positions, from biologists and climate scientists to administrative and interpretative officers, in the parks. Whether you earn a PhD or become a mechanic, we have a position for you.
Talk with your elders and family members. Figure out what your passion is. Work toward it and get the education and experience necessary to compete for these positions.
What’s the biggest policy change you’re implementing?
Working with tribes on co-stewardship and co-management across all 425 parks. Every bureau in the Department of the Interior is charged with figuring out how we’re going to do that. We want to partner with local tribal governments and communities on how to manage our parks.
I come from the Pacific Northwest where courts have upheld tribes’ rights to co-manage salmon in the Columbia River basin. We work closely with them to determine where those co-management legal obligations exist. We work with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the Great Smoky Mountains. We do prescribed fires, working cooperatively with Cherokee Nation fire crews, and we work with the Cherokee Nation to repropagate meadows and waterways with native flora and fauna.
The expansion of co-stewardship and co-management is going very quickly. I’m proud of our staff and superintendents. They are proactively reaching out to tribes rather than the old method of waiting for tribes to come to the Park Service.
Is traditional ecological knowledge affecting your governance?
We need to bring it to the forefront. Not only do we need to bring in Indigenous knowledge in science, we need to bring it in on social science, community, and understanding relationships with flora and fauna.
For example, we work with the Abenaki in Acadia on native plant propagation. The work on traditional sweet grass and native plants in Acadia has propagated tenfold in many cases. We also ally with 11 tribes in the Grand Canyon on everything from water quality to economic development. They bring to the forefront Indigenous knowledge they learned over thousands of years.
What’s your water rights agenda?
That’s a very complex issue. When I went to law school, it was probably my least favorite class. (That said, I still got an A.) The National Park Service continues to protect and preserve surface and ground waters in the parks. Going back to what I said about careers, we need young people who have an inherent understanding that water is life. We need that next generation of folks who have the scientific background and Indigenous knowledge married to Western law so we can secure water rights to protect those areas we love.
What’s the biggest challenge you face?
Climate change. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, we received $190 million to look at natural resource management through the scope of climate adaptation and resiliency. What’s missing is the understanding of Indigenous knowledge. In the past 20,000 to 30,000 years, we’ve seen three major climate changes in North America. We need to bring in traditional stories and match them with the science we use to help better manage how we’re going to be resilient and adapt.
How did your career prepare you for your position?
In the late 1980s in the Umatilla Reservation, I started with the Oregon Youth Conservation Corps, Oregon’s only all-American Indian corps. We built trails, replanted native trees, and did wildland firefighting.
Then I served in the military, notably during the First Gulf War. Afterward, I worked for the Youth Corps doing environmental projects. For the next 30 years I did watershed restoration and worked for the Trust for Public Land to return land to the public trust to preserve it for future generations.
I was able to do all that because I had great mentors. Antone Minthorn, the former chair of the Umatilla tribe, has been a great influence. My grandfather, the late Charles F. Sands Sr., a tribal member of Walla Walla and Cayuse, helped me understand stewarding flora and fauna for ourselves and the next seven generations. Numerous other tribal elders advised me. I was very surprised when I was asked to be the 19th director, but I felt well prepared based on my relationships with my mentors.
How did your upbringing make you who you are today?
In our creation story on the Umatilla reservation, we understand that my eyesight is from the eagle. My hearing is from the owl. My skin was provided by the elk. My nervous system and veins come from the plant people. These were gifts provided by the Creator to create this thing called human. We understood we had a covenant with the Creator and would be stewards of flora and fauna and the voice for those who can’t speak.
That seminal understanding from a very young age and hunting, fishing, and gathering in seasonal rounds with my grandparents, great uncles, aunts and uncles, and extended family became the foundation of how I understand my relationship with the world.
In 2000 I met Wilma Mankiller, who became a mentor and friend. She said we walk in one world. You were born an Indian, and you’ll die an Indian. This is the world our Creator gave us. Other people have come into that world, and they influence it, but it’s still your responsibility to carry forward stewardships your grandfather told you about. Therefore, it’s your job to teach those who have not lived here as long as we have about how to take care of the flora and fauna.
She was absolutely right. Thanks to her, I better understood that I live in only one world: the Indian world I was brought up in. Others may influence that world, but that doesn’t negate my responsibility to be a good steward and teach others how to steward things the right way.
