By Audra Locicero*
The United States’s federal public lands are the treasure of the American landscape. Encompassing some of the most grandiose, wild, and sacred lands in the country, our Nation’s federal public lands are cherished by many for their natural beauty and cultural significance. They are also the ancestral homelands of America’s Indigenous Peoples. Through centuries of war, treaty-breaking, and forced removal, Native American ancestral homelands were taken from Native American peoples, becoming the property of the United States Government and later the Nation’s federal public lands. The majesty of our collective public lands is thus tainted with injustice.
Action on the part of the United States Government to address the harms wrought by Native land dispossession is long overdue. Tribal co-management of federal public lands, an emerging land management strategy in which the United States Government and tribal nations joint-manage parcels of federal public lands, offers a potential route for reconciliation. By exploring the dual histories of Native land dispossession and the federal public land system, and the current legal authority for tribal co-management, this Article provides a call to action to the federal government to prioritize tribal co-management of its millions of acres of federal public lands—the need is pressing, the legal authority exists, and successful tribal co-management agreements are currently in place. The time for tribal co-management is now.