National Park Service Director Chuck Sams made history, but he’s focused on parks’ future

National Park Service Director Chuck Sams made history on day one in office in 2021, by becoming the first Native American to lead NPS.

Sams is Cayuse and Walla Walla and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. His family is also Cocopah and Yankton Sioux.

In many ways, his heritage, as well as his experience as a U.S. Navy veteran, have informed the way he’s led the federal agency and its staff for more than three years.

As he prepares to leave office, Sams spoke with USA TODAY about his legacy and lasting hopes for the National Park System.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: What are you most proud of over the last few years?

Sams: Coming into this agency with funding from the Great American Outdoors Act, I’m most proud of the investments that we’ve made in parks, in their infrastructure, across all 50 states, in several U.S. territories, including here in the District of Columbia. Each year since I’ve been here, we’ve invested $1.3 billion in infrastructure to really improve parks. That takes time, but we are now seeing the fruition. Whether it’s new roadways, new trails that are being built, visitor centers that were built in the 1950s and 60s coming back to life again with new kiosks and interpretation, it’s been exciting to see. And I’m very proud of the work that the staff all across the Service have done to really make sure that every dollar that’s been invested has had a great return to the American people.

National Park Service Director Chuck Sams visited more than 100 park sites during his time in office, including Cape Cod National Seashore.

When you say a word like infrastructure, that’s something an everyday person might not think is very exciting, but it is so critical to their experience in the parks.

It is critical. In this job, I can honestly say that I’ve seen more water treatment facilities than I’d ever probably planned to. That’s not what excites the American people, but if they go to that bathroom and it’s not working, or if they go to refill their water bottle and the water system is not working, then it becomes critical to their visitation and their enjoyment.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the accessibility efforts that you’ve helped lead?

Accessibility is a huge portion of, when I came in, what I wanted to ensure when we were investing these dollars. One of the key elements we kept asking is, what are we doing to ensure better accessibility? What are we doing to ensure that people with other abilities or disabilities have a way to experience the park the way that they best can?

We’ve seen a number of projects, interpretation by example, where we may have statues and structures and make sure there’s a tactile, smaller scale one that a person who may have lost their eyesight can feel and understand what they would be looking at if they still had their vision.

Saguaro National Park’s Cam Juárez says guests can come within inches of the park’s namesake cacti on accessible trails like this one.

Can you tell me about the efforts to tell more holistic stories that reflect all the American experiences within the parks?

You know, three years ago last December, when I took my oath of office on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Secretary (Deb) Haaland said, on behalf of the president of the United States, myself and the American people, I’m charging you with these monuments, memorials and parks, but more importantly, we’re charging you to find those stories that are less told or haven’t been told yet, and to tell them fiercely. So over the last three-plus years, working all across the park system, we’ve been able to tell stories to ensure that every American sees a reflection of themselves in the parks.

We were talking about the Chinese immigration story at Yosemite that had been left out for years. Some of the very first concessionaires, if you will, were Chinese Americans who were establishing different shops, mercantile and services at Yosemite. We’ve been telling the story about Emmett Till which goes from Illinois to Mississippi, and that is one of our first multimodal, if you will, parks that have different ways of interpretation as a whole. And it’s a hard story to tell, but it’s one that we need to face as Americans to ensure that we never act like that again. And then we looked across the entire system to talk about whether it’s my own people, who’ve been here for between 10-and-30,000 years, what does that story look like? What stories do we still have to tell through the use of Indigenous knowledge?

Too, I want immigrants who have just been newly sworn in to start building out their stories in the park so that they build their connections, so that we ensure that the generation of Americans who are new to America will continue to recreate (in) these into perpetuity.

National parks aren’t just places. What you should know about the people.

National Park Service Director Charles “Chuck” Sams was ceremonially sworn in by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in December.

How did your Native American identity shape your time in office?

I’m continuing to be impressed every day by the National Park Service staff. They understand the work that we do because we provide a service for folks coming in and out of the park, which could end up looking very transactional, and in some cases, it has in the past.

What we’re looking for is transformation, and that transformation happens between building relationships, so I’m very proud of how the staff have been able to embrace these different stories with different communities that may not have necessarily always been in the park, to help be much more transformational and be much more relational in how they tell their stories, ensuring that people who had actually had firsthand knowledge and experience are invited in to work with our interpreters and also do presentations in the park. We haven’t seen that a long time, and that has really changed how we tell story.

You know, there can be competing stories because people experienced them in different ways … and they should be told in a broader context. We in the United States are an amalgamation of all kinds of different people and cultures. It’s probably what I think is our greatest strength in our union, and so we should, in the National Park Service, continue to lift up our ability to tell multiple stories in a park. And I’ve seen that happen, and that was informed by how I was brought up, that you listen and you want to understand different relationships that people have with the flora, the fauna, the Earth, the water, the sky, and I’ve seen that happening across the national parks.

The sun sets at Grand Canyon National Park. The park is historically tied to 11 Native tribes. Only the Havasupai still live in the canyon.

Co-stewardship has been so important to you; can you tell me more about that?

It’s building up those relationships and talking with tribes and parks, and reaching out to tribes. You know, in some cases, a number of tribes have been relocated from their homeland so far away that sometimes it’s hard. I’m very proud of the work that parks have done to reach out.

Our parks in Ohio have reached out to like the Miami tribe and others who’ve been moved into the Oklahoma Territory, so that they are now in partnership with them to tell a much broader story. But in that storytelling, they also were able to learn through Indigenous knowledge how to better maintain and preserve the landscape.

At Redwoods National Park, we’re working very closely with the Yurok Tribe and others to talk about their experience on coastal lands, what that looked like, and how we can better manage the redwoods. In Everglades and Biscayne, we’re working with both the Miccosukee and Seminole in co-management – because in their legislation when those parks were set up, they were seen as co-managers – in helping us deal with the rising tide of ocean water. And how are we managing bison in Yellowstone and Glacier National Park and working closely with, in that area alone, nearly 45 different tribes in bison management? That comes from 30,000 years of living on the landscape and interacting with flora and fauna and building a relationship with flora and fauna and being able to teach that to the next generation of stewards in the national park. I’ve actually seen that happen over the last three-plus years.

I’m very proud of the staff who are working in the sciences and understanding how to bring Western science and Native and Indigenous knowledge together, and recognizing that all science is the same. It’s all about observation and about testing those observations. And we have 30,000 years of observation that should be tested against what we’re learning today.

Once nearly extinct, Yellowstone now boasts the largest bison population on public lands, according to the park.

How has your identity as a veteran shaped the way you’ve led?

I’m very appreciative of the time that I got to serve in the United States Navy. I had some excellent leaders, and each of those taught me a strong lesson, which is if you take care of your people, they will take care of the mission, and that has influenced me greatly coming into the National Park Service.

I knew that unless the staff were healthy and happy, they couldn’t really fulfill the mission. So, we’ve been trying to do our best to provide them psychological safety stand down, better pay, better conditions, better cost of living adjustments, looking at their locality pay. We try to take all of that into effect to try to improve their own experience, including housing.

Militarily, when I look across the service, nearly one in five National Park Service employees are veterans themselves, and so it’s been great to meet my fellow veterans all across the park service, because they have very similar experiences.

National Park Service Director Chuck Sams and Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park ranger Lawson Nwakudo look at artifacts recovered from near Harriet Tubman’s birthplace.

How have you helped get people into the parks and discover the larger network of national sites?

A couple of different ways. One, people are within, I think, 50 miles of a national trail within our National Trails System, and so encouraging people to look at that. Maybe not everybody can get to a national park, but you can get pretty close to a national trail and get outdoors and start enjoying the outdoors. We’re hoping to hook you into that so that we can get you into the national parks.

In the last three years, I’ve visited 108 national park units all across the United States, and I’ve been trying to highlight the lesser-known parks that people may not have gone to. I’ve been to Fort Necessity, and Fort Necessity is a park that talks about the only battle that General Washington lost when he was a young colonel fighting in the French and Indian War. This is something that is a little off the beaten highway but is well worth your time to learn about. You’re actually within an hour’s drive many times to a national park unit that you just might not realize is part of the system.

There have been efforts, during your time there, to help curb crowds at the most visited parks. How has that gone?

I feel that we’re getting our arms around it. A little over a year and a half ago, we stepped back to look and talk about what is our overall national strategy in visitor use management planning. We want to ensure every visitor to a national park has a good visit. … Luckily, we have a great social science and we collect a lot of data that tell us, you know, what’s the average time a person stays in the park, what are the most often visited spots in the park, to help us actually look at how then we do traffic management and people management at the park.

In some cases, that told us that we needed to do timed entry in certain parks. In others, that told us that we needed to do permitting on certain types of trails. Of course, there’s going to be some grumbling. We understand that, but our effort is to ensure that the American people and our foreign visitors can actually enjoy the park without it being too overcrowded. I think a lot of those efforts have gone really well overall.

Is there anything that you started that you would love to see continued by whoever takes over this role next?

I’ve been very, very pleased with the co-stewardship and co-management projects we’ve done across the service. We have nearly 150 co-stewardship, co-management projects formalized. We have another 100 that are working their way through for formalization.

To see that basically over half of our parks have some relationship with the tribes is not only good for both flora and fauna, and fulfilling what we need to do as stewards, but it also fulfills treaty and executive orders that have affected tribes for many, many years. And upholding that constitutional responsibility, I want to see that continue.

You know, when treaties were made with tribes on behalf of the United States, they became the supreme law of the land, and it’s the obligation under the Constitution for any of us who wear the uniform of the National Park Service to uphold the Constitution. Therefore, we must uphold those treaties.

What I’d love to see in the future for the National Park Service is an increase in their base operational budget funding. This is not a partisan issue. I’ve not met a member of Congress who doesn’t love the parks in their state, but in order for us to be successful as an organization, to ensure that we keep up with deferred maintenance, we need to increase base operational support for the National Park Service.

If you could speak directly to national park visitors or travelers who’ve never been to a national park, what would you tell them?

That national parks belong to them and are great sources of inspiration, recreation and education. We encourage everyone to visit and experience their national parks.

The National Park Service cares for national parks on behalf of the American public. It is a shared responsibility, and we encourage everyone to be stewards of their national parks. We hope they enjoy their visits and make lasting memories but do so safely – please plan ahead where to go and what to do and prepare properly. We ask that everyone please do their part to help protect and preserve these special places for other visitors, now and long into the future.

San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Superintendent Christine Jacobs shows Director Chuck Sams around Mission San José during National Park Week.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: National Park Service Director Chuck Sams reflects on legacy

Image Credits and Reference: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/national-park-director-chuck-sams-112930070.html