North Dakota’s Contributions to Our National Parks’ 2016 Centennial

Posted by Jeff on Feb 7, 2016 @ 9:37 am in Conservation | 0 comments | Last modified: February 7, 2016

I needn’t tell you North Dakota is not the first place people consider when asked about national parks. Far from it. Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon—these are the places most people picture when questioned by friends and coworkers about memorable places and bucket list destinations. Who could fault them? Americans and people worldwide are flooded with photographs of these and other of the United States’ most cherished lands and places of shared heritage.

To care for these places, Congress in 1916 created the National Park Service, one of the country’s most beloved institutions. During this year’s 2016 Centennial, all visitors to our national parks—in 2014, a record 292.8 million of them—can discover and learn about the many struggles and triumphs of the citizens who committed to protecting what they valued most: the nation’s lands and heritage. The statistics alone are remarkable: as of 2015’s end, 409 national parks; 49 national heritage areas; more than 2,500 national historic landmarks; 597 national natural landmarks; 43,162 miles of shoreline; 85,049 miles of rivers and streams; and more than 75,000 archeological sites.

But that’s not all. Our nation’s parks are places where Americans can honor and remember the lost, those who fought and died to protect their lands and traditions, the values they cherished most. In Montana and the Dakotas alone it includes the Assiniboine, Crow, Cree, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Dakota, and Lakota. Members of these tribes traded furs for manufactured goods at Fort Union trading post, which 50 years ago this year MonDak-area residents helped to protect as a national historic site. Still others lived in the towns now preserved in central North Dakota’s Knife River Indian Villages, also a national historic site. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, members of these tribes sacrificed their lives to defend their northern plains homes and families, just as they have in World War II, Vietnam, and more recent wars.

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