Parks

If the country helps native people remember their knowledge, and ways of relating to their land, we all learn and benefit from it. This podcast is invaluable coming from the NPS itself. I look forward to more conversations like this.

Great podcast! I’ve cried through all of them as I heard the stories of my relatives in different parts of the country where the beauty of the land before colonization was about respecting the land and all it provides… from food to medicine to a way of life governed by wild life and the seasons. I can’t wait for additional episodes. Simply beautiful to listen to tribal ancestral stories about the land we call home.

One episode in and I’m hooked. I have always loved our National Parks and what they have offered me. It’s about time we learned about the darker history and we learned about the people who’s land was stolen to create these areas. I can’t wait for the rest of the season/ series to come out.

If the debut (Yellowstone) episode is any indication of where Parks is going, this will be a first-rate historical podcast based on a simple but brilliant concept: tell the history of a region, native and colonial people, even flora and fauna, through discussion of an individual national park. As you would expect, the Yellowstone episode outlines the history of treaties made and broken that led to the creation of the first US national park. But it also does two things: pulls back to look at the deep history of the whole region (via Shane Doyle's exploration of indigenous inhabitants since the Pleistocene), and zooms in to talk about personal connections to the park (via the stories of specific ancestors who lived there or were displaced, as well as the tribes in general).