Disrupted Pathways: Indigenous Knowledge and the Shifting Politics of Federal Resource Governance

This article examines recent efforts to include Indigenous Knowledge and Traditional Ecological Knowledge into the stewardship and governance of US national parks and historic sites in the National Park Service (NPS) Northeast Region. Drawing on Mellon postdoctoral research conducted in collaboration with Tribal communities and NPS between 2023 and 2025, it traces both the transformative possibilities and structural constraints of these initiatives. Under Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s leadership (2021–2025), federal agencies began to institutionalize new pathways for equitable Tribal engagement, grounded in principles of sovereignty, relational stewardship, and the inclusion of Indigenous governance practices. Yet the abrupt termination of NPS’s involvement with the postdoctoral program in early 2025 and policy reversals under the Trump administration disrupted these developments, undermining fragile relationships of trust and severing institutional commitments. Through ethnographic insights and policy analysis, the article interrogates the conditions that enable—or foreclose—meaningful Tribal collaboration in federal conservation efforts. It highlights the enduring gap between symbolic inclusion and actual power-sharing, arguing that the rapid reversal of policy illustrates how settler-state governance continues to reproduce historical patterns of dispossession and erasure within US environmental management.