On a late August morning, Lester Johnson drove a van of 20 tourists across the cloudless expanse of Browning, Montana. “Browning is the center of the Blackfeet reservation,” Johnson said into a microphone from the driver’s seat. “We call the Rocky Mountains the backbone.”
The granite mountain range filled the horizon above the plains of the reservation. Throughout the eight-hour tour of and around Glacier National Park, Johnson, who is Blackfoot, Cree and Swedish, had a story to tell about every hill, creek and mountain the van passed. His oral history started with the origin story of the Blackfeet tribe up through the U.S. government’s repression of their culture and their current renaissance of relearning their language, religion and art. “Names are very important to the Blackfeet,” he explained. In fact, “Blackfeet” isn’t the name that they call themselves. “That’s the name the settlers gave us after they saw that the bottom of our moccasins were blackened from walking through ashes,” he said. “We call ourselves the ‘real people,’ or Niitsitapi.”
Johnson is the superintendent of Glacier County schools during the school year. During the summer, he works as a Sun Tours guide, introducing visitors to the national park through the Blackfeet perspective. For the hundreds of tourists who sit in his van every summer, he hopes he challenges a stereotype or two about Native Americans. “Oftentimes, I’m the first Native American person they’ve ever met,” he said. “If I can shift their understanding of the world just a little, then I’ve succeeded.”
Though all U.S. national parks are on or near Native American reservations, their history is seldom recognized in official park narratives. Founded in 1992, Sun Tours is the longest-running Native American-owned tour operator in the country. Guides are all members of the Blackfeet Tribe, like Johnson, and they teach park visitors about Blackfeet history and the tribe’s relationship to the land.
Ed DeRosier, who founded Sun Tours, said that he grew up with a strong desire to pass on his culture’s oral traditions. “We have survived here in Blackfeet country through thousands of years of brutal changes,” he said. “I wanted to take people through the Blackfeet lands to share the values, landscapes and culture that have endured.”
Today, it’s a family business; DeRosier’s son, Derek, handles most of the day-to-day operations. Derek said he understands their legacy as one of the few Native-owned tour companies in the national park system. “The park has become a major destination for travelers all around the world,” he said. “For Sun Tours to be a part of their trip, even if it’s just for a day, is a great responsibility.”
Building a Native American tourist economy
Around noon, the Sun Tours van climbed to the park’s highest point at Logan Pass, where glacier-carved valleys dip dramatically into turquoise alpine lakes. Johnson pointed out mountains used as sacred prayer sites, hills used as ceremonial areas and the cliffs where the Blackfeet hunted buffalo. “Glacier National Park was part of the Blackfeet reservation until 1895, when we sold it to the United States government for $1.5 million,” he said. “The tribal council sold the land because they knew if they didn’t agree to the sale, the government was going to take it anyway.”
This is not a story unique to Glacier National Park. The National Park Foundation notes on its website that out of the 431 national parks, “most, if not all, of the lands in today’s national parks were once home to Indigenous peoples.” Many, like Glacier National Park, started with tribal land that was sold or forcibly ceded to the federal government. The first national park, Yosemite, was founded by President Abraham Lincoln after a state militia started a bloody war over mining prospects during the California Gold Rush.
Similarly, the Blackfeet population had already been weakened through smallpox epidemics, violent clashes and buffalo extermination when they were forced to sell 800,000 acres to the federal government in 1895. In the since-contested 1895 Agreement mentioned by Johnson, they retained the rights to hunt, fish and cut wood on the land, but many of these practices were banned by the park system. The land they sold now makes up much of the eastern half of Glacier National Park.
The animosity between the National Park Service and the tribe grew further when DeRosier started doing unofficial tours in 1992, citing it was his legal right under the 1895 Agreement. The park fined him and charged him with misdemeanors, which developed into a legal case that went all the way to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. “I asked them, ‘How long are you going to be around? Because me, and my people, will be here long after you’re gone,’” DeRosier said. He eventually won the concessionaire agreement from the park in 1994.
Though the tourism industry took a hit during the pandemic, with national park visitors dropping 28%, to 237 million in 2020, it’s slowly been rebounding. Last year, 3 million people visited Glacier and spent $372 million in communities near the park. Of those visitors, thousands of people took a Sun Tour.
DeRosier built Sun Tours’ reputation mostly through word-of-mouth. Sherry L. Rupert, the CEO of the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association, provides training and resources for businesses like Sun Tours to get them from inception to marketing. “When you’re on tribal land, it’s not easy to get a loan for your endeavor, so we provide advice to get through those hoops,” she said. Tours led by the Yurok in Northern California, the Ute in Ute Mountain Tribal Park and the Navajo in Antelope Canyon have also successfully established footholds in the tourist economy.
“When tribes are empowered to manage the tourism that comes into park areas, they can control the numbers, keep sacred sites separate from visitation and protect the environment from overtourism,” Rupert said. Her mission is to bring more visitors to gateway tribal communities like East Glacier to develop local Native economies. “Supporting Native-owned businesses gives Indigenous people an opportunity to stay on their homelands,” she said. “When our children were sent to boarding schools by the federal government, much was lost. As we teach others about our culture, our younger generations are also learning to be proud of who they are.”
Aboard Johnson’s van, Kelly Doohan is one of the visitors who chose a Sun Tours trip to expose her children to Native American culture. “We didn’t want to just drive through the park without context,” said Doohan, of Minnesota. “We wanted them to hear about the history from the Blackfeet directly.”
A rising demand for the Indigenous perspective is something Derek DeRosier has noticed over the past 10 years. Previously, tourists were often retirees, but now that’s changing. “We’ve had way more families with children that are coming through our tour,” he said. “They’re going out of their way to look for a more authentic experience.”
Bridging the disconnect between the tribe and the park
After stopping the van for a late lunch outside the eastern gateway to the park, Johnson mentioned the challenges the tribe faces today. He spent years as a youth mental health and suicide prevention counselor before becoming a school superintendent and Sun Tours guide. “Montana has some of the highest American Indian suicide rates,” he said. “The median life expectancy is 55 years. Sometimes I’ll see four funerals a day, for all young people.”
Derek DeRosier believes that some of the tribe’s intergenerational trauma stems from the disconnect between the tribe and the park. The park spans 1,583 square miles, and the reservation sits about 13 miles away from East Glacier Park. Once tourists step foot in the park, only 2.5% of employees they encounter will be American Indian or Alaska Native, and 3 out of 4 visitors they see will be white. Derek has found that some of their drivers haven’t spent any time in Glacier National Park, even though their families have lived there for generations. ”There’s historically a severing of a connection between the tribe and the mountains because of the boundary of the national park being established,” he said. “When they start going into the mountains, they’re learning about that lineage, too, which is a really powerful part of the job.”
Sun Tours facilitates a connection between the park and kids on the reservation by bringing vans full of high school students on a tour every summer; usually, only 1 out of 4 have visited the park before. Thomas Walter, a junior at Browning High School, went on a student tour last September with his class. The trip was only his third time in the park, and his first time hiking on a trail. “It made me want to go on more trails,” Walter said. “It would be nice if there were more opportunities for students to visit the park.”
Because they’re a long-running, trusted park operator, the DeRosiers get questions from visitors about how to support the local economy and whether park hikers should feel guilty about giving their money to the federal government to hike on Native land. Ed points them to Blackfeet-owned businesses in East Glacier. “It’s very powerful that people are asking us how to support Native communities,” he said. “The tribal entities can carry that message to government bodies throughout the nation. There should be a Sun Tours-type entity in every park in America, because it’s all Indian land.”
