WELCOME FROM THE EDITOR
If you plan to include a Native American adventure in your next trip to the USA you may be in for some surprises.
Yes, you can still explore Arizona’s film-set Monument Valley with a resident Navajo guide, take your chances at the gaming tables in a Seminole-owned casino close to the Florida Everglades, and witness colourful inter-tribal Powows held in many native nations across the country.
But did you know you also could zipline with the Chickasaws in southcentral Oklahoma, luxuriate in a new Aqua Caliente-owned spa in Palm Springs, California, sample speciality cocktails in Wisconsin’s first native (Chippewa)-owned distillery and, in Rhode Island, enjoy a delicious meal prepared by the first indigenous woman to win an “Oscar of the Food World”?
It’s all part of an impressive tourism evolution taking place among some of the 36 states’ 574 native nations. At its heart is the 25-year-old American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association (AIANTA, aianta.org), which has 250 members in 15 Native American regions and describes some of the tourism adventures on offer on nativeamerica.travel
According to the organization’s CEO Sherry Rupert, its major achievements include the US Government’s 2018 enactment of the NATIVE Act which focuses on enhancing and improving visitors’ Native American experiences. It also does such things as sponsor tourism scholarships for young indigenous people and promote both the inclusion of Native American courses into university curriculums and visitation to indigenous restaurants, hotels, craft vendors, bookstores and events such as powwows and craft fairs.
't present there are five indigenous members in the US Congress as well as the first Native 'mericans to serve as the Secretary of the Interior and the Director of the National Park Service. And there also have been notable environment successes in such things as the prevention of uranium mining in the tribal areas of the Grand Canyon and of the running of oil pipelines across certain indigenous lands.
However, the high level of homelessness and poverty and the lack of adequate voting rights facilities in some tribal areas still needs to be addressed. So do ongoing fossil fuel issues, according to Judith LeBlanc of the Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund who says: “Twenty percent of fossil fuel deposits are on tribal land and our traditional teachings and origin stories tell us that we must keep fossil fuels in the ground in order to restore our relationship with the Earth.”
So, borrowing a quote from an old Hollywood Western: “The Natives are restless!” … and, I note, doing something about it. Read on to discover more from the tourism perspective.
Mary Moore Mason