Chuck Sams, a trailblazer in environmental stewardship and the former director of the National Park Service, takes on a new leadership challenge at the Yale Center for Environmental Justice.

Charles "Chuck" Sams understands, better than most, what it means to break new ground. An enrolled member of the Cayuse and Walla Walla of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Northeast Oregon, Sams made history in 2021 when he became the first Native American to serve as director of the National Park Service. During his tenure, he visited over 120 of the 433 national park sites and championed initiatives aimed at supporting the well-being of NPS employees, increasing climate resilience, and expanding Tribal co-management of public lands. This summer, Sams broke new ground again when he joined the Yale Center for Environmental Justice (YCEJ) as its inaugural director of Indigenous Programs. There, he will lead the center's efforts to advance Indigenous governance, sovereignty, and knowledge systems, with an emphasis on building climate resilience. He also will co-teach a course on Public Lands and Native Rights.

Sams recently spoke with YSE News about the history and importance of Tribal co-management of public lands, his plans for expanding YCEJ's Indigenous programs, and what brings him joy in his work.

I thought it was a great opportunity to continue some of the work that I've been doing over the last nearly 30 years on how to work with Tribal nations on natural resource management, and more particularly, on co-stewarding and co-managing public lands. Many Tribes and Tribal Nations across the U.S. reserved rights to usual and accustom places, mostly through treaty and executive orders, and, therefore, have the right to collect, hunt, fish, and gather natural resources there. A number of court cases over the past 200 years have reaffirmed that, and, yet there is a large gap of knowledge about implementation. I saw that firsthand as director of the National Park Service.

At Yale, we'll be exploring a number of these models. In the Pacific Northwest, there is the co-management of salmon in the Columbia River Basin. The longest-running court case, U.S. v. Oregon, is still open after 50 years to ensure that Tribes have that co-management equivalency (with the federal and state government). This is important because salmon are a central aspect of Tribal life for Tribes here in the Columbia River and the Columbia Plateau.

We also will look at co-management down in the Everglades with the Miccosukee and the Seminole Tribes, and how it was so important to them that, when the Everglades became a national park, it was written into the legislation itself that the Tribes had the right to not only go into their usual custom places to live, camp, and gather plants and animals, but also to co-manage the species there, so that they would continue to be present on the landscape. We'll also consider opportunities for co-management at Acadia National Park in Maine and what the Wabanaki people there are doing to ensure the propagation of sweet grass. There was initially a fear, even among NPS staff, that the Tribal ways of practice would lessen the propagation. Through shared experiences, they found that through co-management, they were able to increase that propagation, and Tribal practices also had additional beneficial effects on watershed protection and water quality management in the park.

So, we'll delve into several examples across the country, including the work of 45 different Tribes at Yellowstone on the protection and propagation of bison and the bison herds that roam there.

I think there's a real opportunity to help meet the need for continued education about Tribal sovereignty and Tribal governance. Under the Constitution of the United States, it clearly states that treaties made are the supreme law of the land and supersede the Constitution. What we've seen in the last 200 plus years is that the U.S. has not always fulfilled its full obligation to the treaties that they've made with Tribal nations. Many folks don't realize that beyond the state and the federal government, there's a third sovereign -- and those are Tribal nations. It's a knowledge gap that is due, in large part, to the education gap in our school systems. When we don't teach that, then people forget about that responsibility that we have as Americans to fulfill trust obligations.

Beyond that, I'm just very honored and excited to be asked to join the Center for Environmental Justice at Yale. I'm really looking forward to working with faculty at the School of the Environment and across Yale, and particularly with motivated students who want to dig into this information and learn. It's an incredible opportunity to train and educate the next generation of stewards to go out and tackle these huge issues that we face as human beings, such as how we are going to mitigate and adapt to a changing world and a changing climate.

That's a great question. The outdoors always brings me joy. My wife will tell you, if you can get me up in the mountains or on the river, out from behind my desk, I will always find joy because being in the natural world, taking your boots off, and putting your feet in the river, just touching the soil in itself is a reconnection of who I am as a human being because my own story tells me my eyesight comes from eagle, my skin comes from the hide of elk, my entire nervous system comes from the plant people. It's just a reconnection of those gifts that were given to me to become a human being and a reconnection of those things that give me life.