Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center opens for second season inside park

Clark Corbin

(Idaho Capital Sun) The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center opened for the summer season on Wednesday near the Old Faithful area inside Yellowstone National Park.

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is a place where artists, storytellers and scholars from the 27 Native American tribes that are associated with the park connect with Yellowstone visitors. The center will be open to the public until Oct. 14, according to a news release issued by Yellowstone National Park.

This year, demonstrations and presentations will be devoted to many different topics, including nature photography, beadwork, making clothing, Native American art, songs, drumming, dancing, traditional storytelling and more.

“Many Tribal Nations have a continuous presence in the area now known as Yellowstone National Park,” said Alyssa McGeeley, Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center Coordinator and member of the Muscogee Tribe from Oklahoma, in a news release. “The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is a space where Indigenous people from the 27 Tribes associated with the park share the resiliency of their people with visitors from all over the world as artists, educators and culture bearers.”

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center opened in 2022, during Yellowstone’s 150th anniversary celebration, and represents a partnership between the National Park Service, the nonprofit organization Yellowstone Forever and Native American tribal consultants.

The center, along with many of the 150th anniversary celebrations, are some of the ways that Yellowstone National Park recognizes that before it was established as the world’s first national park, the land was home to many Native American tribes that still have significant connections to the land and water.

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is located between the Old Faithful Lodge and Old Faithful Visitor Education Center.

A complete schedule of presentations and demonstrations for the 2023 season is available online at Yellowstone Forever’s website.

Yellowstone National Park was established as a national park on March 1, 1872. Most of the park is located in Wyoming, but some of it extends into Montana, as well as a small, remote portion of Idaho that has no roads.