Origins. The PNV Project’s origins date from a conversation between a park ranger and Lloyd Burton, the director of the environmental law and policy program in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado, Denver. The conversation took place on the afternoon of summer solstice,1998 at [Bears Lodge] Devil’s Tower National Monument in northeastern Wyoming. The Euro-American ranger had just given an interpretive presentation on the spiritual significance of the Tower to the Plains tribes of the area. In this conversation, she remarked how much more meaningful such a presentation might be if it were made by member of one of the cultures who hold the place sacred.

From this conversation came the idea of training Native American college and university students whose tribes have a traditional cultural and historical relationship with national parklands in the intermountain West to work as cultural resource interpreters at those parks. Initial funding for the establishment of what would become the Place and Native Voice Project came from the Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, a program in which the National Park Service partners researchers at participating colleges and universities in the region (such as the University of Colorado Denver) with national parks, monuments, and historic sites in the region wanting assistance in doing research and program development.

Training and Activities of PNV Interns. Students are recruited into the Place and Native Voice Project by several means, including outreach from parks and monuments wanting a PNV intern to the governments and schools of tribes having a traditional cultural affiliation with the NPS units, outreach to potentially interested students by workforce enhancement staff at the NPS Intermountain Regional Headquarters, and by outreach to colleges and universities in the region by Professor Burton, who would become the academic director of the PNV Program.

Students are trained in the art and craft of interpretive program development and delivery by the interpretive staff at the national parks and monuments at which they are assigned to work. They receive guidance in how to incorporate traditional cultural knowledge they have acquired from friends and family, elders, and others in their clan, tribe, or culture group into interpretive presentations they create, which appear on the PNV website as sections within chapters of Sustainability and the Sacred – an Anthology of Teachings on Indigenous Peoples and National Parklands in the Intermountain West.

In training students to prepare these presentations, they are carefully instructed to incorporate into their work only those teachings which their elders and others from whom they have received such teachings have authorized them to share outside the tribe. All tribes have some knowledge they freely share with outsiders and other knowledge that is to be held only within the tribe; and it is the intent of the PNV Project to share only the former. Students are also instructed that what they are doing is learning to tell aspects’ of their culture’s stories in their own voices, and that the are not acting as official spokespersons for either their tribe or their culture group.