Native Americans and land advocates say increase in visitors threatening sacred sites
CBC
Land advocates and Native Americans are calling for better protection for sacred sites, as their locations are being distributed online.
Deidra Cinclaire, a land advocate and enrolled member of the Navajo nation in Arizona and Apache nation, said she's noticed more damage caused by visitors to the sacred sites her grandmother taught her about. Cinclaire said her grandmother taught her lands are medicine that will always provide for her as long as she takes care of it.
"These are the home to our ancestors, the very ancestors who survived genocide, for us to exist today," said Cinclaire.
She said she thinks the uptick in visitors is related to social media influencers posting images and GPS co-ordinates to trails.
She said that she and other land advocates have approached hiking influencers — people with social media accounts dedicated to sharing their hiking trips — about their concerns only to be met with hostility, apathy or being blocked on social media.
CBC Indigenous contacted Ed Preston and Anna Preston Schlosser who run The Wanderer's Guide, a website that sells trail maps and co-ordinates to sites. The website's trail guides tell people to leave artifacts alone, report vandalism to the U.S. Forest Service, and not to take their pets to archaeological sites.
"Make no mistake. Everything sacred will continue to be defiled, whether I write hiking guides or not," said a written statement from The Wanderer's Guide to CBC Indigenous.
"I'm 100 per cent against taking taxpayer money to support public land, while telling taxpayers they cannot visit or even know where something is.... Excluding any group of people from hiking on public land and experiencing our national heritage is my definition of pure evil."
Cincliare said she feels a lack of awareness about Indigenous people and their history in the U.S. is part of the problem.
"I think people often forget, too, our ancestors were forcibly removed. It wasn't our choice," said Cincliare.
Alicia Spargo, who is of the Yaqui Nation and head curator at the Indigenous issues website Last Real Indians, calls these sites her ancestors' dwellings.
"These are our relatives, these people we have a direct relationship to," she said.
She said she reached out to several people and websites posting about the sites and that they refused to remove the co-ordinates from their pages.
"I understand wanting to visit these places, wanting to spend time there, wanting to witness it themselves. I get it," she said.
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