Radio Script
1999

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People In The Park
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STORY: Covering more than 8 million acres of wilderness--more than twice the size of Massachusetts--Alaska's Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park is home to some of the nation's tallest mountains, wildest rivers and biggest bears. Jonathan Jarvis, superintendent of the park, says it is also home to some of the very first Americans.

JARVIS: "The park is directly associated with 12 Native villages and four linguistic groups, the Upper Tanana, the Ahtna, Athabaskan, the Eyak, and the Tlingit peoples."

Unlike other national parks where people are welcome only as visitors, Jonathan Jarvis says Wrangell-Saint Elias is a place where indigenous people are a vital aspect of the park.

JARVIS: "The really unique part about Wrangell-Saint Elias, and many of the Alaska parks, is that these people have continued their traditional use of the land for thousands of years. We haven't gone in and run people off. We have councils and a very active cooperative relationship with these communities and the village councils, and residents of these communities."

When Congress established Wrangell-Saint Elias as a national park in 1980, the park contained more than one million acres of Native-owned lands. Park officials recognized that Native people had used the area for tens of thousands of years, and incorporated their needs into the park's management plan. As a result, Jonathan Jarvis says old ways of life continue inside this modern park.

JARVIS: "The people that live in these communities have the rights to hunt, to fish, to occupy, to trap, and to carry on a subsistence lifestyle inside the park."

Jonathan Jarvis says managing a park with human inhabitants has unique challenges, but he says it's the only way to preserve both cultural and natural wonders.

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Doug Schneider, reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska.