Reimagining governance for 'Yellowstone' modelled national parks in the new era of indigenous legal recognition

National parks provide an ideal locale for considering Indigenous customary rights and interests in modern landscapes. This is particularly true for national parks modelled on the first national park established in the ‘New World’, Yellowstone National Park in the US. This is because these parks are places typically owned and managed by the state, protected from private sale, for present and future generations to use and enjoy, and gain from them an appreciation of the country’s distinctive scenery, ecological systems, and natural features. The creators of these Yellowstone model national parks (first in the US, and subsequently in Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, in that order) devised this new public governance property concept to transform the so-called ‘wild’ and ‘empty’ Indigenous ‘spaces’ of often initially mountainous landscapes into colonial ‘places’ for recreation, tourism and conservation. But denoting these lands as ‘wild’ and ‘empty’ was merely a convenient legal fiction that justified the taking of Indigenous peoples’ homelands.