I got the press release at my small-town news desk and read it to find the words “biological,” “cultural,” and “spiritual” all in the same sentence in reference to the future of “environmental sustainability.” Sheer desperation over looming ecological catastrophe, including the climate crisis, has led to an all-hands-on-deck moment, me thinks. The White House, for instance, sent out a press release last year elevating Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in federal land use decision-making. This event takes place at a time when the country and the wider world are looking to Indigenous people for direction. In a monumental event, Yellowstone National Park has invited representatives from the tribal nations with traditional uses and habitation in the park to the table-many of whom are part of the Land Back Movement to return stolen lands. It feels different these days-not just Dances With Wolves different-but epochal: Standing Rock to seat-at-the-table different. Sams now oversees all the 423 national parks that cover over 85 million acres of public lands. Yellowstone (where I’m headed) is the world’s first national park-and perhaps the most famous one. At the National Park Service, Charles Sams III, an Indigenous Cayuse and Walla Walla man, is the new director. Department of the Interior, which oversees nearly 12 million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands in Idaho and 245 million acres total, about 10% of America’s land surface. It feels different because Deb Haaland, an Indigenous Pueblo woman, is now in charge of the U.S. Little packs of pronghorn antelope stand idly in the desert, designed to outrun predators that died out during the Pleistocene. I’m en route to the Tetons, a toothy little snag on the distant sunrise horizon that marks the southern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. It feels different driving across the big lonely of Southeast Idaho these days.