“Cd’a Indian Tribe Wants Heyburn State Park Back”: An Examination of Federal, State, and Indigenous Environmental Conflict

‘Alienation of the land’: this is the charge that the Coeur D’Alene Tribe and the U.S. Department of the Interior filed against the State of Idaho in the 1970s and 1980s. After nearly seventy years of state control, the Coeur D’Alene people believed that the State had not acted as a proper steward of the land and that this negligence violated the terms of the original land patent. In 1908, President William H. Taft signed a bill that took over 5,500 acres of land and 2,300 acres of water from the Coeur D’Alene reservation for the purpose of creating Heyburn State Park in Idaho. The conditions of this land-lease stipulated that the state use and maintain the land solely as a public park. The leasing of Heyburn parkland to cottagers, according to the Coeur D’Alene and the Department of the Interior, was a violation of this stipulation. Ultimately, the courts sided with the rights of the State. This paper looks at the way that the cottager issue was used to unite the interests of the tribal and federal government against the State of Idaho. This paper will look at the way in which the land that became Heyburn State Park was taken from the Coeur D’Alene people and the way in which the views and opinions of the Coeur D’Alene have been underserved by prior historians. Furthermore, this paper will look at the way in which the Coeur D’Alene Tribe used the cottager issue as an avenue by which to address longstanding environmental concerns in regards to Heyburn State Park, including the pollution of Chatcolet Lake and the cutting of timber within the park. Lastly, the paper will relate the Heyburn State Park case to other Indigenous land disputes within state and provincial parks in the United States and Canada.