AT HOME IN YELLOWSTONE

The center occupies a former Haynes Photo Shop, a building once dedicated to images that helped introduce Yellowstone to the world. Today, it invites visitors to experience this extraordinary landscape through the people whose connections to it predate the park’s boundaries and its founding in 1872, an event that ushered in an era of displacement, forced removal, and restrictions on Indigenous access. The Tribal Heritage Center opened 150 years later through a partnership between Yellowstone Forever, engaged Tribal members, and the National Park Service, creating a space where Indigenous voices and perspectives could help reshape the understanding of a place from which their communities had long been excluded.

For McGeeley, the work has also become a deeply personal journey. She first arrived to work in Yellowstone in 2022. Its scale and beauty exceeded her expectations, but a sense of belonging came through something deeper: a felt connection to “all things living” on the landscape and a recognition of the intimate relationships that bind them.  

“It didn’t take long for me to feel like, ‘This is home.’ If some place is home, you want to care for it, and you want to share that with other people so they care for it too,” she says.

Across five seasons, that care has taken many forms. In 2026, the center welcomed 27 presenters, among them Crow designer Della Big Hair-Stump, whose contemporary clothing draws on the geometric and floral patterns she watched her family sew and bead; Willy Lamere, whose flintknapping practice demonstrates the ancient skill of shaping stone into tools; and Evans Flammond Sr., whose ledger paintings bring traditional designs into a vivid contemporary context. Each offers visitors a distinct perspective, grounded in the unique experience and cultural knowledge of the presenter. McGeeley’s work also extends to Voices of Yellowstone: First Peoples Celebration, an annual weeklong gathering in Gardiner, Montana, where Indigenous communities come together to celebrate and share their cultures through art, storytelling, dance, and music.

These encounters matter because Indigenous life is still too readily relegated to the past. When McGeeley has asked presenters what they most want visitors to understand, their answers often return to the continuity of their cultures and connections to Yellowstone. Removal from the land did not bring those relationships to an end. Visitors who might arrive expecting a museum instead encounter artists creating new work, musicians sharing their traditions, and individuals illuminating the histories, experiences, and aspirations of their communities.

The presenters have helped shape the center itself. Expressing a desire to see their own cultures and communities represented in its retail space, they helped shift the focus from the stories of explorers and settlers arriving from elsewhere toward the people who had known the land for generations. Artwork for sale is designed and created by people with heritage in Yellowstone’s associated Tribes, while a dedicated display features Yellowstone-inspired artwork by students from the Wind River Reservation, a 2.2-million-acre reservation in west-central Wyoming jointly occupied and managed by the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho Tribes.

Some of the most meaningful signs of change have arrived more quietly. During the center’s second season, McGeeley saw a two-month-old baby visiting with her Native parents. In that moment, she realized what continuing this work could mean for that child and others who followed.

“We are going to see a generation of kids that will only ever know being invited and wanted in these spaces,” she says.

That possibility is helping guide broader Tribal engagement efforts. Indigenous professionals with heritage in Yellowstone’s associated Tribes gather to review the work and inform its direction, with intergenerational education among the priorities. This year, a career pathways camp introduced 24 Tribal college students to professional opportunities across the National Park Service in Yellowstone. The experience offered a view of the park as a place where they might build careers in the very landscape many of their ancestors had known, pursuing work in a wide range of environmental and conservation-related fields—from park administration and archeological research to managing the park’s bison herds and helping to restore them to Tribal reservations.

For McGeeley, the bison offer another way of understanding the relationships at the heart of this work. She speaks of their movement through the landscape: aerating soil, carrying seeds, grazing without taking everything, and sustaining other life even after death. Revered as relatives in many Indigenous cultures, bison embody a profound reciprocity between the land and the living beings that depend upon it.  In their presence, ecological function and cultural relationship are closely entwined.

“They’re not taking too much, but they’re also planting as they go. And even after they stop breathing, they still support so much of the ecosystem. In a way, they’re the original conservationists,” she says.

It is a lesson in how to inhabit a place with care, and how much that care depends on relationships. At the Tribal Heritage Center, that work continues through the people who shape it, the visitors eager to listen, and the children growing up with a different experience of Yellowstone. A landscape their ancestors have always known can also become a place where they can imagine, pursue, and realize their own futures.